Monday Beans

Senior Year Beans

2010-08-13T11:05:00.004-04:00

My sister and I grew up in a little town on the outer suburbs of Philadelphia. Ridley Park is just over one square mile in area and when we lived there the population was under 10,000. We had our own high school, distinctive because it had a girl's entrance and a boy's entrance (not enforced by the time we were there) and at school assemblies boys sat on one side and girls on the other. This was a public school, mind you, so I don't know why we were separated. But it was a great school with small class size and wonderful teachers who cared about us and who believed that good students should be allowed to rise to the top and poorer students should be nurtured and encouraged. At our school, no child was left behind.

Ridley Park High School had about 750 students in grades 7-12 and since there weren't separate junior and senior high schools, my sister and I, four years apart, were in the same building for two years until she graduated. I loved being in the same school with my sister. I saw her at assemblies or in the hall between classes. I watched her with her friends and studied how to act around boys and teachers and coaches. She was beautiful and smart and popular and involved in everything from school plays and chorus to field hockey to the Hi-Q team. I idolized her and wanted to be just like her.

The year my sister was a senior our school hosted a foreign exchange student for the first and only time. He was "Willie from Chile" and seeing him in our school planted a seed in my mind. The idea of spending a year in another country was thrilling, but alas, our school didn't send any students abroad.

Two years later Ridley Park High School was knocked down to make room for a new middle school. We were sent to a big regional high school miles away where we were separated into rigid tracks and herded into large classes with teachers who didn't know us and hadn't taught our our older sibs. I was in 10th grade, and while I liked making new friends I missed the intimacy and academic challenge of Ridley Park. I knew within months that my high school experience would be different from my sister's.

One day at the beginning of my junior year they announced over the PA that anyone interested in applying to be a exchange student should see their guidance counselor. O happy day! I applied immediately without even discussing it with my parents. I was determined to do it, partly because I thought it was the only way I'd ever get to travel to another country and partly because I had no allegiance to my new school and missing my senior year didn't mean much.

For the next few months I was focused on getting accepted to the exchange program. There were applications, transcripts, essays, medical forms and hours and hours of interviews in hushed conference rooms with men in suits. Finally I was accepted, and by spring of 1968 I knew I would be spending my senior year in Sweden.

A few weeks ago I found Swedish Brown Beans at IKEA. During my entire year in Sweden I never ate or even heard of brown beans. I emailed my Swedish brother and asked for an authentic recipe but he wrote back, "I think it is not so common anymore. Younger people in Sweden are more into Asian food." A little internet searching got me to this recipe, and frankly, they were so delicious I'd rank them in the top five of Monday Beans so far this year. If you've got an IKEA near you, pick up a bag.

Swedish Brown Beans (Bruna Bönor)

1 bag of Swedish Brown Beans (18 oz)

Soak the beans in water to cover overnight. The next day, bring the beans to a boil, lower heat and simmer for 1-1/2 hours or so until almost tender. Mine took much longer for some reason.

Add to the beans:

1-1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup white vinegar
1/3 cup molasses
3 Tbsp brown sugar

Simmer for another hour or so until the beans are tender. My beans took a long time to cook and I eventually had to resort to the pressure cooker, but even then the beans kept their shape and didn't get all mushy.

Some recipes recommended adding cinnamon and nutmeg to the beans, but I left them without the spices and instead served them on cinnamon raisin toast. They were fantastic, and even though the recipe makes a lot, I lapped them up for lunch all week until they were gone.

Summer Salad Tacos

2010-07-13T17:56:00.001-04:00

We love tacos. We love filling the center of the table with bowls and plates of sliced onions, shredded lettuce, grated cheese, guacamole, chopped hard-boiled egg and salsas. We assemble our own with refried beans, reaching and passing and getting messy and overstuffed. It's a great casual dinner with friends or family, but what if it's just the two of us? This week I came up with a great way to have tacos with less mess by combining the taco basics -- tortillas, beans and cheese -- with one of my favorite summer dishes, chopped salad. Jack and I agree that it's now our favorite way to have tacos; every one is perfect and delicious and there are fewer dishes to wash!

Summer Salad Tacos

1 lb. Dominican Red Beans, rinsed and soaked overnight. Any beans will do. I usually make refrieds with black beans but I'm trying to branch out and these are pretty.

Drain the beans, cover with fresh water and cook until very tender with a chopped onion and a couple of bay leaves. Drain, but save the cooking liquid.

Saute in corn oil a large onion, chopped, and 3 or 4 cloves of garlic, minced. Add a couple of minced jalapeno peppers and a can of chopped tomatoes or an equivalent amount of fresh.

Add 1/2 tsp cinnamon and 1/4 tsp ground cloves and the juice of half a lemon. Simmer for a while, then add the drained beans. Cook until the beans are falling apart. Use the cooking liquid if they get too thick. Most people mash them into a puree, but I like some texture to them. Do them however you like. Add salt -- you'll need a lot -- and correct the seasoning.

For the salad we chopped lettuce, red onions, seeded cucumber, peeled avocado, green peppers and tomatoes. I also had a small yellow squash that I diced and sauteed until brown. If I'd had fresh corn or zucchini I'd have added those too. I suppose you could dress the salad, but I left it plain.

Assemble tacos with the beans and grated cheese, then pile on the chopped salad and top with salsa.They were so good we had them again a few nights later.

Favas for the Fourth

2010-07-05T21:48:00.000-04:00

Months ago I bought some dried fava beans with no specific plans for them. I confess I'd never eaten favas, fresh or dried, and like most people I can't say "fava beans" without adding "and a nice chianti" and doing that creepy rodent-like sucking thing Sir Anthony did in the movie.

It's time to try them and a turn around the interwebs led me to some ideas. These are pretty plain and very similar to previous red beans, but the favas didn't hold their shape and that made the dish thicker and heartier.

I shared with a bean-loving friend and he gave them a thumbs up. We had the leftovers with eggs for Sunday breakfast, 'cause everything's better with eggs.

