Precooking as a kind of prep

Another way of killing two birds with one stone is to precook two or three days' worth of an ingredient.

I've been doing that with beans for years. Precooking three days' worth of beans takes very little more effort than cooking a single batch. I neither soak nor rinse my beans, and I would never discard their cooking liquid, which I hold to be a valuable ingredient in its own right. [Jeremiah Tower … never use bean soaking liquid …ha ha ha]

Let's say I'm using those mottled green French flagiolets for supper tonight as a thick sauce for fresh tuna. (The combination of fish and bean flavors is a favorite of mine.) Since I live in a two-person family, and since neither of us is a teenager, half a cup of fried beans is about the right amount for us for one meal. But as long as I'm cooking the beans anyway, I might as well cook enough for three meals. So I put a cup and a half of dried beans in the bottom of a tall pot, then add six cups of water and two teaspoons of kosher salt. (The idea that salt in the cooking water does bad things to beans, making them tough or making them cook unevenly or whatever, is an urban legend. Two problems [xxx] the cooking of dried beans: boiling over and boiling dry. I use a tall pot because no matter how fast and furiously the beans boil, they can't boil over. Boiling dry didn't use to be a problem when I was younger and lived mostly in the kitchen of whatever habitation I found myself in. But as I've gotten older my sense of smell has diminished, and I now have the luxury of working in another room a little away from my kitchen. The combination of those two changes means I no longer smell the beans when they've boiled dry; it's a characteristic acrid small that's not strong enough to reach me in my workroom. No, what happens these days when I catch a warning smell is that the beans are burning – or rather, have already burned, filling the kitchen with hideous dark smoke that smells like poison gas from WWI and ruining the pot (as well as the beans) beyond repair. You've probably read that you can recover from scorching beans by adding some bacon to the dish. And so you can, if scorching is the worst of it. Burned beans are another story altogether. There is no recovering from them. So these days when I put my tall pot on the fire in my kitchen, I use a kitchen timer set to 20 minutes. Every 20 minutes I return to the kitchen and check the water level on the beans. The timer's gasping ring (da-da-da-ta, da-da-da-ta) is unpleasant, but my motto has become "Better obnoxious than noxious."

When the beans are cooked, I remove a third of them plus a little of the cooking liquid from the tall pot, puree the removed beans and liquid with my immersion blender, and then when the fish is almost ready to serve I reheat the bean puree, add tiny slivers of raw onion to it, taste to be sure it doesn't need more salt, put the fish on a serving plate, and sauce it generously with the bean puree.

At the time when I'm first cooking the beans, I may have no idea what use I'm going to put them to on days 2 and 3. Beans never go to waste in my house. Day 2 might be a hot bean and pasta salad; day 3 might be a vegetarian bean and cabbage soup (another favorite combination of flavors), using up the bean cooking liquid. Or day 2 might be a bean gratin, the beans spread out in a small baking dish and topped with breadcrumbs and butter, first warmed through in the oven and then run under the broiler for just long enough to brown the breadcrumbs. Day 3 could be a cold salad of beans, fennel, and strong garlic mayonnaise. Some members of the bean family have very distinctive flavors – black beans, black-eyed peas, chickpeas, chowder peas, favas, kidney beans, ordinary and split peas – but most are interchangeable. I'm not saying that there's no difference between, say, refritos made with pinto beans and a similar dish made with flageolets; I am saying that if the one tastes good the other probably will too.

Most experts will tell you to store the beans for days 2 and 3 in your refrigerator, and that's undoubtedly good advice, but I prefer to leave them in their tall pot on the stove. I bring them up to a simmer and simmer them 2-3 minutes. I do that once a day unless the weather is very hot, and then I do it twice a day. My refrigerator is small, I wash all my dishes by hand, and I'm used to heating stuff up on the stove to keep it from going bad. You might want to keep the beans presentable by some other means.