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 Farmer B 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 FB 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.) Farmer B 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 FB 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 Farmer B’s 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!