Dried Favas with Chorizo

2 cups of fava beans, soaked overnight, drained. Cook in water to cover and a teaspoon of salt until just tender. Cool and peel.

Saute together in a litle olive oil:
1 large onion, chopped
1 or 2 garlic scapes, minced or a couple of cloves of garlic, minced
1 bell pepper, chopped
1 pkg Trader Joe's soy chorizo

Add a can of chopped tomatoes, or fresh if you're lucky enough to have vine-ripened this early. Stir together until bubbling. Add the beans and simmer together for however long you want. My beans fell apart such that there were very few whole beans left in the pot.

Correct the seasoning. I didn't add any cayenne or hot pepper flakes because the soy chorizo is perfectly spiced as is. You can season it further if you want.

Serve with rice and garnish with fresh parsely.

School's Out Masala

2010-06-29T09:18:00.002-04:00

My sister and brother-in-law retired last week, she after 38 years as a high school librarian, he after 35 years as a high school biology teacher and department head. Jack and I and almost everyone we know have always worked freelance, so experiencing a formal retirement was a new thing for us. Our ilk just eventually stop working when we decide the return is no longer worth the effort. My sister and BIL both loved their jobs, as I think most good teachers do, but they're happy to call it a day and move on to the next phase of their lives.

We were glad to be there to celebrate with them, but we came home to a nearly bare larder, with Monday Beans looming. We hadn't had chick peas for a while, so I've decided to make one of my favorite Indian dishes. This isn't really a summer dish, since it doesn't rely on fresh farm ingredients, and in fact can be made with cans from your cupboard in the dead of winter when you're snowed in.

As much as I love Indian food, I can't seem to make it with ease so I usually rely on this or that cookbook. This version of Chana Masala is based largely on "Very Spicy, Delicious Chick Peas" from Madhur Jaffrey's World of the East Vegetarian Cooking, a well-thumbed and thoroughly post-it noted volume on my cookbook shelf. I've changed it up a bit mostly because I like my chana masala more tomatoey and gingery, and also because my garam masala is a bit old and needs to be replaced. I think Indian food, like chili beans, is a personal thing and you can adjust the seasonings to your taste. Maybe I'm wrong about that and the amounts are actually prescribed and rigid. But I like to think not.

Chana Masala

2 cups dried chick peas

Cook the chick peas in water to cover until just tender. Drain, reserving liquid.

2 Tbsp. oil
1 large onion, finely chopped
6-8 cloves garlic, minced

Saute the onion and garlic over medium heat until caramelized.

Stir together:
1 Tbsp. ground coriander
2 tsp. ground cumin
1/2 tsp. cayenne
1 tsp. turmeric

Add the mixture to the onions and garlic; cook for a few minutes until fragrant. Add a box of chopped tomatoes, or an equal amount of fresh tomatoes, diced. Cook until heated through.

Add the drained chick peas and a cup of their cooking liquid, more if the tomatoes aren't juicy.

Stir together:
2 tsp. ground cumin
1 Tbsp. amchoor powder
2 tsp. paprika
2-3 tsp. garam masala
1/2 tsp. salt or to taste

Add to chick peas. Stir and cook for 10-30 minutes. Add more liquid if you want it soupier. Add the juice of half a lemon, some minced fresh chili pepper and a 2-inch piece of ginger, grated. Correct seasoning.

Serve with rice or naan or both.

The leftovers are going to make a delicious omelet!

Early CSA Overload

2010-06-15T10:04:00.002-04:00

Our CSA farm started with a bang this season. As always, the first few weeks are mostly lettuce and greens, herbs, spring onions and garlic scapes. We live on main course salads during June, trying to keep up with the produce we get every week.

When Monday rolled around this week I happened to come across a wonderful article by Anna Thomas in the latest issue of Yoga Journal about her book Love Soup and including a few recipes. I do love soup but I mostly make it in the fall and winter when a fragrant pot bubbling on the back of the stove warms the house and the soul. When I think of summer soups I think of cool gazpacho or Deborah Madison's Zucchini-Cilantro Soup, a favorite I often freeze during the zucchini abundance of July for a taste of summer in January.

So here's my idol Anna Thomas with three beautiful summery soups and one of them addresses both the challenge of Monday Beans and our CSA overload. To make it a perfect choice, Drew and Ericka brought some fresh oregano from their garden. I adjusted the recipe from the original based on what we actually had and on our preferences.

Butter Bean and Summer Vegetable Soup

1 cup dried giant lima beans

1 tsp. salt
2 onions
1 red bell pepper (I had an orange one)
1-1/2 lbs ripe tomatoes
6 oz. green beans
8 oz. summer squash
6 oz. spinach
2 garlic scapes, chopped
1 qt. light vegetable broth
1/3 cup fresh basil, chopped
1 Tbsp. fresh oregano
juice of half a lemon

Cook the beans in 7 cups of water until tender, then add the teaspoon of salt. Set aside, reserving the cooking liquid.

Saute the onions in olive oil over medium heat until caramelized. Add the garlic scapes and continue cooking for a few more minutes. Char the pepper either on a gas burner, a grill or a broiler. Let it cool, then peel, seed and chop.

Dice the summer squash; trim the green beans and cut in 1" pieces. Toss together with a little olive oil and roast in a 400 degree oven until lightly browned, turning a few times during cooking. Wash and trim the spinach and coarsely chop. Skin and chop the tomatoes. I used a box of chopped tomatoes because we don't get fresh ones around here until nearly August.

In a large pot combine the broth, the beans and tomatoes, all of the vegetables and the herbs. Add bean cooking liquid if necessary to bring to soup to the desired consistency. Cook for 20-30 minutes, then add the lemon juice and freshly ground black pepper. Taste for salt. Anna Thomas recommends a swirl of olive oil on top. I left that out because I'm dieting and don't need the extra calories. I don't think the soup suffered for it.

