Well, today was supposed to be the big day for the Steady Pulse, Bean and Legume Recipes You Can Count On round-up, but I have a family medical situation I need to take care of, so I am hoping to have it all up by Friday. I will try to notify all the participants as soon as the round-up is posted, and please check back here! Thanks and sorry to make you wait for your legumelicious treats!
Coming soon to a beanpot near you…
Going Dutch on a vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday
I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but Duck is an amazing thrifter. He has amazing skill and amazing luck. Practically our entire house is furnished and decorated from thrifted or free furniture, artwork, cookware, appliances… I could go on and on. The best was when we needed a new sleeper-sofa. Duck picked out the exact one he thought would work best for us from the Ikea catalogue. Then he used his incredible powers of thrifting to find both pieces – the mattress and the frame – from separate people on craigslist, one for free and one for a fraction of the original cost.
His most recent conquest is our very shiny, very beautiful, very orange Le Creuset Dutch oven (well, according to them it’s a French oven, but I think they’re just being snobs). We’ve been wanting a Dutch oven for a long, long time, but even used they still sell for hundreds of dollars. I’m not even going to say how much (or little, rather) Duck found this one for, but I will say the woman we got it from was fully in her right mind and understood what a treasure she was bestowing on us, and when she showed us her stunning, brand-new set of cobalt blue Le Creuset cookware we felt quite equanimous about accepting from her our incredible bargain.
We lugged it home (they tell you and they tell you, but still nothing prepared me for how heavy this baby actually is) and thunked it proudly on the stove. Where it sat, admired, for several days.
“Do you remember why we wanted a Dutch oven?,” I finally asked Duck as we basked in the warm glow from our stovetop.
“I just like how they look,” he told me, gesturing to the vibrant enamel glaze that starts out fiery orange at the bottom of the pot and then fades up to almost sunrise yellow.
“But what did we want to cook in it?”
I remembered that at some point I decided I needed a Dutch oven, that there was something I just couldn’t cook without it, but now more than a year later I had no idea what that was.
Duck shrugged. His job was done. The prize had been attained. But as I wracked my brain and scoured the internet, I had to wonder – had we just gotten the world’s best deal on the world’s heaviest paperweight?
(Here’s the thing, in case you’re wondering if I’ve never cracked a cookbook in my life. I know what you use a Dutch oven for, but, you see, we’re vegetarians.)
Finally I came across a recipe online for Wine Braised Lentils over Toast, with credit given to Deborah Madison from her cookbook Vegetarian Suppers. This is one of my favorite cookbooks, and so when I saw that, memories clicked back into place. Debbie M. to the rescue again, this time incarnated as the Queen of the Meatless Dutch Oven.
So, without further ado, I present you with a meal plan designed for a week of glorious, vegan, gluten-free celebration of that enameled treasure of the stovetop, that weighty jewel of the kitchen, the Dutch oven.
Monday
Wine braised lentils over toast with Tuscan kale and pearl onions (Vegetarian Suppers)
Tuesday
Butternut squash green curry with mushrooms, eggplant, and tofu (Vegetarian Suppers)
Wednesday
Brussels sprouts and mushroom ragout with herbed vegan, GF dumplings (Vegetarian Suppers)
Thursday
Braised fennel with saffron rice timbale (Vegetarian Suppers)
Friday
Grits and greens with spinach, chard, scallions, parsley and dill (Vegetarian Suppers)
Saturday
Moroccan chickpea stew with harissa and apricots
Sunday
Greek-style braised green beans
Gigantes in savory tomato sauce (using canned gigantes beans)
Tzatziki
This week I have the honor of hosting the weekly Gluten-Free Menu Swap, and of course I self-servingly chose Dutch ovens as our theme! Check back as the day goes on for more wonderful gluten-free menu plans from all over the web.
Heather at Celiac Family is getting her Thanksgiving planning in gear (hmm, I should be doing that, shouldn’t I?) and on top of that she has a delicious, ambitious week planned. Butter chicken, boneless pork ribs, and GF pizza will all be new recipes this week, capped off by a Leftovers Buffet that’s sure to be gourmet if the rest of the menu is any indication of the contents of Heather’s fridge!
