Black Beans

Black Beans- a perfect balance between budget and healthy?

Maybe.

I too am struggling with eating healthy tasty food within a reasonable budget. Why do all the healthy, yummy foods have to be so expensive?

I have had one recent victory: black beans.

They are an affordable, alternate source of healthy protein. I have discovered lots of uses for them and plan to make them a regular part of my menu. (By the way, my full dinner menu for February will be posted soon).

I'm most impressed with mixing them with ground beef to stretch the beef further. I've used the ground beef for tacos and meatloaf. The beans are almost unnoticeable in flavor when mixed with ground beef, but obviously the texture is different. Thankfully, both of us were pleased with the results. The beans & beef mixture for tacos made so much sense that we are wondering why we didn't think of it earlier.

We have also thrown black beans on salads and in soups.

For a while, I was using convenient canned beans. But I decided to save even more money and give dried beans a try.

It was a huge success! I cooked a WHOLE package of beans ($1.30) and then frozen them in to a few packages. Now, when I need beans, I can just take out a package and mix them into my recipe.

I already tried it & they were perfect. I wanted a cheese & black bean tortilla for lunch so I took some beans out of the freezer in the morning and few hours later I had a delicious, affordable, somewhat healthy lunch.

Do you have more ideas for using black beans? Please share!