Tuscany on 21st Street

2010-06-09T12:29:00.001-04:00

Jack and I don't go to supermarkets much. We have a shopping route that mostly takes us up and down the streets of the Strip District to produce markets and specialty stores, particularly our favorites, Penn Mac, Stamooli's, and Reyna's. We do our shopping and reward ourselves with espresso and cappuccino at La Prima Espresso on 21st Street where on weekday mornings the customers are mostly groups of men playing cards and talking in animated Italian. Next door and connected to La Prima is Colangelo's Bakery, offering various pastries but also delicious and reasonably priced lunches.

Last week we were later than usual in our shopping and found ourselves at La Prima just after noon and hungry. We ordered sandwiches and went outside to wait and enjoy our coffee drinks. When our food came we were delighted to see a simple bean salad on the plate. We tasted and inspected it, then I went inside to ask what was in it, in case there were super-secret ingredients we wouldn't know about. Nope. It's as simple as it looks, fresh-tasting and a perfect accompaniment to an Italian sandwich or other Mediterranean entree.

Tuscan Bean Salad

1 cup cannellini beans, rinsed and soaked overnight
broth to cover

Drain the beans and cook in the broth until just tender. Drain.

1/2 red bell pepper, diced
1/2 yellow bell pepper. diced
3-4 scallions, sliced
a handful of fresh basil, chiffonaded
balsamic vinaigrette, either homemade or bottled, to taste
salt and pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients and correct seasoning. Let stand for an hour to allow flavors to develop. Serve at room temperature or chilled.

We enjoyed them with a Mediterranean Chard Pie. Perfect!

Memorial Beans

2010-06-09T11:05:00.001-04:00

Seems like we've all become so much more sophisticated about food than our parents' generation was. Exotic ingredients are available year round nearly everywhere. Delicious international restaurants are in even the smallest cities. And chain supermarkets have aisles of ethnic foods. But sometimes you just need to have a good old-fashioned American cookout. How can you top the classic barbecue with hamburgers and hot dogs (veg for me), potato salad, cole slaw and best of all, homemade baked beans?

I made Boston Baked Beans not too long ago so this time I took a crack at Jack's favorite, barbecued beans. I wanted to add bourbon, but I searched the liquor cabinet and came up empty and used beer instead. I'm not sure it added to the flavor, so if you try these, add about 1/2 cup of bourbon to the sauce and use all stock when cooking the beans.

Beer-Barbecued Baked Beans

1 lb. pea or navy beans
1 bottle of beer of choice
vegetable stock
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon thyme

Soak the beans in water to cover overnight. Drain. Put the beans in a pan with the beer and enough vegetable stock to make about 3 cups of liquid. Add the bay leaves and thyme, bring to a boil, then lower heat and simmer until barely tender. Don't overcook them.

1 onion, finely chopped
2 stalks of celery, finely chopped
1/2 green bell pepper, chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 can plain tomato sauce
3 tbsp. brown sugar
3 tbsp. dark molasses
1 tbsp. dry mustard
1/2 tsp. cayenne pepper
3 tbsp. vegetarian Worcestershire sauce
1-1/2 tsp. liquid smoke
1/4 tsp. ground cloves
1 tsp or more freshly ground pepper

In a big skillet, saute the onion, garlic, pepper and celery in olive oil until lightly browned. Add the rest of the ingredients and simmer for a few minutes. Add salt to taste.

When the beans are cooked but still firm, mix in the sauce and put everything either in a bean pot or a slow cooker. I used a slow cooker because it's more energy efficient than running the big oven for hours. If you're using an oven, baked the beans at 300 degrees for anywhere from three to six hours. Check periodically that there's enough liquid. If you use a slow cooker, set to low and cook for however long you want, 8 hours to overnight. The great thing about baked beans is it isn't critical how long they bake.

I made these two days before Memorial Day, cooled and refrigerated, then reheated in the slow cooker. They were so good, four people ate nearly all of them.

Black Lentils for a Busy Week

2010-05-29T19:56:00.000-04:00

Four work deadlines have converged and taken time out from my real life: bike riding, reading, gardening and most of all, cooking.I did manage to make some black lentil dal, called Kali Dal in various spellings. I've been staring at these split urad dal in the pantry for too long and thought it was time to make something of them. And because I have so much of them, I actually doubled the recipe, thinking I could send the leftovers home with the troops after our semi-regular Sunday family dinner. Unfortunately, the Sunday family dinner didn't materialize. Faced with all this dal in the fridge, I dipped into it for lunch a couple of times and found that the flavor gets better and better as it sits. Which shouldn't have been a surprise, really. Most bean dishes are better the next day. We served it with delicious garlic naan bought frozen at Trader Joe's. I promised myself I'd learn to make homemade naan one of these days. But not this week.

Kali Dal

1 cup split urad daal
2 onions thinly sliced
2 green chillies, minced
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 tomatoes, diced
3" piece of ginger, peeled and grated
2 tsps ground coriander
1 tsp ground cumin
1/4-1/2 tsp cayenne
2 tbsps oil

Wash the lentils and soak in water to cover overnight. Drain.

Put lentils in a pan with 3 cups of water, 1/2 the onions, the chilis and a little salt. Bring to a boil then lower heat and simmer until tender.

In a skillet, saute the rest of the onion until transparent. Add the ginger and garlic and cook for a few more minutes. Add the tomatoes, cumin, coriander and cayenne, and cook a little longer. Add the tomato mixture to the lentils. At this point if the dal is too thick add a little water or stock.Cook until creamy and thick. Correct the seasoning.

2 tbsps butter
1 tsp cumin seeds

Wipe out the skillet and heat the butter. When it sizzles, add the cumin seeds and give them a stir. Cook until fragrant but don't let the seeds burn. Pour the butter and cumin over the lentils, put the lid on and turn off the heat. After a few minutes, give the dal a stir and serve.

