Leggo my legumes!

Since the creation of this blog I've been struggling with the point of it. I know a lot of farms have blogs and a lot of people maintain interesting and sometimes profitable blogs, but what is the point of this one?
The conclusion I've come up with is that there maybe is no point, other than to give me a vent into the world and the reader a look at how we do things around here. I guess, ideally, it's for our consumers, our customers to get a closer look at where their food comes from, how it's grown, produced, etc. I mean, who doesn't want to know the temperature of the compost that we turned last week?
Anyway, I'm just going to throw this together and see where it takes us. Today it takes us to a recipe I made up for delicious baked beans. We've grown navy beans here, that were part of a trial with the OACC and I've finally found a great recipe for them, and currently have an overabundance in my pantry. Here's the scoop;

• Soak approx. 2 cups, cleaned, rinsed beans overnight in 3x as much water as beans.
• Drain, rinse and cover with water in a large pot. Bring to a boil, then turn down to med. heat for awhile. (This is purposely vague as it depends on your beans. When you take out a couple, blow on them and the skin pops they're done. Our beans only took a few minutes).
• Drain again, this time reserving the cooking water.
• Dump 'em in a slow cooker with;

1/2 cup butter/margarine 1/2 cup molasses (and maple syrup if you have some)
1 tsp dry mustard
1/2 tsp each salt and pepper
1 whole onion (or sliced if you like onion in your beans)
some bacon or weiners are optional.

• Cover with the cooking water, cook for 7-9 hours, checking once in a while to make sure they're not dry. If so, add some more cooking water. They're done when you say they are.

Enjoy! 2 cups of dry beans only made up one meals worth for my beast of a husband and mini-beast baby, and my preggers self, so for a regular group of people it should feed about 4-5.

Dried legumes vary a lot based on their growing conditions, etc. so the whole boiling thing is really pretty dependant on the individual lot of beans. The skin popping trick is pretty handy though.
My next and perpetual culinary challenge is trying to find the perfect loaf of bread with Speerville Organic Flour. I'm yet to come close to anything I would call perfect. I would probably call it more like dense, heavy, delicious but filling. Any tips out there?

I'll leave you with a quick story about my old roomate, John Mills, who I shared and apartment with at NSAC. He's a western Canadian hippie (not to be confused with other Canadian hippies) and one time came home from the grocery store all pumped up about his 'legume' soup he had found at the store. Turned the box over to discover that it was just the french translation for vegetable soup.
Silly, tall Albertan.