Beans Beans the Magical Fruit...

For now my main picture is of the ingredients that go into my beans, because I forgot to get a final picture of just the beans.  Oops!
 

I have been complemented many times on my re-fried beans.  Because of that, I am separating them out, as their own topic, even though I used them on this night to make taco salads...which will be another post.  The best part of my re-fried beans, is that they are not re-fried!  They are super simple with canned beans, which is the easiest for me now that my local store finally carries black beans.  You could do this with pinto or black, but I have always preferred black, and can't even get pinto (although you might need to adjust the flavors for pinto, I don't know)...My recipe is going to be with the canned beans cause I never have such good luck with dry ones.

In this particular case, I forgot the garlic, and cooked up a whole onion.
I set half of the onion aside to cook with the meat I cooked when the beans
were done.  

First you dice up half of a medium sized onion into fairly small slices.  Put a little oil in your frying pan and cook the onion on medium until transparent.  Add a clove of garlic or two minced or crushed to the pan as well.   Then when the onions are transparent, maybe even a little over done, pour in 2 cans of black beans.  Use the water and everything.  If there is startch at the bottom of the can, rinse it around with a little water (or chicken stock), and dump that in the pan also.  Because these are not truly re-fried, you need the starchy water to help thicken up the beans.  

Next add your seasonings.  I did about 2 teaspoons of cumin, 1 of coriander, and 1 of turmeric, as well as a tablespoon of Chicken bouillon.  If you have chicken broth instead, maybe use that to rinse out your bean cans, so maybe 1/2 a cup.  You don't want to add a lot of extra liquid.  

Next I chop up a maybe 1/4 cup of jarred jalapenos and add them to the mix.  Once all of the ingredients are mixed and simmering on the stove, I do the part that gives them the real re-fried bean texture.  The trick is mashing them with a potato masher!  

As you do this, the mixture starts to thicken.  You can scrape the sides of the pan and keep adding the starch back into the mix, and it gets thicker and thicker.  Once you have mashed about 1/3-1/2 of the beans you should start getting a really thick texture on the bottom and a more liquid texture on top, make sure you are stirring and scraping the bottom of the pan.  Take the beans off of the heat when it is just a little runnier than the texture you like.  As it cools, they will thicken a bit more.  If they thicken too much, just add some chicken stock or some water to get them back to the consistency that you like.   

This is the closest picture I have to the beans done, I was trying to show that I added garlic powder cause I forgot to cook garlic with the onions...It really is important to the recipe though.
Don't the beans look re-fried?  

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So, my recipe is super simple, takes less than 20 minutes to make, and always provides at least four servings of my family of two.