Bean Week!

I have gotten a request for bean recipes (thanks, Kim!), and I've been wanting to experiment with bean dishes but put it off all summer in favor of using the bounty of my garden. You know, use it or lose it when the garden is producing free food! Now it's fall, and it's a great time to start bean week. I'm going to start off with some basic bean information and then post at the end of each day the recipe I did for that day, a couple tried and true and a few new to me recipes. One recipe I'm going to do is for the oven and takes 7 hours, so I'm going to adapt it to the crockpot just because I think it's more accessible for the average person that way. Two other recipes are for the crockpot and not just bean soup which most people think of when thinking of beans and crockpot in the same sentence. In fact, I'm not going to do a traditional bean soup at all! I'm going to mix it up with which beans I'm using, trying to get in a variety, using navy, pinto, kidney, black, great northern, and garbanzo, all beans easily found in an average supermarket in both dry and canned forms. Side dishes, main dishes, maybe an appetizer and a dessert will all make appearances. Beans are low in fat while high in fiber, protein, vitamins, an minerals and lower cholesterol and reduce the risk of colon and prostate cancer.