Kim at Gluten Free Is Life is enjoying glorious weather and a perfectly Fall menu. Bourbon chicken, honey-baked lentils, and sweet potato hash browns just conjure up crisp, clear days with lots of running around outside followed by tummy-warming suppers. She also just celebrated her anniversary – Happy Anniversary Kim & Aaron!
Deb at Green V-Neck is miserably hung-over but still managed to put together a fabulous vegetarian, gluten-free menu with international flair. A little visit to the British Isles with lentil and rice shepherd’s pie, all kinds of Indian goodness with rajma masala and bean curry, and some Mexican heat to banish that hangover for good with her taco salad and black bean soup with guacamole. Hope you feel better soon, Deb!
Cheryl at Gluten Free Goodness is still hampered by her kitchen remodel, but she pulls off a spectacular menu as well. (Maybe our theme this week should be “triumph through adversity”!) More fall flavors, with turkey and celery in chestnut sauce, rosemary salmon, and something I’d never heard of before that has now become the new object of my obsession – hazelnut butter cups. Yum!
Esther of The Lilac Kitchen is trying to get more veggies back into her meal plan, and she succeeds wildly this week with a mouth-watering menu that includes sweet potato rostis, bean and veg stew, and butternut squash gratin. And just so things don’t get too wholesome, there’s an amazing white wine and cream sauce in there as well…
For a huge compendium of menu plans (most not veg or GF), check out the Menu Plan Monday round-up over at OrgJunkie.
Oh! And if you’ve been meaning to share a favorite bean, lentil, or other pulse or legume recipe for the Steady Pulse event, it’s not too late! Just send it to me by tomorrow (Nov. 17th) and it will still make it into Wednesday’s round-up and of course into the final Recipes You Can Count On compendium.
Welcome home to a vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday
I just got back from a long trip. I had a great time (I was with my mom on the East Coast and in Canada), but the traveler’s diet is not heavy on dark leafy greens, and it was such a relief to come home and dive back into a delicious pile of kale. Duck had one waiting for me, of course, the minute I walked in the door.
We’ve put our CSA box on hiatus again, which means we can menu plan from cookbooks this week. So most of our meal plan is from Veganomicon or another cookbook, The Vegan Table, that we are trying out from the library. I hated it when I first looked at it because it seemed to be full of ingredients like “eggless mayonaise” and “tofu cream cheese,” but then I looked it over again and found many recipes that excited me, and then I tried a few and am back to feeling wary. I’ll let you know how the week goes.
Because of the heavy reliance on cookbooks I don’t have a lot of links or photos for you this week, just a few of the old standards – sorry!
Cheryl at Gluten Free Goodness is hosting the GF Menu Swap this week with the theme of Carrots, which inspired me to take on the delicious (and time consuming, but worth it every once in a while) Moroccan butternut squash and carrot stew shown above. If you’ve been trying to eat quinoa regularly but are running out of ideas, try the quinoa pilaf that goes with the stew recipe. It’s so good that I often make it on its own. And of course, for a huge compendium of menu plans from all over the web, check out the massive Menu Plan Monday round-up over at OrgJunkie.
And please don’t forget – Sunday is the deadline to send me a favorite, tried-and-true, tested-and-approved recipe for beans, lentils, dried peas, and other pulses. I am putting together a master collection to help me – and others – conquer beanphobia. No need to write up something new for this event – the recipe can be in an old blog post, and in fact the longer you’ve been making it the better! Then come back here Wednesday, Nov 18th to check out pulse inspiration from all over the world!
