Bean & cheese tortilla roll-ups/Gin Lee

Bean & cheese tortilla roll-ups

If you love bean burritos, then here's a recipe for you to sink your teeth into!

Today I will walk you through the instructions on how I slowly cook pinto beans, make refried beans, followed by my recipe for the bean & cheese tortilla roll-ups.

Bean & cheese tortilla roll-ups/Gin Lee

This entire meal cost me under ten dollars to prepare. Of course, I already had the cheese, spices, onion, and garlic. The bags of dried pinto beans that I purchased at Wal-Mart cost only a dollar for the sixteen ounce bags.

When I make refried beans, I normally make them from the dried beans that I cook. The recipe for my bean and cheese tortilla roll-ups doesn't use the amount of beans that I pre-cook. What I do is cook a crock pot of beans and use them to make different recipes. Because it takes so long for dried beans to slow cook.

Two cups of dried beans once cooked, equals about four fifteen ounce cans of cooked beans. That's the equivalent to six cups of cooked beans.

Cooking pinto beans in the crock pot/Gin Lee

Ingredients to cook the dried pinto beans:

• 2 cups (16-ounces) of dried pinto beans
• 10 cups of water
• 1-½ teaspoons of seasoning salt

Instructions:

To cook the pinto beans in a crock pot (slow cooker):

First, place sixteen ounces of dried beans in a colander to wash and sort out (pick out the bad beans, pebbles, etc). This step is very important because not only does it wash the dirt and pollutants off the beans, it also ensures that you've gotten the rock pebbles, small stick-like particles out of the beans. Yes, sometimes there are rocks and other particles of stuff inside the bags of dried beans.

Now that the beans have had their bath time, add the dried beans and ten cups of water to the crock pot (slow cooker) to cover the beans.

Cover and slowly cook for about twelve hours. Normally, about four hours into cooking the beans, I add extra water (once the beans have soaked up a lot of the water). Then, around ten hours, check the beans again and taste them to see if they need any more seasoning. I prefer my beans to be really tender. A lot of times I allow them to stay in the crock pot on the warmer setting to finish cooking them down even more.

Making refried beans

Making homemade refried beans/Gin Lee

Ingredients:

• 2 cups of cooked pinto beans, mashed
• ½ cup of un-mashed cooked pinto beans
• 1 teaspoon of garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon of onion powder
• ½ teaspoon of ground black pepper
• 1 teaspoon of smoked paprika
• About 2 tablespoons of canola oil (to add to the skillet

Instructions:

First, place a skillet on a burner, add the oil. Allow the oil to heat up on a medium setting.

Next, take two cups of the cooked pinto beans from the crock pot, drain the juice off of them. Then add them to the hot skillet. Lower the heat.

Using a fork, or potato masher, mash the beans so that there are no clumps. Add in all the spices. Stir well. Allow the heat to dry the beans and thicken, stirring constantly. Cook for about five minutes. Add more oil if it's needed.

Take the refried beans out of the skillet and transfer to a bowl. Now add a half of a cup of un-mashed pinto beans, stir well.

Set aside for the following recipe.

Bean & cheese tortilla roll-ups

Bean & cheese tortilla roll-ups/Gin Lee

The tortilla roll-ups are made with pinto beans that I cooked in the crock pot, homemade refried beans from the cooked pintos and added spices.

The only other two ingredients that are needed to finish off the bean and cheese tortilla roll-ups are shredded cheese and flour tortillas.

Stirring shredded cheese into the homemade refried beans/ the filling for the roll-ups/Gin Lee

Ingredients:

• The bowl of seasoned refried beans
• 1 cup of shredded cheese (Mexican cheese is best for the recipe, however, today I used white American cheese. It's what I already had.)
• 1-2 packages of small flour tortillas

Instructions:

Adding the cheese/Gin Lee

Heat up the bean mixture just enough to melt the cheese, then stir well.

Rolling the bean & cheese tortilla roll-ups/Gin Lee

Now, heat up the flour tortillas for a few seconds. You can do this on a burner, or in the microwave.

Next, add a spoonful of the bean mixture into the center of each flour tortilla and begin rolling the flour tortilla tightly. Don't tuck the ends in. Proceed with this step, until you have made the amount that you need, or until all the bean mixture is used up. Serve and enjoy!