Oil and Water

2010-05-18T14:18:00.002-04:00

As I watch the trail of oil in the Gulf of Mexico, I'm shocked by the extent of offshore drilling. This NOAA graphic maps 3,858 active platforms and each platform supports multiple wells. Everyone's focused right now on the disastrous spill from the explosion at BP's Deepwater Horizon well, but as catastrophic as that is, the very act of offshore drilling is harming the ocean environment every day.

Lubricants and other waste drilling "muds" contain mercury, lead and cadmium that accumulate in marine life that makes its way to your dinner table. The water that comes up with the oil and gas contains tuolene, benzene, lead, arsenic and radioactive pollutants. This discharge ends up in local waters, marshes and inlets.

Even the surveys they conduct to estimate the size of an oil reserve cause environmental damage. These surveys are done by ships towing airguns that emit high db impulses to map the ocean floor. The sounds damage fish eggs and larvae, disrupt migration and mating patterns and impair the hearing of fish and other marine life, making them vulnerable to predators. Onshore areas used as staging grounds for offshore rigs require infrastructure like roads, pipelines and processing plants, often built on pristine natural areas.

On top of that day-to-day assault on the water, wetlands and wildlife, add the decades long disaster of an oil spill. Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez an estimated 20,000 gallons of oil is still wreaking havoc in Prince William Sound. We just don't know how to clean it up completely.

Other sources of energy carry similar risks of environmental damage. Coal ash waste contains arsenic and lead that ends up in water supplies and wetlands. And radioactive waste from nuclear plants is forever, and can poison hundreds of square miles.

When did it become acceptable to trash our planet? How can any self-respecting public servant support reducing environmental regulations in exchange for campaign contributions? How is it possible that our government considers limiting liability when one of these companies causes an environmental disaster?

I'm as addicted to electricity as anyone, but it's clear we have to change. We need to legislate and enforce environmental protections and fuel economy standards. We need to invest in alternative clean energy sources like wind, solar and geothermal. And we need to change our attitudes about what it means to be an earthling. In particular we need to relinquish the old biblical concept of dominion, and instead become stewards of our planet.

Finally, I suggest that those people in Massachusetts who are against the wind farm off Cape Cod take a little journey down to the sugar-white sand beaches of the Gulf of Mexico before they're destroyed for generations by our greed and inertia. Wind farms are beautiful. Dead wildlife is not.

Gulf Coast Beans and Rice
This is my vegetarian take on Cajun rice and beans

1 cup of red kidney beans, soaked overnight
1 yellow onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 red bell pepper, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 bay leaf
1/3 cup parsley, chopped
1/2 package Trader Joe's soy chorizo
3 cups vegetable broth
2-3 green onions, sliced

Saute the onions, garlic, celery and pepper in a little olive oil until the onions are transparent. Add the soy chorizo and cook a few more minutes. Add the drained beans, bay leaf, parsley and broth. Bring to a boil then lower the heat and simmer gently until the beans are just tender. Correct seasoning.

Serve with rice.

Lillian R. Again and Again

2010-05-11T15:51:00.004-04:00

I was a new vegetarian in 1977 when I moved to State College, PA, with my 3-year-old son to attend Penn State. We happily explored the town together and found what would be our favorite food store for the next six years. It was called New Morning Natural Foods and it was my first experience with recycling and buying in bulk. We learned to reuse glass and plastic containers and scoop our own honey and tahini and peanut butter. We carefully folded and saved small brown bags for dried beans and grains.

We fell into the reuse-recycle routine easily, and I realized why almost immediately. On one of our trips to New Jersey to visit my mom, she loaded us up, as mothers do, with bags of groceries, leftovers and road snacks. One of the bags was a little brown paper lunch sack with her name, Lillian R, written in her beautiful Palmer Method cursive. She'd used it to take lunch to her church sewing circle meeting, saved the bag, brought it home and passed it on to us. She grew up in the depression, and saving was a way of life.

We added the bag to our collection for shopping at New Morning. The first time we used it the shopkeeper noticed the name and asked about it. I told him about my mom and her lunch and New Jersey. We decided there must have been another Lillian at the sewing circle, prompting her to add the 'R'. We used that bag over and over, week after week, for beans and rice and bulgur and nuts. Every time we went to the checkout counter the shopkeeper would say, "Ah, we've still got Lillian R." I told my mom she was famous at New Morning and we laughed about it.

We took good care of that bag and used it for a very long time. One day I noticed it was missing from the pile. I don't know what happened to it; it just disappeared. But by that time the habit of reuse-recycle was a way of life, in part because of our personal connection to that one little bag and the pleasure we got from seeing my mom's name again and again.

America's had a tough time catching up to many other industrialized countries in recycling, maybe because we're a throwaway society or maybe because we have so much land that using some for garbage dumps doesn't seem to matter much.We're finally getting the hang of it, though, even if we're not quite as sophisticated as some places.

A few years ago on a trip to Germany I got sick on a morning train to Passau. I was dizzy and nauseated and by the time we got to the station I had to throw up. I grabbed the empty bakery bag from our breakfast pastries and hurled. Now grossed out in addition to dizzy and nauseated, I stumbled through the station looking for a trashcan to dump the bag. What I found was a long bank of labeled containers with strict instructions for their use: metal, glass, plastic, paper, etc. There I was, holding a paper bag of puke, wondering which bin to use. I wanted to be a good recycler but between trying to translate the German lists of acceptable materials, and an inability to categorize the bag and its contents, I had a hard time deciding. Paper? Yes, but --- ? The bag started to leak and I quickly chose Mülle, which I think means garbage, but it was a stressful moment and I wonder even now if some municipal worker in Passau cursed my ignorance.

In my video production work I've been to many dumps and landfills and scrap metal yards and nuclear waste sites. It's staggering how much waste this country generates and we've really got to get a handle on it. All we can do, I guess, is start at home. We save and reuse everything, and what we can't reuse we try to recycle. Jack thinks I take it to extremes when I wash and reuse plastic freezer bags, but we do what we can and I've got to believe it makes a difference.

