I often talk about the canning or the cold storage or even regular house storage but I don’t often talk about the dry Pantry, and I don’t know why, I mean I dry a good amount of my own food, its great to have in storage, it takes a lot less space. I use a lot of dried greens, herbs and more. I dry meat and I dry veggies and so forth.

Today though we are going to talk about beans, I mean I grow a goodly amount of beans on the farm, and while a the biggest portion is eaten fresh or canned be it pickled or straight canned, I also take a number of kinds into dried shelling beans.

This mix is a blend of a number of the beans I grew on the farm in 2016, I have already pulled out the beans I want for planting and some of the kinds have their own jars but in the end I had less then a full jar of a few kinds and so I blended them together and made a mixed blend..

As these beans are not for planting, and they are for longer term storage, they were placed at the lowest temp for six hours in the dryer and then allowed to cool before being placed in the jars.

Like store beans, its a good idea to give them a overnight soak before cooking them..

I love bean salad’s done a number of ways, but this is one of the o so easy ones.. take your bean mix and that is the key number one.. you need a bean mix, each kind has its own flavour, meaty-ness, and texture of bite.. you want a blend.

The second is fresh bits of crunch, it can be as simple as onion only or like today, onion, celery and carrot, my favorite dressing is creamy Italian, but you can make it as simple or as zippy as you want.

Do you like bean Salad?  Do you eat it in winter as well as in summer? Do you grow drying beans in your garden? What is your favorite dried bean?