Monday:
Broiled smoky tempeh (VCon)
Smoky sauteed kale with onions (VCon)
Millet
Tuesday:
Rice bowl with black rice, kale, and leftover broiled smoky tempeh
Wednesday:
Hot and sour soup with tofu, carrots, shitake mushrooms, napa cabbage, and button mushrooms (VCon)
Braised bok choy with toasted sesame seeds (VCon)
Thursday:
Chana masala (made with canned chick peas)
Pumpkin coconut curry (The Vegan Table)
Brown basmati rice
Friday:
Cornmeal pizza crusts with chard & caramelized onions (Vegan Table) and balsamic portobellos (Vegan Table)
Saturday: Movie night – Little Chihuahua chile verde tofu burritos to sneak into the theater
Sunday:
Moroccan butternut squash and carrot stew with quinoa pilaf
Still crazy for pulses on a vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday
This week’s menu plan is sort of half-retroactive and half-hopeful. We get our CSA box on Wednesday so we’ve been trying to make our menu plan then, but I didn’t make it to the store for the rest of the stuff we needed until Thursday, so the whole week’s plan got moved to Friday. So this is the ghost of menus past, present and future.
Tangy Red Lentils
We have another menu that’s heavy on the beans and lentils. We just can’t get enough! So cheap, so filling, such good protein and nutrients. We’ll get bored soon with the recipes in our own repertoire, though, so I hope there will be some great recipes in the Steady Pulse beans & legume recipe round-up!
This week’s Gluten Free Menu Swap is hosted by the lovely Cheryl of Gluten-Free Goodness. The theme for the menu swap this week is apples, and I don’t have any in my dinner plans, but we’ve certainly been crunching along all week long on the delicious first-crop apples that arrived in our CSA box! For millions more menu plans, check out the giant Menu Plan Monday compendium over at Orgunkie.
I usually do a little “mash-up” photo of some of the food from the menu plan to act as a header, but this week, for fun and inspiration, I give you the full-size experience!
Friday:
Nasu dengaku (broiled eggplant with miso)
Steamed bok choy with pickled ginger
Sloppy sushi with avocado
Nasu Dengaku - Broiled Japanese Eggplant with Miso Sauce
Saturday:
GF Mac and cheese (or “cheeze”) with green beans, tomatoes, and kidney beans
Sunday:
Cumin-crusted potatoes (5 Spices, 50 Dishes)
Punjabi creamed greens with kale and chard (5 Spices, 50 Dishes) (made with soy yogurt)
Punjabi Creamed Greens (kale and chard)
Monday:
Lentil dal (5 Spices, 50 Dishes)
Home-cooked cranberry beans
Dandelion greens with walnuts and raisins
Quinoa
Chocolate pumpkin loaf (made without eggs)
Tuesday:
Sweet potato and kale soup with fennel seeds
Pamela’s drop biscuits
Sweet Potato and Kale Soup with Fennel Seed
Wednesday:
Tangy red lentils
Roasted broccoli with pine nuts and lemon zest
Brown rice
Thursday:
Tinkyada brown rice spirals with vegan pesto, roast zucchini, tomatoes
Gluten-free spirals with vegan pesto, zucchini, and tomato
Don’t forget to send in your favorite tried and true recipes for beans, lentils, and other legumes and pulses!
Highly Delicious Grape Cake Pudding Thinamajig
Our Farm Fresh to You CSA box delivers our fruit in small paper bags. We take the larger pieces of fruit out of their bags and arrange them in various places as part of our endless experiment in food storage. (Fridge? Hanging basket? Kitchen table? Cupboard?) But grapes I like to eat cold, so the whole bag goes straight into the fridge. We’ve spent the last two weeks munching our way through an incredible bag of grapes – huge, dark, sweet, and firm, with that special, almost perfumed Muscat-type flavor that drives me wild. But while we munched we never realized we were neglecting another bag of grapes, similarly delicious but of a less firm variety.
We are a sensitive bunch when it comes to fruit texture. Mealy apples, spongy nectarines, hard plums – all go sadly into the compost. And this bag of soft grapes (soft, but not rotten!) was about to follow suit. But they were so pretty… So I hopped online to see if I could find a delicious grape dessert. I figured cooked fruit is supposed to be soft, so it could be a win-win for everyone.
