I love cooking dried beans. I love to put soaked beans and aromatics—black beans with garlic and chile peppers, cannellini with chopped tomatoes and rosemary—in the slow cooker at night before bed and wake up the next morning to their warm, comforting smell and the smug satisfaction of having already made dinner before 7 a.m. And I love how they taste, each individual bean full of flavor and creaminess and structural integrity. I ladle the beans into a mug and eat them just like that, taking sips of their heady broth between each spoonful.
Unfortunately this scenario, which requires a particular combination of forethought, grocery-shopping prowess, and time management skills that often elude me, is rare. So I usually turn to canned beans instead, adding canned black beans to quesadillas, stirring white beans into a brothy spring minestrone, simmering kidney beans in a hearty, spicy pot of chili. The types of foods in which beans are an enhancement, rather than the featured attraction.
These canned beans don't thrill me. Often they are mushy and flavorless—nothing like my homemade batches. Thankfully, I've read The Everlasting Meal, by Tamar Adler. It's a lovely book, with pages of beautiful prose woven around concrete yet creative cooking tips. And it contains an entire chapter about beans, within which Adler mentioned her simple method for transforming a can of beans: gently simmer the beans in olive oil for several minutes. That's it.
It helps, of course, to use good olive oil (and don't be stingy with it—you want the beans really swimming). I also like to add a peeled, smashed clove of garlic, or maybe a bay leaf or a few sprigs of thyme. After 10 to 15 minutes, the beans will be warm and fragrant, ready to be spooned over a piece of garlicky toast, or served alongside grilled sausages and sautéed greens. Finish with a final drizzle of olive oil, if you'd like, or a sprinkling of grated lemon zest. The particular flavorings don't really matter: just like my slow-cooker beauties, these beans can hold their own.
