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Beans, Veg, Yogurt, Meat

Another simple meal pattern: legumes, roasted vegetables, yogurt, and optionally meat.

In this case, fresh shelling beans (simmered on medium-low 30-40 minutes with aromatics + herbs), winter squash from the garden and broccoli (both chopped, tossed with olive oil and salt, and roasted in a 400F oven for 20-30 minutes), and a pan-fried sausage and some yogurt (optional: fermented hot sauce).

It does take three pots/pans, but only 45 minutes (depending how long the beans take to cook), so it’s on our roster as a common weeknight or weekend meal with endless variants…

Tags: shelling beans, Squash

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Categories cooking, core techniques, easy meals, garden

Cooking Fresh Beans

10 Nov

Every year I grow a few varieties of fresh shelling beans, and when I’m lucky I find them at the local markets as well.

A common even weeknight-fast way of cooking them is to combine beans, salty water, a splash of olive oil, some aromatic (half an onion, a shallot, a clove of garlic), a whole dried hot pepper pod (without seeds if I want it to be less spicy), and a bay leaf.

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Just low-simmering this combination for 25-45 minutes until creamy-soft (time depends on the particular beans, their size, and their maturity) and then draining and dressing with good olive oil is consistently delicious.

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Categories cooking, core techniques, favorites, garden

Cooking Dry Beans

10 Mar

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Cooking dry beans? How boring and simple a concept is that?

I just cooked some great dried-but-not-old beans (Good Mother Stallard beans from this summer’s back yard garden, picked once the pods got papery and brittle and just stored in a mason jar), so I’m jotting down a few notes.

I didn’t soak them overnight. I covered them with a few inches of water, fairly heavily salted (a palmful of salt, such that it actually tastes like salty water, though not seawater), added a spoonful of olive oil, a whole peeled shallot, and maybe 1/2 tsp each of mustard seed and fennel seed.

Then I brought them to a very low simmer and let them cook uncovered… they took just under two hours to be creamy-soft and delicious.

A few months later, I cooked some larger Akahana Mame and Shirohana Mame dried beans from this summer’s garden, with a similar approach (plus a four-hour pre-soak), and they took about four hours to be creamy-soft and done (the Shirohana Mame were ready at three hours).

On the other hand, cooking similar dried beans from last year’s garden took almost six hours, even with some pre-soaking, so it seems to depend how old they are (and perhaps how dry they got before being picked?)