Using the fantastic Food Blog Search, I found several recipes for grape pie and different types of grape cake. I have a horror of making pie crust, and have never yet attempted a gluten-free pie crust. Also, Duck hates pie absolutely. I decided on a recipe for Grape Cake from Supper in Stereo, only of course the recipe was neither vegan nor gluten-free.
If I have a nemesis these days, it would be vegan, gluten-free baking. Last weekend Duck and I tried to make Rebecca Reilly GF mint-chocolate brownies using egg replacer instead of eggs. When the timer went off and I pulled the brownie pan out of the oven, it was full of a bubbling, boiling, oil-slicked mass of goo that hardened as it cooled to something completely inedible. (I was trying to describe the texture to my mom: “They were hard, but not like crisp hard…” “Hard like resin?,” she suggested. “Yes, exactly!”) Now I have all this mint glaze and nothing to glaze with it.
I’ve made four separate batches of not very good biscuits in the last month and a half. The only ones that came out well were the Pamela’s Baking Mix drop biscuits, which were fantastic, but I would love to not have to rely on a store-bought mix. I feel overwhelmed – the things that make vegan baking possible and the things that make gluten-free baking work are each canceled out by the restrictions of the other diet. I miss the days when I baked for sheer pleasure as a quick afternoon activity, or whipped something up a few hours before a potluck and knew it would be the star of the show.
I have used egg replacer successfully in GF muffins, but it doesn’t cut it when it comes to cake. I did some research online to check out the various egg substitution options and saw flax seed, bananas, silken tofu, soy yogurt, and applesauce suggested. The Vegan Baking post at the Post Punk Kitchen was especially detailed. I didn’t have most of the stuff on the list, so I decided to just kind of wing it, using flax to sub for one egg and applesauce for the other. (Although for every five people who claim “I use applesauce all the time instead of eggs, it works great!” there is one intimidating person chiding, “Applesauce subs for oil, not eggs!”)
The reason I chose this recipe is that it already used ground almonds for part of the flour, so I decided to up the proportion of almond meal and use my last bit of Pamela’s baking mix for the rest. I changed a few more things around to adjust for the new ingredients, followed the directions for the original recipe, put it in the oven and prayed.
This cake has a very fun element to it, which is that 15 minutes into the baking time you take it out of the oven and arrange a bunch of grapes on top, then sprinkle the whole thing with coarse sugar. This sets the grapes up into a golden, springy cake top and looks just beautiful. I baked my cake for about as long as directed, then let it cool and sliced it open.
Totally uncooked inside. The nice thing about vegan cooking is that nothing bad will happen to you from eating undercooked cake, but no one wants to eat a “slice” of wet batter. I put it back in the oven. And back, and back, and back. I don’t even know if it works to put something back in the oven after it has cooled – I’ve certainly never tried before this. But I really wanted this cake to work, at least to get to the point of edibility.
After another 20 minutes or so I decreed it done, and we ate it warm with spoons from a bowl. It was heavenly. That sexy, perfumed true grape flavor, in a rich, buttery base of almonds and lemon zest, with a crisp topping from the sugar sprinkling. I don’t know if cooking it longer would have finally resulted in an actual cake, but I suspect not. There was just no rising happening, no place for air pockets to puff the cake up and give it texture and form. This was more like a bread pudding, but with grapes instead of raisins. It was phenomenal. I can’t wait for more grapes to go soft so I can make it again!
Highly Delicious Grape Cake Pudding Thingamajig (vegan & GF-ized from Supper in Stereo)
1 T. ground flax + 3 T. water, whisked well
1/4 C. applesauce
2/3 cups sugar, plus extra for finishing the cake
4 Tbsp melted Earth Balance
3 T. extra-virgin olive oil
1/3 cup hemp milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup Pamela’s Baking Mix
1 1/2 cup ground almonds
1/2 tsp baking power (because of baking powder already in Pamela’s)
a pinch of salt
zest of one lemon (I keep a supply in my freezer)
2 cups flavourful grapes
Butter and flour a 9″ round cake pan, then set it aside. Preheat your oven to 350 F.