New Morning Natural Foods is gone now. I loved that store; shopping there helped me make the transition to vegetarian cooking and the sandwiches they sold gave me tons of ideas for meatless lunches. The sandwiches were made with hummus or tabouli or something called miso pate, always on pita. The best-selling sandwich was called Peanut Better, a concoction of peanut butter, bananas, applesauce and raisins that weighed about a pound and was nearly impossible to finish. I have fond memories of those sandwiches and replicated most of them through the years.

This week I wanted to cook adzuki beans for Monday Beans, and thinking back to New Morning inspired me to make a sandwich they might have made. It's light and healthy, if a little messy to eat.

Adzuki Bean Salad in a Pita
(based on a recipe in Gourmet, September 1994)

1/2 cup adzuki beans, washed
broth to cover by an inch or so

Bring the beans to a boil, lower the heat and simmer until just tender. Drain. (I didn't soak these and it took about 50 minutes for them to be fully cooked. I don't know if soaking would reduce that.)

1 large carrot, finely diced
2 stalks celery, finely diced
6 stalks of asparagus, steamed and cut in 1/2" pieces
1/2 red bell pepper, finely diced
1/4 cup finely diced red onion
a couple of handfuls of fresh parsley, chopped
2 2-inch strips of lemon zest, very finely julienned

Mix together in a bowl; add the cooked beans. In a small bowl, whisk together 1 clove of garlic, finely minced, 2 Tbps. each of olive oil and lemon juice. Pour over salad and mix well. Add salt and pepper to taste.

At this point you can go several different ways. You can go Mediterranean and add fresh basil and grated Romano. You can go Turkish and add cilantro and mint. Or you can do what I did this time and add ground cumin, coriander and a little cayenne. Be creative and add whatever you're in the mood for.

Fill pita halves with the salad. Add sliced tomatoes and lettuce. Or just put it on a plate.

Cuatro de Mayo

2010-05-04T11:00:00.002-04:00

This week is Cinco de Mayo, commemorating the victory of the Mexican army over the French in the Battle of Puebla in 1862. It's something we almost always celebrate in our house because it's an opportunity to have a theme party featuring our favorite Mexican foods, tequila drinks and beers. But for me, and for many people of my generation, Cinco de Mayo will forever be overshadowed by what happened on May 4th, 1970, at Kent State University.

I was 18 that May, young and lost, trying to understand what was going on around me and out in the world. I had spent the previous year as an exchange student in Sweden, an experience at once exhilarating and disorienting and I arrived home in July 1969 to the moon landing and something called the "Vietnamization" of the war. That was followed by Charles Manson, My Lai, the draft lottery, Altamont, Apollo 13 and Cambodia. The number of dead in Southeast Asia hit 50,000 but it would be 1971 before the 18-year-old boys being drafted would be allowed to vote. At the same time there was Woodstock and Earth Day and the Moratorium to End the War. We were full of hope and optimism even as we saw the mess our parents' generation had made.

The one thing that expressed the confusion, fear, anger and power we were feeling was the music we listened to. Buffalo Springfield, Country Joe, Bob Dylan, Edwin Starr, John Fogerty, John Lennon and others gave us anthems to sing and a connection to each other that remains to this day. They were our age and they spoke to everything we were feeling and some things we hadn't thought of on our own yet and they made us believe we could change the world.

I remember feeling the power of youth and the absolute certainty that my generation knew more than our elders and that the world we would create would be better than before. And then came May 4th, and the news that the Ohio National Guard fired live ammunition into a crowd of college students protesting the invasion of Cambodia. It was a punch to the gut. I remember the moment, and I remember thinking, "they're killing us."

For me it was the beginning of distrust, of cynicism, of defeat. What had been a renaissance of art and philosophy, peace and love, became the butt of jokes and a theme of Halloween costumes. A few months after Kent State we lost Jimi Hendrix, then Janis Joplin. It would be five more years before the fall of Saigon and the end of US involvement in Vietnam. But at least we had the music.

Four dead in Ohio.

Spiced Red Beans

1 lb. Dominican Red Beans
1 medium onion, quartered
1 bay leaf

Wash the beans, then bring to a boil in water to cover. Add the onion and bay leaf, reduce heat and simmer until beans are just tender.

3 Tbsp. oil
1 large onion, chopped
2-3 jalapeno peppers, minced
3 cloves garlic

1 box of chopped tomatoes in tomato juice
1/2 tsp. salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
juice of half a lemon
1 tsp chipotle chili, or to taste

While the beans are cooking, saute the onion and garlic in the oil; add the jalapenos and cook for a few minutes more. Add the tomatoes, salt, cinnamon, cloves and lemon juice. Simmer for a few minutes.

When the beans are nearly tender, add the tomato mixture and simmer the beans for as long as you want. Correct the seasoning, then add chipotle to taste.

I like to make beans like this at least a day before we're going to eat them to allow the flavors to develop. I initially served them as a side dish with enchiladas for our early Cinco de Mayo dinner, but on Monday we ate them alone with rice and a little salsa verde. Delicious!

Appalachian Beans in my Dreams

2010-04-27T19:08:00.010-04:00

This week we drove 1100 miles to South Carolina and back for a 3-hour video shoot. Our route took us the length of West Virginia, over the mountains of southwest Virgina, and across North Carolina. This is the heart of Appalachia, one of the most distinctive cultural areas in America.

I've loved Appalachia ever since I read Catherine Marshall's "Christy" as a kid and started picking bluegrass classics on the guitar during the folk music craze of the sixties. I've camped nearly the length of the mountain chain from Maine to Georgia and hiked to the top of Mt. Marcy, Mt. Washington, Mt. Rogers, Mt. Mitchell and Clingman's Dome. I feel as at home in these woods as I do in my own back yard.

