Archive for the 'beans' Category
It was -33 today. I can think of no better argument for bringing out the slow cooker.
Wait – there was a better reason. Kelsey and Phoebe and Cara (from Big Girls Small Kitchen – who’s new cookbook I became smitten with in early December when I was bedridden with a wrecked back) asked me to be a part of their slow-cooker love-in. It’s cold, and I love slow cooked food. Why not?
They’re giving away some slow cookers too, if you want to get in on the action. They’re also swapping ideas and links and pins and such, if you’re looking for slow cookin’ inspiration, which if my inbox is any indication, a lot of people are.
I must keep this short – have a story due today, which technically ends at midnight, right?
There are so many possibilities when it comes to slow cookers. So many cool things to make, but I couldn’t see past a bowl of baked beans. These are thick and sweet and tangy and everything baked beans should be, plus the beer. (As Sue puts it – feel free to swap apple juice or stock if there’s no beer in the fridge, or other members of the household protest its use this way.)
Guinness Baked Beans
a few slices of bacon, chopped (optional)
2 onions, finely chopped
2 19 oz (540 mL) cans red kidney beans, drained
2 19 oz (540 mL) cans white kidney or navy beans, drained
3/4 cup ketchup
3/4 cup barbecue sauce
1 bottle Guinness, or 1 1/4 cups beef or chicken stock or apple juice
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup Dijon, yellow, or grainy mustard
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
2 Tbsp. molasses
salt and pepper, to taste
a few shakes of Tabasco sauce (optional)
In a heavy skillet, cook the bacon until crisp. Remove it from the pan, crumble and set aside. Sauté the onion in the bacon drippings (or dump them and replace with a drizzle of oil) for about 5 minutes, until tender and beginning to turn golden.
Transfer the onions to the bowl of a slow cooker and add the beans, ketchup, barbecue sauce, Guinness, brown sugar, mustard, vinegar, molasses, and a hit of salt and pepper. Cook on low for 6-8 hours.
Stir the bacon back into the beans right before you serve them. Makes lots.
Look who else has come to play!
FN Dish (The Food Network Blog)
Food52
The Family Dinner
Foodily
Punchfork
The Daily Meal
College Candy
Her Campus
College Lifestyles
Life2PointOh
One Bite At A Time
Mrs. Wheelbarrow
Savor the Thyme
Babble
Momtastic
Families in the Loop
NY Family Magazine
One Hungry Mama
CafeMom
Simple Bites
Gluten is my Bitch
Cookin’ Canuck
Food for my Family
Eclectic Recipes
Family Fresh Cooking
Talk Nerdy to Me
The Kids Cook Monday
Early Twenties
January 16 2012 | beans and slow cooker and vegetarian | 16 Comments »
We interrupt our regular dinner announcement to bring you these deliciously salty, spicy, munchable roasted chickpeas, which ruined our appetites for dinner anyway. I tweeted out a picture of these this afternoon, as I prepared to have four kids descend on my kitchen to taste test bean recipes for an upcoming Parents Canada spread. The immediate twitter flurry of recipe requests that ensued suggested that perhaps some of you may be interested in knowing how to roast a chickpea.
It should be a standard formula in any kitchen, I think. Especially after watching how kids devour them. If you’re looking for something salty and snackable, these beat chips all the way to the curb. Protein, fibre, they’ve got it all-and good taste, to boot. I’ll refrain from any reference to safe snacking.
Roasting chickpeas is like roasting anything else: the drier they are going in, the crispier they’ll be coming out. Open a large (19 oz.) can (or two), rinse and drain them well, and spread them out on a rimmed baking sheet. Drizzle with canola or olive oil, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and any other seasonings you like – cumin and paprika (sweet or smoked) are good, or curry powder, or any spice mix you fancy. Roll them around to coat them more or less, and rast them at 400°F for 20-30 minutes, giving them a poke around once or twice, until golden and sizzling and crispy. They do tend to get paper towely after a couple hours, so serve them right away. Divine.
January 08 2012 | appetizers and beans and vegetarian | 11 Comments »
I’m in the Saskatoon airport. (My favourite airport in the world – small, never any lineups, a Tim Horton’s right beside the security gate, which likewise never has lineups. Cushy seats with plugins beside or under each seat, and fast, free wireless. Shouldn’t this be LA?)
I’ve just finished a 3 day tour of pulse farms and production facilities in rural Saskatchewan with Sue and a group of writers and researchers. Lunch today was at Simon’s Fine Foods, where we had a sort of hands-on cooking lesson with various pulses.
We were divvied into groups, and I got to cook with Sue and Cynthia Sass (check her out with Martha and Rachel!), but really mostly Cynthia and I chatted and I took photos while Sue did all the work.
Wait, you don’t know what a pulse is? Don’t sweat it – most of us outside the UK aren’t familiar with the term. I’m hoping Jamie will start cooking with them a little more often, so the term becomes as familiar as he made rocket. Outside of the gym, the term pulse refers to legumes – lentils, peas, chickpeas and beans. (You can learn more about pulses on the Saskatchewan Pulse Growers website.)
We’re continuing our research, learning more about how and where legumes are grown and how they’re processed by tramping about in fields, eating fresh lentils straight from their pods, talking to farmers and nutrition researchers and processors and cooks. It’s all very fascinating, and we now know more about how lentils are grown than we probably ever thought we would.
The release date of Spilling the Beans, by the way, is September 21. My parents’ anniversary. (A good omen I think, considering they’ve enjoyed a long and healthy marriage, and have taken to snuggling and smooching even more lately. Blech.)
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(OK, I wrote all that last night, got home at around midnight and discovered that I yet again left a small but essential cord -the one that connects camera and computer- in my hotel room. So sorry for the time lapse while I found another cord. I’m not actually in the Saskatoon airport anymore.)