Beat the flax mixture, applesauce, and sugar in a large bowl with an electric mixer until they’re thick. Beat in hemp milk, Earth Balance, oil, and vanilla.
Sift together the baking mix, almonds, baking powder and salt. Add the zest, tossing it to make sure it is well-distributed. Then stir the flour mixture into the wet ingredients, making sure it is well-combined. Allow this mixture to sit for 10 minutes to make sure the flour has absorbed the liquids.
Gently stir in 1 1/2 cups of grapes, then transfer the batter to your cake pan.
Bake on the middle rack for 15 minutes. After 15 minutes, pull out your cake and top it with the reserved grapes. Sprinkle coarse granulated sugar overtop. Bake for about 1 hour, until the top of the cake is golden and springy and the center of the cake is cooked. (I had to actually dig into mine to see if it was cooked – the top was gorgeous but the inside was raw. I would not make this dish for the first time planning to present it to company!) Remove from the oven and eat warm as a pudding or allow to cool in the pan for a slightly firmer treat.
Triumph and disappointment in a vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday
It’s so nice to be back again after so long away! Here are some notes from the trenches of another (retroactive) vegan, gluten-free Menu Plan Monday…
This week I tried to check out Veganomicon a bit more for inspiration, but I still get the feeling I might be happier with their previous book, Vegan with a Vengeance, since all the “basic” recipes I look for – tofu scramble, chocolate chip cookies, etc. – aren’t in the fancier V’Con because they already appear in the humbler first effort. I think that was a poor choice on the authors’ (or publishers) part. By including all those basic recipes in V’Con, they could have created a book that would be the cooking bible, the Joy of Cooking for vegan folks, but instead their big book is just one more on the shelf.
We have switched our Farm Fresh to You CSA box to a smaller size because we were getting a little overwhelmed, but we did a good job this week of using up all the veggies that came, even the lettuce, which is usually our downfall. Duck has also been volunteering at the food bank in our neighborhood, and they always insist on sending him home with some nice organic veggies, so those informed our meal choices this week as well. Last night I rediscovered a huge bunch of gorgeous black grapes that had gone past the point of eating raw (Duck and I like our grapes very, very firm) but were in no way rotten, so I tried something I’ve never done before and improvised a little gluten-free, vegan grape cake. It turned out a bit more like a grape bread pudding, but it was delicious!
This week’s menu post is light on recipe links, but that’s because the potato leek soup, the biscuits, and the tofu scramble were all first-tries and all disappointments. (Not so bad that dinner was ruined, but I wouldn’t recommend the recipes to anyone else.) If anyone knows a recipe for fantastic vegan, gluten-free biscuits, let me know and I will be forever in your debt!
For a massive dose of menu plans, check out the giant Menu Plan Monday compendium over at OrgJunkie. The Gluten Free Menu Swap is hosted this week by Asparagus Thin, with the theme of Superfoods. I got to feel all smug and healthy at how many superfoods from her list I used this week, and not even intentionally to meet the challenge. Avocados, chick peas, dark leafy greens, eggplant, flax seeds and hemp milk in the cake, garlic in everything, lots of nice fermented and sprouted soy, sweet potatoes, tea, whole grains, and yogurt – nearly her entire list!
Monday
Homemade falafel with tahini sauce, tomatoes, lettuce, and sriracha
Middle Eastern-style turnip pickle
Steamed kale with kale sauce
Tuesday
Semi-Nicoise salad with butter lettuce, heirloom tomatoes, steamed green beans, and red onion with Nicoise dressing (no anchovies)
Hot-sauce glazed tempeh (V’con)
White rice
Wednesday
Southern-style collard greens and beet greens with tempeh bacon and tomatoes (recipe to come)
Deborah Madison tofu
Quinoa
Thursday
Potato leek soup made with scrap stock
GF biscuits
Green salad
Friday
Bengan bharta (Indian eggplant)
Raita (goat yogurt with cucumber, mustard seeds, and spices)
Cucumber sunomono salad
Brown rice
Saturday
Pasta “alla California” (GF noodles with broccoli, red pepper flakes, and avocado) (VCon)
Roasted root vegetables (beets, carrots, red onion, sweet potato) with fresh rosemary
Sunday
Tofu scramble
Sweet potato fries with aioli
Tempeh bacon
Grape pudding-cake
Have a great week, everyone! And, if you have a favorite Bean, Lentil, Legume, or Pulse recipe, don’t forget to send it to me for the Steady Pulse round-up!
