Cooking Tasty Red Beans

If you've landed here, I know two things about you: First, you cook and are kitchen handy, and second, you are computer literate.

I you want to know how to cook red beans, have these handy:

• 10 inch cast iron skillet, or wider.
• A low flame for your stove top, and
• Double up the height of burner's load bearers, borrowing a second one from another burner

So . . . . What makes great Red Beans?

Quickly browning out all the non-bean items before you add them to the pot. (If you cook red beans, you probably would also cook jambalaya, and same idea applies.)

For example, when I add sausage, I slice it, and then brown both sides lightly in a cast iron skillet. Onions, too, benefit from precooking -- I slice them in 1/4 inch rounds, with a single slice radially to the edge on each round. Each side browned.

The browning will:

• make the food an order of magnitude more tasty
• make the food look more interesting
• caramelize the sugars in the onions, the meats, and whatever else has sugars, whether natural to the food, or added by a processor.
  (for this reason, don't overcook or excessively brown these items, as the sugar will burn, and add a scorced taste to the end-product).

This takes time, but it's worth it. But most of the time can be occupied doing other things in the kitchen, including preparation.

That's it.