On any road trip we try to balance the desire to explore and appreciate the countryside with the need to get to our destination. We get off the interstate when we can and drive the back roads through small towns looking for places where the locals eat, always asking our hometown server what the specialties are. This time we did that, but for mile after mile, all we found were strip malls and fast food chains, an endless stream of Shoney's, Bojangles, KFC/Taco Bell, CiCi's, Buffalo's, and McWendy King. We'd get to the end of the strip, drive a couple of miles through rolling hills and the sequence would begin again, usually anchored by a Walmart. Try as we might we found not one locally owned restaurant. Our last day, wending our way through southern West Virgina looking for a homemade breakfast we finally gave up and pulled into the Cracker Barrel.

What's happening to Appalachia? What's happening to America? Everyone complains that Walmart puts local shops out of business, but is anyone concerned that chain restaurants are killing the local cuisine? We ended up eating at Buffalo's, Fatz and the Cracker Barrel, and all were packed with locals, groups of friends celebrating the end of the work week, young couples enjoying Saturday night, families sharing brunch after church. But they were all eating food chosen for them by corporate interests located far from their homeland with little awareness of local specialties.

When we got home I looked up beans in Appalachia and discovered that in West Virginia they make something called soup beans, which are plain pinto beans cooked with fatback or other porky pieces, served with cornbread. Fatback is not going to happen in my vegetarian kitchen, but I managed to make some beans that filled the void we felt after a thousand miles of laminated menus.

Mushroom Beans with Ramps

1 cup pinto beans, soaked overnight, drained
1 small onion
1 bay leaf
mushroom broth
2 Tbsp. olive oil
1/3 cup dried mushrooms
5-6 ramps
chopped red onion
chow-chow

Cover the drained beans with mushroom broth to cover; add the olive oil, the whole onion and the bay leaf. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to simmer and cook until the beans are not quite tender.

Meanwhile, cover the dried mushrooms with boiling water and let stand until the mushrooms are softened. Drain the mushrooms, reserving liquid. Sometimes dried mushrooms are a little gritty, so wash well until running water, then pat dry with paper towels and chop fine. Add to the beans. Strain the soaking liquid (I use a paper coffee filter) and add to the beans.

When the beans are about tender, add a splash of cider vinegar and liquid smoke to taste. Correct seasoning.

Wash the ramps well. Trim the roots, then thinly slice the bulbs and stems. Stack the leaves and slice fine. Saute the bulbs and stems in a little butter. When they're transparent, add the leaves and stir until wilted. Add the ramps to the beans when you're ready to serve.

The traditional accompaniment to West Virginia Soup Beans is an old-fashioned cabbage relish called chow-chow, a particular favorite of my mother. I couldn't find any locally (why didn't I buy some when I was in WV?!?) so we're using a corn salsa from Trader Joe's and some fresh chopped red onion. The added flavors give the beans a nice kick.

We ate these beans with homemade cornbread and pretended we were sitting at a little Mom 'n' Pop filled with locals and bluegrass and tables covered in oilcloth, with a view of the New River. We'd like to believe that place is out there; we just couldn't find it.

Cannellini on the Set

2010-04-21T17:03:00.002-04:00

I've been making my living in video production for nearly 30 years. Most of the time I work on small projects with a crew of one to five. We usually only shoot for a few days in a couple of locations, then edit for a week or so, which means that projects come and go pretty quickly.

Once, during the late 90s I was part of a large crew shooting the live-action sequences for two video games, Black Dahlia and Jet Fighter: Full Burn. My role was organizational rather than creative, but it was interesting to work on one project for months on end in the same location with a big cast and crew. Even more interesting was that since these were video games and the locations and backgrounds were created by the animators, all of the people scenes were shot in front of a plain colored background and then composited into the scenes by a process called chroma key.

One thing about the movie business is that you eat well. Too well sometimes. There's food everywhere all the time and much of it not very healthy. Luckily on this job we had a terrific caterer who prepared a hearty hot lunch every day for anywhere from 20 to 80 people, depending on how many actors and extras were on set on the day. I was the only vegetarian yet Cindy always had several dishes that I could eat and I never went hungry.

The first few months of this marathon were in the darkest, coldest winter and nearly every day there was hot soup on the lunch buffet to start the meal. Surprisingly, many of these soups were vegetarian and the one that most knocked my socks off was Tuscan White Bean and Escarole. I begged for the recipe but Cindy just smiled and changed the subject. That sent me on a mission to replicate the soup, and after many tries I finally succeeded. It's one of our family's favorites and perfect for chilly nights. It's probably worth doubling the recipe to have some in the freezer for when you come home cold and tired to your own hungry cast and crew.

PS: If you ever play the game Black Dahlia and get to the very end, I am Severed Head #2. It's my only on-screen credit ever, and I'm pretty proud of it. :)

Tuscan White Bean and Escarole Soup

1 cup cannellini or other white beans, soaked overnight
1 small onion
1 bay leaf

Cook the soaked beans with the onion and bay leaf in water to cover until barely tender. Drain.

1 stalk of celery
1 carrot
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
1 Tbsp. fresh rosemary

Mince together until very fine, then saute in a little olive oil until golden and aromatic. Add the drained beans and 1 quart of vegetable broth. Simmer for 1/2 hour to 45 minutes.

Chop one small head of escarole and swirl in fresh water until clean. Drain and add to soup. Simmer another 15 minutes or so, then taste and correct seasoning. I add a little cayenne for punch, a splash of cider vinegar for sparkle and a lot of freshly ground black pepper for bass notes.

For some reason, every time I make this soup the flavor is a little thin at first, maybe because the water in the escarole dilutes the broth. I have a couple of secret fixes for that. Either one of these will pump up the flavor. Add just a little at a time; too much and your soup ends up too salty.

I usually make this in the fall, but we've had such unseasonably cold weather here lately that when I saw the escarole in the market I snatched it up and put the beans on to soak. We've got a fire in the fireplace, biscuits in the oven and this soup simmering on the stove. What a great way to warm up a cool April Monday!

Monday Beads

2010-04-13T18:27:00.002-04:00

I've always been interested in how quickly knowledge disappears, how soon we forget what really happened and how stories repeated become remembered truth. This is particularly common in families, I think, where everyone remembers the time Jimmy wanted to fly and jumped off the garage roof, or the time Cathy took her dress off during Christmas dinner. Well, everyone thinks they remember, but often the memory has been implanted by hearing the story over and over again until it becomes a visual recollection.