Steady on! A pulse-perfect gluten-free, vegan Menu Plan Monday
Beans, legumes, lentils, pulses – whatever you call them, they are incredibly healthy, with so many advantages and no nutritional downsides. They are high in protein and fiber, low in fat and on the glycemic index, high in B vitamins, folate, calcium, and potassium, and help to lower cholesterol and blood sugar. Dried beans, peas and lentils are some of the cheapest foods out there, and some of the most filling.
But pulses can also be intimidating, what with all the rinsing and soaking, long cooking times, and potential for coming out either too hard or too mushy or just bland and kind of gross. I’ve been put off myself for years from making bean and lentil dishes from scratch, but I’ve decided it’s time to conquer my beanphobia. It’s time to establish a steady collection of go-to recipes that will help to make cooking with pulses a regular and non-terrifying part of my life.
I’m calling the project “Steady Pulse: Bean & legume recipes you can count on,” and I’m inviting food bloggers everywhere to contribute their most time-tested bean/lentil/dried pea/etc. recipes – the ones that will make legume converts of us all. The project will be ongoing, but I’m hoping to gather an initial round-up of folks’ favorite recipes by November 15th. For more information on participating, please visit the Steady Pulse page.
To kick off the project and celebrate kicking my phobia, this week’s menu draws on my tiny personal collection of legume recipes, the ones I make again and again and love every time.
Monday:
French lentil soup with thyme, tarragon, and brandy (made with scrap stock)
Sweet potato fries with aioli
Tuesday:
Home-cooked cranberry beans
Fennel-marinated tempeh (Moosewood at Home)
Brown rice
Green salad with tomato, cucumber, carrot, pine nuts, red cabbage
Wednesday:
Home-fried potatoes with onion and tempeh
Fried eggs
Home-cooked cranberry beans
Thursday:
Tangy red lentils
Quinoa pilaf with red and white quinoa
Steamed broccoli
Friday:
French lentil salad with cucumber, tomato, mint, and feta
Steamed corn
Green salad with tomato and carrot
Saturday:
Chana masala from canned chick peas (Will try to get recipe up later this week)
Spanish rice
Steamed kale
Sunday:
GF fettuccine with vegan pesto, roasted yellow squash and red onions, and roma tomatoes
Salad of red-leaf lettuce, carrot, red onions, avocado, and beets
I also have the pleasure of hosting the Gluten-Free Menu Swap this week! My fellow gluten-free bloggers have planned out some amazing meals this week, so read on!
Kimberly at Gluten Free is Life has redesigned her blog since I last visited and it’s all shiny and gorgeous! (Sorry if that’s old news, Kimberly – my computer has been in the shop for several weeks!) She has no fear of pulses, adding chick peas and black beans and other legumes to her lunches and salads all the time. She has a great menu planned including a sweet potato with cinnamon and Greek yogurt that caught my eye (and made my mouth water), and there is definitely zucchini bread in her future (check out her post to see why and be astounded!!).
Sea at Book of Yum takes another of her drool-worthy weekly trips around the world with a menu inspired by India, Mexico, and the American South. She’s just found out her new baby may have a casein sensitivity, which is sad news, but at least baby’s momma is one of the best vegan-recipe creators on the web. Sea’s latest dairy-free creation is a dreamy dairy-free soy-free pine nut basil tomato cream sauce for ravioli. It doesn’t get any better than this!
