Creative Things To Do With Canned Beans

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So you overdid it on the canned bean purchases. Whoops. The world is not ending at quite the rate you’d anticipated, and now you have more cans of beans than you know what to do with. I see you. I know you’re out there. When all of this started to happen, I saw the canned beans flying off the shelves. I also saw stores running promos on them, knowing that they would sell like hot cakes. Hey, beans are a good thing to keep around. They are loaded with fiber and protein. They can help with glucose metabolism, making them a good ally for diabetics. If you have diabetes or are helping a partner manage it, keep this food around. They’re also good for your heart! If you were going to dine a lot on something during the apocalypse, these would be a good way to go (other than all the gas you’d be producing, that would bother your apocalypse mate).

But…it’s not the apocalypse. Things are bouncing back. Store shelves are being restocked. A vaccine is being worked on. It’s certainly not the time to return to all of our normal activities, but you may find that you bought too many cans of this food. What are you going to do with it all now? You may have bought so many, that you actually risk not eating them before their expiration date which is…about five years away.

Fortunately, there are a lot of unexpected ways to use beans. They aren’t just for nachos and chili. They work with a big variety of cuisines and flavor profiles. They can be mashed, purred, blended, fried, boiled—you name it. So you don’t need to throw out your surplus. Here are healthy recipes to make with canned beans.

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Put kidney beans in soup

Kidney beans taste delicious in all sorts of soup, from spicy broth soups with rice, to minestrone soup, to sausage and kale soup. If you have an all-veggie soup that’s needing a little protein boost, dump your can of kidney beans in it. And, naturally, it’s a staple of any good chili recipe.