Moroccan Chickpeas with Roasted Peppers, Parsley & Mint
Recipe courtesy of Saskatchewan Pulse Growers and Simon’s Fine Foods
canola oil, for cooking
1 yellow onion, finely chopped
2 tsp cumin
1 tsp cinnamon
2 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp cardamom
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1/2 tsp cayenne
1 Tbsp grated fresh ginger
2 garlic cloves, crushed
1 small can tomato paste
2 Tbsp raisins
1 Tbsp chopped dried apricots (we used more!)
4 cups cooked chickpeas (keep the cooking liquid)
1 roasted red pepper, chopped
2 Tbsp chopped fresh mint leaves
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley (we used more!)
juice of a lemon
In a large skillet, saute the onion in a skiff of canola oil over medium-high heat until soft. Add the cumin, coriander, turmeric, cardamom, nutmeg and cayenne and cook for a minute.
Add the garlic and ginger and cook for 30 seconds. Add the tomato paste, raisins and apricots and a splash of cooking liquid (or tomato juice) and bring to a simmer – it should be saucy. Add the chickpeas to the pan and stir to coat. Cook for a bit to cook off any excess liquid if need be. Add the red pepper, mint and parsley and squeeze over the lemon. Toss to combine and serve warm or refrigerate until chilled – allowing the mixture to marinate for a few hours (or a day) will help the flavours improve. Makes lots.
August 11 2011 | beans | 16 Comments »
I saw a pot of black bean soup awhile ago on Smitten Kitchen, and its inky blackness called to me. Every time I see dry black beans now, which is a lot, I think of this soup – simply made in the Crock Pot, the dry beans tossed right in with lots of water. No soaking needed.
It’s a simple recipe – vegan, even – cheap and easy and good for you. It needs plenty of salt, and the chipotle chiles add smokiness and a bit of heat. You could really use this as a blank black bean soup canvas and do what you like with it. A ham hock or some stock would certainly boost flavour.
I posted the recipe over at the Family Kitchen.
May 23 2011 | beans and Family Kitchen and freezable and soup | 3 Comments »
Oh how I wish I was the type to fall in love with working out. I do it, but I do not love it. I never regret it though – and generally regret not. Funny how easily I forget that part.
I went to a step class tonight with one of the Eyeopener’s Live Right Now workout groups. It was on the other end of the city, and didn’t start until 7:30. I SO BADLY didn’t want to go. I was tired and headachey. My eyeball hurt. I procrastinated until the minute I should have been walking out the door, then couldn’t find my shoes. (They were buried under a pile of reusable grocery bags.) I grabbed my wallet, trying to pretend that it didn’t occur to me that I’d be alone and Peter’s Drive-In is on the way home. I went. I did it. I kept up. Did I feel great afterwards? Only from stopping all that stepping. Am I glad I went? Hell yeah. I didn’t get a hot fudge sundae with whipped cream hold the cherry at the drive thru on the way home. Triumph.
I haven’t been making dinner lately. We were away for a big chunk of last week, on the Rocky Mountaineer from Calgary to Vancouver (I do have more to tell!), then in Banff for the Rocky Mountain Food & Wine Festival. Then dinner club Sunday night, and Sue arrived first thing Monday morning for an intensive two days of editing the first round draft of Spilling the Beans (yes, that’s the official title now), which is slated to be released this fall.
Monday night we went for pizza (I had been on traffic duty on the Homestretch right up until 6), Tuesday night we celebrated with a bottle of Italian bubbly (a brand new one called Secco), tossed some veggies on the grill, cooked leftover chickpeas (from a soaking experiment) in a skillet with garlic, cook a couple eggs in the garlicky oil, and opened a black peppercorn Gouda from Sylvan Star.
Tonight we wound up going for pizza again (a different occasion), and I stuck to one and a half thin-crusted slices and some marinated bean salad. As I saw on twitter about ten minutes ago, Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain. Which can be applied to so much, don’t you think? Or loosely be translated to: Life isn’t about giving up pizza, it’s about learning how to enjoy less of it, with a side of beans. Or some such. And remembering that I really do like beans, especially when I have an appetite. The bean salad we ordered was similar to the one I grew up with – sweet and tangy – we generally add celery seed, fresh green and yellow beans, chopped red peppers and purple onion. A marinated bean salad is a good thing to keep in the fridge for lunches or snacks, and a great thing to bring to a party when you want to contribute something delicious and colourful that won’t wilt or go soggy and actually improves as it sits in the fridge.
It might be a good thing to bring to a potluck, too. How does Saturday, May 28 sound? I’d love it to coincide with the apple tree blooming pink in my back yard, which lasts about a week per year.
Bean Salad
2-3 cups green and yellow beans, trimmed (just the stem ends)
1 19 oz (540 mL) can kidney beans, rinsed and drained
1 19 oz (540 mL) can black-eyed peas or chickpeas, rinsed and drained
1 red, yellow or orange bell pepper, seeded and chopped
2 celery stalks, chopped
half a small red onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup red wine vinegar or white vinegar
1/4 cup sugar or honey
1/4 cup canola oil
1/2 tsp. celery seed
salt and pepper
Combine all the beans and veg in a large bowl. In a small saucepan, combine the vinegar, sugar, oil, celery seed and salt and pepper to taste. Set it over medium heat and bring the mixture to a simmer. Cook for a few minutes, until the sugar dissolves completely. Set the vinaigrette aside to cool for a few minutes before pouring it over the salad. Toss gently to coat all the beans with dressing.
Cover and refrigerate overnight to allow the beans to marinate. Makes lots.
May 18 2011 | beans and salads | 31 Comments »
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