Cheryl at Gluten Free Goodness is a definite bean lover. She even uses beans in desserts and as a thickener for chocolate frosting (I want that recipe sometime, Cheryl!). She has a yummy, fresh-sounding summer menu planned and I basically want to eat everything on it. Chickpea crackers, roasted cauliflower, sauteed fennel, chestnut sauce – this week sounds like it’s going to be a flavor explosion of the very best kind!
For a whole host of other weekly menu plans, check out the mega-gigantic Menu Plan Monday compilation over at Org Junkie!
Conquering beanphobia
The spot on your back you can never quite reach to itch. The messy corner of your house you can never quite get organized. That one hole in your culinary knowledge that, while you can effortlessly make a multi-course meal or a bake-sale’s worth of desserts, sends you running back to your recipe books again and again.
For me, it’s beans. Or more specifically, beans, legumes, lentils, pulses – y’know, those things that have to be soaked and cooked for hours and you can’t add salt or acid at the wrong time or look at them funny or they’ll come out hard or mushy or both at once. I not only don’t get them, I’m intimidated by them, and like dogs they can smell my fear and snarl at me whenever I come near, not to mention I get vertigo just looking at bean recipes with all that rinsing/picking over/soaking/simmering.
As a gluten-free vegetarian and somewhat nutritionally obsessed cook, beans/legumes/lentils/pulses should be my best friends. But as the previous sentence shows, we’re not even on a first-name basis. (Technically “pulses” pretty much covers all edible dry beans, chick peas, lentils, black-eyed peas, etc. and even includes random stuff like the Bambara groundnut and the common vetch, but when I use the word “pulses” no one ever knows what I’m talking about, so I have to get all mouth-stumbly and say beans/lentils/legumes instead.)
I want to be eating pulses pretty much every day. They are super high in protein and fiber and many great nutrients like B vitamins and folate, with none of the downsides of soy or dairy which are my other main sources of protein. But my whole cooking life I’ve been scared of them – of the time it takes to cook them, of the lack of spontaneity involved in soaking something overnight, and of ending up with something boring and brown after all that hard work. And then when I blog-surf for yummy-sounding recipes I end up on all the amazing Indian food blogs with their delicious dals using every pulse under the sun, and after bookmarking madly for an hour I realize I don’t have any fenugreek or curry leaves or tamarind and I am back to feeling overwhelmed. So my bean/lentil consumption relies solely on a few favorite recipes and an occasional canned bean supplement to a Mexican meal.
I can already hear those of you who are blessedly free from beanphobia telling me, “It’s really not that much work! I do it all the time!” and I know logically this is true, but I just have a bean blockage. Mentally, that is. Or I did. Until now. Because as of this month I am setting out to conquer my fears.
I’ve seen plenty of other food bloggers write about feeling intimidated or befuddled by beans or lentils (lentils seem to be an especially common mystery-item). So for all of us out there, I’m starting project Steady Pulse. I have a few bean and lentil recipes I know I can rely on. They’re easy to make, can be made with things I commonly have at home or have easy access to, and I’ve successfully made them many times. And that’s the real key for me – I love to read The Well Seasoned Cook’s monthly round-up of legume recipes, My Legume Love Affair, but I never know (unless the blogger tells me specifically) whether the dish in question was made once for the event or is a longtime favorite. (And I know I myself may be guilty of writing “through rose-colored glasses” about one-time dishes that I make for blog events… even if they don’t actually turn out that well.)
So my plan is to try some of the other bean and lentil recipes out there, and if something turns out wonderfully several times in a row and fits the other criteria (easy to make, common ingredients) I’ll write about it or link to it here. And if you have blogged about one of your sure-fire bean or lentil recipes, you can feel free to grab the logo above and add it to your post, or just send me the link and I’ll add it to the list here. And of course everyone’s idea of “easy to make” is almost as varied as their idea of ”common ingredients,” but at least we’ll end up with a collection of yummy recipes that we know someone real out there relies upon. And that will make us a happier, healthier (and um… perhaps slightly gassier) food blogging community!
