beans
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Monday, August 2nd, 2010
Last week there were rather a lot of things I was frantically trying to get done. One of them was to take some pictures to enter in the Leite’s Culinaria food photography contest, which involved making a recipe from their website and taking a photo of the finished dish. I am very bad at following recipes closely, so it was a little hard for me to find one that I thought I could remain mostly faithful to. I ended up choosing a salad of canned tuna and black-eyed peas, a traditional Portuguese dish with many possible variations.
The recipe is incredibly simple, just cooked black-eyed peas tossed with tuna, onion, garlic, olive oil and vinegar, with some parsley stirred in. I was a little dubious at the initial smell of the black-eyed peas (which I had never cooked before) – they seemed unpleasantly grassy and stunk up the house remarkably. But when I had mixed in the other ingredients and let the salad sit for a little while, it took on a whole new level of flavor that was compellingly good. We ate it plain for dinner the first night, then stuffed into pitas with lettuce for two more lunches. Delicious.
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Tags: beans, black-eyed peas, Portuguese food, salads, tuna
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010
I’m not feeling very verbose today, but I want to get this post up while I’m thinking about it. What am I thinking about? Pot beans with chimichurri. I’m not sure why I stumbled across this combination, but it was wonderful and we’ve eaten all the leftovers and now I’m going to have to make it again very soon.
I used speckled Vaquero beans from Rancho Gordo, soaked in salt water, then rinsed and cooked with onions and garlic fried in bacon fat. The beans had a soft texture and nice flavor, and kept their pretty spots much better than I expected. They were good by themselves, but with a drizzle of chimichurri on top – woof! It was incredible. I ate a whole bowl of just beans and sauce for lunch yesterday, with a piece of good sourdough bread.
The chimichurri I made this time was a bit different than the one I described back in February. I used a recipe from Francis Mallmann’s amazing book Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way
, which goes like this:
Chimichurri Sauce
- 1 cup water
- 1 Tbsp kosher salt
- 1 cup fresh parsley
- 1 cup fresh oregano
- 2 tsp red pepper flakes
- 1 head garlic, broken apart and peeled
- 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
- 1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil Click to continue »
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Tags: Argentinian food, beans, Beef, grilling, herbs, sauces, steak
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
I’ve been eager to get to work with some of the beans I picked up at the Rancho Gordo booth in San Francisco, and I finally got my chance this week. I decided to start with the ones I was most curious about: the Christmas limas, which the packaging claims taste of chestnuts. Plus they’re all kinds of pretty.
I picked a recipe out of my newly acquired copy of Heirloom Beans
, for Christmas limas with cabbage and pork chops. I did my new favorite brine soak, but otherwise followed the recipe fairly closely. The beans cook in an aromatic broth of bacon, garlic, bay and ancho chile, and Savoy cabbage is wilted in with them at the last moment. The pork chops are very straightforwardly seared, then finished in the oven (we thought about hauling out the grill but ran out of time that day).
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Tags: beans, cabbage, pork
Monday, November 2nd, 2009
I recently invented this soup, and its become one of our favorites – as it turns out, really just a version of pasta e fagioli (Italian for noodles and beans, also known as pasta fazool). It also happens to be one of the easiest soups I’ve ever made, with the exception of the kind that involve opening a can or two. The first time I made it with freshly shelled borlotti beans from Colony Creek Farm (which were incredible), and the second time I used some locally grown, cupboard-aged Calypso beans (like little Yin-Yangs) that had taken up embarrassing residence in my pantry. Good thing dried beans don’t go bad very quickly.
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Tags: beans, local foods, pasta, sausage, soup
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Like the regular, cheese-filled khachapuri that I usually make, this bean-filled variation is from the book Flatbreads & Flavors
by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid (I’ve only recently discovered Naomi’s evocative personal blog - check it out, it’s wonderful).
I’ve raved about this cookbook repeatedly on this blog (do you have a copy yet? If not, why not?) The only thing I wish is that the first edition had been bound more effectively, because my copy is completely shot. You can tell it’s been well-loved. It’s the only place I’ve found recipes for Georgian food, which is a wonderful savory cuisine full of walnuts, cheese, pomegranates and herbs.
