Kitchen Failure: Bean Thing

I figure I shouldn't just post my culinary successes; I should also post my failures. As an only averagely talented cook who usually doesn’t follow a recipe, I have many, many failures. Of course, I can’t post everything I cook that turns out terrible because, well, that would just be depressing and not very useful. So I'll only post those that are funny. Here is one:

Yesterday I decided to cook some sort of Mexican thing. This happens a lot with me, actually, and usually it's pretty good. I mean, it's pretty hard to ruin beans, veggies, and cheese.

But I did it. I don't know what I was thinking, but I had some pinto beans that had been soaking, and I decided to fry them up with onion and garlic. This would've been great if the pinto beans were already soft. But they weren't. They were hard, nasty little buggers that took about 40 minutes to soften up. Jesus!

So while my granite beans were cooking and the onion was getting overcooked and mushy (I had to keep adding water for the beans, which made the onion nasty), I decided to toss in a generous amount of my dad’s home-dried pepper flakes. And did I mention that these pepper flakes are really hot? Yep. Like screaming-holy-mother-of-god hot. I think he made them with Habaneros or devil dandruff or something.

Anyway, at this point I had too-spicy rock-hard beans with mushy onions. And then I burnt it. Yep. Right to the bottom of the cast iron pan. God damn it. Unlike any sensible person, who would, at this point, simply toss the mess out on the grass for some poor scavenging animal to eat, I decided to add more water, scrape the bean mess off the bottom of the pan, and continue cooking. I also added some red and green pepper. The kitchen by now smelled of burnt-ness, capsacin, and cumin.

Once the beans were soft enough to eat and I couldn’t stand spending any more time on what was surely going to be a bad lunch, I took the pan off the heat, and, what the hell, I mashed it all up. It’s like refried beans… or something?

Well, doesn't that look... brown?

It looks less revolting when you can hardly see the beans.

I ended up eating it like a street taco, and it wasn’t terrible when you drowned it in salsa and yogurt (I use yogurt instead of sour cream). But no amount of sauce really covers up that burnt taste. Oh, and did I mention that I made a ton of it? So I'll have leftover bad beans for a while now.

Anybody want to come over for Mexican food?