What are you cooking today?

Yum.

Black beans and rice makes a good dish; popular in the Caribbean as "peas and rice." Cook with some onions and jerk spice to serve along side your jerked pork. I put a splash of Balsamic in it just before serving (does no good to cook it in).

One of the most important points above is serving beans with rice; Worf could explain it but there's some chemical reason the two together release a health benefit that they don't do separately.

I learned the hard way that if you cook with dried beans, and you add tomatoes early while cooking, the beans will remain hard bullets and never soften--I think it's the acid--so be sure your beans are soft before adding the tomatoes.

Neither Texans or Mexicans would eat black beans. Pintos. Black beans are more Cuba/Caribbean. 

speaking of jerk, I like to add dark rum to the jerk for my meat.

Black beans are good in chili, but I usually put all three in mine.

Maybe it's the salt in the tomatoes that locks up the beans? I use canned, which would be high sodium.

It's the sugars in beans that are flatulence fountainhead. They then ferment in the gut and any beer brewer knows that means CO2 production. Traditionally, a good soak can remove the water soluble sugars. Anything that can influence the reaction can change the amount of sugar available. I've heard of people using baking soda. There are also some digestion friendly spices that have their devotees. They include ginger, cardamom, cumin, and peppermint along with others. Cooking the beans thoroughly and eating them slowly can also reduce gas production. 

I went to a lecture a long time ago given by a nutritionist for people considering vegetarianism.  She strongly made the point about combining rice and beans as being synergistic and gave the technical reason, but I cannot remember the details.

I believe it is because combined they provide all eight of th essential amino acids that build the other 15 so your body an make complete proteins. 

I do too. Red, black and Great Northern. I do not care for red or pink kidney beans. Cannellini are good, but I can get my Great Northern and even navy beans almost as creamy, so why go out of the way?

To get your pasta sauce to stick to the pasta, so you don't end up with just one or the other on your plate at the end, pour some pasta water into the sauce. Some chefs keep some pasta water on hand for this. The gluten or whatever it is in the water gets the sauce (gravy) to stick. This works somewhat even if you oil your pasta after draining.

I am also trying to get away from the custom of putting pasta on the plate and sauce on top. Better to add the pasta to the sauce in the pan and let them cook together some. But that makes quantity control difficult and I usually make a large batch of sauce for next time and cook the pasta as needed.

I made homemade Beefaroni last weekend for my granddaughter: a batch of hamburger red sauce and added some milk and velveeta. Mixed in cooked ziti. Of course, I was really making it for me! At 15 months the dish is both food and war paint.

I put oil in the water at the start. I don't oil after draining if I'm serving it right away, or putting it in the sauce. I'll oil so it stays warm if serving it soon. Otherwise i hit it with cold water to stop the cooking, which puts it at room temp, easy to heat up or add to the sauce, or refrigerate for leftovers.

Not sure how my Scots-Irish East Tennessee, or my English Tidewater Virginia, grandmothers did their pasta, if at all. I don't think I had "pasta" until after college; until then I ate a lot of noodles, including spaghetti. I started my Italian cooking at age 10 with canned beefaroni--ah, the circle connects.

I'm going out on a limb here but I'm guessing this is where your handle came from...

What part of do you not understand?