Beans from scratch
It’s so much easier with a friend to hold your hand down the path, and that’s what Farm Princess did a few weeks ago by making our household’s first batch of beans from scratch. A while back I had filled a jar with beautiful cranberry beans from the bulk section of my food co-op, but they sat in our pantry like a pretty pantry ornament until one morning when FP texted me saying, “Will you soak the beans?” I put them in to soak and five or six hours later she came home and cooked them. Simple as that. (We’d actually planned it a bit in advance so we had celery in the house, which we don’t normally have, but otherwise it was quite stress-free.)
The cranberry beans were heirloom beans from Rancho Gordo, which is a local organization that is impacting heirloom bean awareness and popularity on a national scale. (They were #2 on the Saveur 100 list in 2008.) Farm Princess and I decided that for our first beans from scratch we would follow the Rancho Gordo “Master Recipe” and see how that went for us. It has you soak the beans and then cook them with a simple mirepoix, although ultimately FP added a few flourishes of her own.
What can I say about these beans that will adequately convey how delicious they were? I’ll say this – for the first two days, everyone in our house would only take little tiny bites of the beans. This was because they were so good, so unbelievably delectable, that each of us felt guilty eating them and depriving the others of more bean-delight, each of us was holding back because we knew if given the chance we would eat them all. They were meat-like in the sense of being completely satisfying, almost smoky, with an incredible mouth-filling texture. They didn’t need anything – no sauce, no accompaniment, no place in a larger meal. These beans stood alone. Although they were mighty fine with fried eggs and homefries, too..
Rancho Gordo Master Recipe for Simple Beans (with Farm Princess’ optional additions in italics – feel free to substitute your own flavor elements instead!)
1. The morning of the day you want to make the beans, rinse the beans and check for debris. Put the beans on to soak, covering them in about an inch of water.
2. Make a mirepoix of onion, celery and carrot diced fine and sautéed in some kind of fat, like olive oil. A crushed clove of garlic doesn’t hurt.
3. Add the beans and their soaking water to a large pot. (Steve of Rancho Gordo addresses the gassiness question here.) The beans will have expanded, so make sure they are still covered by at least an inch, maybe a bit more. Add the sautéed vegetables, crushed garlic, a strip of kombu, some whole cumin seeds, a few bay leaves, and a couple of peppercorns, and give a good stir. Raise your heat to medium high and bring to a hard boil.
4. Keep the beans at a boil for about five minutes and then reduce them to a gentle simmer, then cover. I like to see how low I can go and still get the occasional simmering bubble. When the beans are almost ready, the aroma will be heady. They won’t smell so much like the vegetables you’ve cooked but the beans themselves. At this point. I’d go ahead and salt them. Go easy as it takes awhile for the beans to absorb the salt. If you want to add tomatoes or acids like lime or vinegar or red wine, wait until the beans are cooked through.
If the bean water starts to get low, always add hot water from a tea kettle. The tap produces disgusting water for food. Don’t forget to remove the kombu strip before serving.
Galia Melon and Heirloom Tomatoes ~ Week of August 5th
No photo this week, but a tasty box full of treats nonetheless. We are starting to miss what we think of as “real veggies,” though. Tomatoes are terrific, but they don’t satisfy the leafy green urge. At least there was a bit of broccoli this week!
In this week’s box from Farm Fresh to You:
Blueberries (6 oz.)
Flame grapes (1 lb)
Cherries (1 lb)
Galia melon (1 large)
Broccoli (1 crown)
Portobello mushroom (1 large)
Cherry tomatoes (1 pint)
Heirloom tomatoes (2 lbs)
Romaine hearts (3)
Purple basil (1 bunch)
Yellow onions (1 lb)
The quality of the produce is still really good, and stuff doesn’t rot immediately, which is a huge plus for summer CSA fruit and tomatoes. I wish the newsletter recipes were a little more inspired though… This week’s recipe was for grilled cheese sandwiches. They sound like amazing grilled cheese sandwiches, but that’s one I can pretty much figure out on my own!