I love cheese-filled khachapuri so much that it was hard to make myself try something new, but I’m glad I made the effort. What I really like about the bean filling is that it really highlights the flavor of the bread, which is very tender and tart. Full of protein from both beans and yogurt, it makes a great vegetarian meal. I made a quick pureed spinach soup to dip the breads in, but a sharp green salad would also be good alongside.
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Tags: beans, books, cookbooks, flatbread, food stuffed with other food
Friday, August 28th, 2009
For some reason I was in the mood for clams last weekend. When I began delving into cookbooks to look for some new ideas, I stumbled across the exact same recipe in both 1080 Recipes
and Casa Moro
. Clams and white beans: so simple, but two ingredients I had never thought of combining. We brought back a bag of fresh clams from Taylor Shellfish after our walk on Sunday, and we were good to go.
I went with the Moro recipe, since it seemed a little more interesting, but it’s still not a complicated dish. Saute garlic in wine, add cooked white beans, saffron and parsley, add clams, done. I made it a little more work by using fresh cannellini beans, bought in the pod from Dunbar Gardens, but shelling beans is a very peaceful and philosophical activity – preferably with the aid of good music and a tasty beverage.
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Tags: beans, clams, local foods, seafood, shellfish, Spanish food
Thursday, August 20th, 2009
For the last two weeks I’ve had the latest issue of Food & Wine sitting on my kitchen table. It’s not that I haven’t read it - I have – but I don’t allow myself to keep the back issues and so I hate to recycle it until I’m absolutely done with it. I keep going back through it to make sure there isn’t one more recipe to cut out or one more restaurant review to make a note of. As a result, I’ve been staring constantly at a large front-cover photo of chicken salad with Green Goddess dressing. With predictable results.
I have actually never made Green Goddess dressing. I mean, ever. So this was sort of a duh moment for me, as I realized that I had fresh herbs all over the place, garlic and anchovies ready to hand, and a tub of sour cream in the fridge left over from our Monday night enchiladas. There was no reason at all not to make this. And I had the perfect vehicle for the dressing: a large bag of perfect, slender green beans from Blue Heron Farm. I cut the beans in half, blanched them in boiling salted water and drained them, then got to work on my dressing.
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Tags: beans, green beans, herbs, homegrown food, salad dressing
Monday, June 8th, 2009
At this point in the season, the rhubarb plants have peaked, attempted to bloom their heads off (and been thwarted by my Felcos), and are beginning to settle back into merely being a large green presence in the yard without actually attempting to overrun or squash anything. We’ve had rhubarb crisp, clafoutis, pie, compote, and muffins, and stowed away a large freezer bag of chopped stalks for later.
Despite all that, I’m nowhere near rhubarb burnout, and there are several recipes left that I want to try – for instance, I’ve still never roasted rhubarb. Or poached it in red wine. I have, however, braised it with green herbs, onion, tomato and saffron. Sound weird? It’s actually really, really good.
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Posted in eating in, in the garden | 3 Responses »
Tags: beans, braising, herbs, homegrown food, Kurdish food, rhubarb, split peas
Monday, February 9th, 2009
I’m fairly sure that this is the ugliest soup I have ever made or eaten. The good news is that looks aren’t everything; it was actually very tasty. It was a cunning use of leftovers: the fava bean puree from awhile back, mixed with plenty of garlicky chicken stock, some finely chopped ham and asparagus stems, and a fair quantity of frozen chopped spinach.
The final soup was savory and had a nice velvety mouthfeel. It also had a tendency to gel when chilled, which made for an unappetizing look straight out of the fridge, but a bit of whisking after reheating brought it right back. This would be a good soup to make with any sort of leftover bean puree, or with fresh split peas. It would also be splendid with sourdough croutons, I’m thinking.
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Tags: beans, fava beans, leftovers, soup, ugly food
Thursday, January 8th, 2009
The New Year’s cassoulet turned out to be a bit of a bear as a leftover. The lovely crust disappeared, and the beans soaked up any remaining broth and became rather dry. It still tasted great, but it definitely wasn’t as much fun to eat as when it was fresh.
What to do? Make a soup! I figured the beans wanted more liquid, plus some vegetable to make them less dense and rich. Click to continue »
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Tags: beans, greens, kale, leftovers, soup