I don't remember much from my childhood. I look at the photographs and see my sister Nancy and me dressed in shorts sets on our annual Highlights-of-the-East summer car trips to Niagara Falls, Williamsburg, the Jersey shore, Washington, DC, the Skyline Drive or Cypress Gardens. I don't really remember those trips, though I do have a vague memory of throwing up on my sister's needle work somewhere in the mountains.

There are other "memories" I have that aren't visual but are still firmly embedded in my brain. I remember our mother telling me that Nancy got her head stuck between the spindles in the second floor railing and they had to call the fire department to get her out. To be clear, I don't recall the event but I recall the telling of it. My sister doesn't remember it. So did it happen or not?

Mom also told me that Nancy once stuck a bean up her nose. I have a clear picture in my mind of Nancy crying with a green bean up her nose, although sometimes it's a lima. I wasn't there and I guess I never asked Mom what kind of bean it was so the image, though perfectly clear, alters slightly depending on the day.

As it happens, Nancy is visiting us in Pittsburgh this week and I was excited that she'd be here for Monday Beans and I thought maybe she'd reprise the bean-up-the-nose trick.

But when I mentioned this to her she said, "Bead."

"Bead?"

"Bead."

"What kind of bead?"

"I think it was a wooden bead, the kind you string. I don't really remember."

What?! She doesn't remember either? Did it even happen? I'm shattered. I have this clear picture of Nancy with a bean up her nose and I was going to cleverly tie that into Monday Beans and now I learn it's a bead and we don't even know for sure what kind of bead. The image in my mind is wrong and it makes me wonder what other memories and stories are suspect. With no actual memories of my own, I now have a childhood that's a vast empty tundra. And beanless.

Pigeon Peas and Rice

2 cups pigeon peas, soaked overnight
1 onion, chopped
1 bay leaf

Saute the chopped onion in a little olive oil until transparent. Add the pigeon peas and bay leaf and water to cover by an inch or two. Bring to a boil then lower the heat and cook until the pigeon peas are just tender.

1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 red pepper, chopped
1/2 tsp turmeric
1/2 tsp paprika
1 tsp ground cumin
1/2 cup sofrito (I used frozen, feel free to make your own)
1-1/2 cups rice
3 cups vegetable broth
liquid smoke
balsamic vinegar
Vegetarian worcestershire sauce
Salt and pepper
Cilantro

Saute onion, garlic and pepper in a little olive oil until transparent. Stir in the spices and saute a few more minutes. Add sofrito and cook a few more minutes. Add the rice, stir until coated, then add the broth, bring to a boil then reduce heat and simmer until rice is almost cooked. Add the drained pigeon peas, stir to combine. Add a little liquid smoke, some worcestershire and balsamic vinegar. Add salt and pepper to taste and garnish with chopped cilantro.

These were ok, not great. And Nancy wouldn't put any up her nose.

Too Much Dal

2010-04-05T17:53:00.000-04:00

I'm deep into spring cleaning. Serious spring cleaning, where you not only throw open the windows and scrub and mop and clean windows, but where you dig deep in the back of closets, open the boxes piled in the attic and basement and sort through the junk drawers and catchall bins. And much to Jack's consternation, the agenda includes adding a fresh coat of paint on ceilings, walls and woodwork as we move from room to room. You'd think I'd've done this before hosting my family last summer for our son and daughter-in-law's wedding but better late than never.

I haven't tackled the basement pantry shelves yet. That's Jack's domain because he's the one who gets sent down for a box of pasta or a can of tomatoes or a steamer pot, so he organizes it his own way. This morning, though, as I was passing through, I noticed a large Tupperware tub of ingredients for Indian food. The colors caught my eye and I brought the container up to the kitchen to inventory. In addition to curry powder, garam masala, and a collection of other spices, there were four kinds of dal: chana, masoor, split urad with skins and moong. I've made various kinds of soupy dal using all of them, but it's spring and warm out and isn't there something else I can make with them besides a spicy hot dish?

Turns out there is. I've got a hefty tome by Yamuna Devi called The Art of Vegetarian Indian Cooking, the subcontinent version of Julia Child's opus. On page 573 (of 800 pages) there's something called Dal Munchies or Moong Dalmot. It looked like a perfect change of pace.

Fried Dal

Sort through 1 cup of moong dal and wash in several changes of water until it is clear. Drain, then soak in 4 cups of water and 1 tsp. baking soda for 8 hours or overnight. Rinse, then drain, then pat dry with paper towels and air-dry for 30 minutes.

Heat oil in wok or deep fryer until moderately hot (365 degrees.) Fry 1/4-1/2 cup of dal at a time in a wire mesh strainer just until it floats to the surface. It cooks really fast, so don't overdo it. Drain on paper towels and season with plain salt or any kind of seasoned salt. I used a salt with coriander in it, although you couldn't really taste it. I might try smoked salt next time.

This is a super-crunchy snack, and you can make it as salty or not as you like. I'm a sucker for salty snacks and with this I can delude myself that it's good for me because it's protein! It was a big hit with drinks before dinner.Be forewarned, though: don't make it if your teeth aren't firmly attached.

Old Beans and Ancient Grains

2010-04-01T21:52:00.002-04:00

Ever since I began Monday Beans I've been on the lookout for different and interesting varieties. I'm a member of the East End Food Co-op but they only have the usual kinds. I found the best local selection at Penn Mac, just about my favorite food emporium in Pittsburgh.

Purely on looks alone I picked up some Scarlet Runner Beans, then had to look them up. Turns out they're an heirloom variety, known at least as far back as the eighteenth century and grown in Thomas Jefferson's garden. The vines produce beautiful red blossoms that attract hummingbirds so they're a favorite with backyard gardeners.

These are big beans. I figured they'd be better as a accent ingredient rather than the main thing. A little more poking around and I came across Lorna Sass's Scarlet Runner Beans with Farro Risotto from the book Heirloom Beans by Vanessa Barrington and Steve Sando. (I'm amazed at how many great food blogs there are!) Lorna Sass is queen of the pressure cooker and that brings up an interesting point.

I've been using a pressure cooker for beans since I inherited an old 1940s Presto 6-quart back in the 70s. For Monday Beans, though, I've been cooking the beans the old-fashioned way, soaking overnight and cooking in a saucepan. I just want to get to know the beans a little better and some beans go mushy too quickly in a pressure cooker. So I used Lorna Sass's ingredients as a guide, but I made the risotto the usual way.

I actually had farro in the house and was glad to find an interesting use for it. Farro is an ancient form of wheat and originated around the Mediterranean and Middle East.

Old Bean and Ancient Grain Risotto

2/3 cup scarlet runner beans, soaked overnight
1 small onion, chopped
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp. saffron
2 Tbsp. boiling water
1 onion, chopped
1/2 cup white wine
1 cup farro
4 cups vegetable broth
1/2 cup toasted walnuts, chopped
1 tsp thyme
1/2 cup grated romano cheese
salt and pepper to taste

Saute the small chopped onion in a little olive oil until transparent. Add the beans and soaking water, bring to a boil, add the bay leaf and reduce heat to simmer. Cook until the beans are tender. This took forever for me. Halfway through I almost reconsidered the whole pressure cooker thing. In the end it took nearly three hours to get the beans to the edible stage. I did this the day before.

To make the risotto, heat the broth to simmering and keep it hot. In a small bowl dissolve the saffron in 2 tablespoons of boiling water. In another saucepan saute the onion in a little olive oil until transparent. Add the farro and stir to combine. Add the saffron water and cook for a minute until fragrant. Add the wine and stir until nearly dry.

Add 1 cup of hot broth and stir until absorbed. Keep adding broth and stirring until all of the broth is incorporated. Add the drained beans and cook for a few more minutes. Stir in the thyme, walnuts and cheese, and salt and pepper to taste.

My sister-in-law was in town on Monday and we both thought this twist on risotto was great, and the beans themselves were delicious. I think next time I'd add some red pepper flakes and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice to brighten the flavor.

New cousins, new beans

2010-03-23T15:34:00.008-04:00

I'm a family history addict. I'm lucky to have been born into a family of story tellers and writers, so reading and listening to family lore my whole life made me want to know more about the various branches of my ancestry.

Genealogy is a multidisciplinary journey. First I learned about public records and archival research; then record-keeping and sourcing. When my search for ancestors moved offshore I dredged up my high school French and German and acquired some basic Latin. As the family tree grew I wanted to know why people left their homelands. What was their life like? Why did their names change? So I sought out histories of the Huguenots, Quebec, the Banat, Haiti, Puerto Rico and St. Thomas to learn about their lives.

Sometimes I get lucky and uncover old photographs, but more often than not they're unlabeled and undated. So I study the clothing, the studio, the style of the image, the framing, the paper they're printed on, the faces of the subjects, anything that can help estimate the date and place or identify the people.

Every new type of document, record or artifact requires a knowledge base in order to evaluate its authenticity and understand its significance.

When I first started more than twenty years ago family history research required spending hours and hours in dusty libraries scanning rolls of microfilm until I was nearly seasick from the jumping, weaving images. I paged through delicate church registries in white archive gloves hoping to inch back another generation. I used library phone books to find possible distant cousins in other regions and wrote hundreds of letters that began, "You don't know me but I believe we are related...."

Suddenly--and it does seem sudden--we find ourselves in the future. Millions of records have been digitized and indexed. Phone directories are online. People share their research on family history websites hoping to collaborate with others researching the same lines. And best of all, social networking has been embraced even by the AARP set.

I like to identify an immigrant ancestor then find every one of his or her descendants all the way to the present day. I've done this with two lines so far, and I'm onto a third, a 4th great-grandfather named Archibald Liggett who made the journey from the British Isles to St. Thomas sometime around 1800. Archibald had five children. Two sons and a daughter stayed in St. Thomas; one son went to Philadelphia (my line) and one went to Louisiana. I'm determined to fill in this whole family tree.

I've recently discovered that one branch of the Liggetts of St. Thomas migrated to Costa Rica, and what's more, I've connected with a new-found cousin in San Jose. I love meeting new cousins, not just because I gain new family information but because connecting with another descendant of a immigrant ancestor reminds me that a long time ago one person changed the course of generations by leaving his homeland to build a better life for his family.

In the course of learning more about Costa Rica, I discovered their version of beans and rice, gallo pinto. I poked around the internet for a definitive recipe then smacked my forehead and thought, wait a minute -- I have the inside track! I asked my new cousin for a recipe and he was happy to oblige. I've edited a little for clarity.

My beloved cousin Marce,

Responding to your request about one of our typical dishes Gallo Pinto, I asked my wife who really knows how to cook, well she teaches in a cooking academy Cocinart here, cause I do not cook is not one of my strongest points, but in the other I love to eat very well, probably cause I got used to it cause my grandmother Myra May and my mother Andrina were great cooks.

Before we go into it let me explain certain facts

Rice is one of the most basic ingredients in Costa Rican diet
Beans the same, you could find them Black, Red, White, baby beans, Cubaces that are a bit bigger and so on, we eat them in different ways and at any hour.
Gallo Pinto is called like that because the mixture resembles the spots of a rooster.
We eat it at breakfast, most usually with fried or scrambled eggs on top and with a tender or fresh cheese also with bacon or ham or chorizo, also with something sweet as French toast or fruits as melon, strawberries and of course with coffee, it is like a small brunch.
Well here is what I’ve got for you

For preparing it, you should have already prepared rice or cooked , better from a day before.

Rice:

2 spoons of vegetable oil
2 spoon of copped onions
3 cups of normal white rice (washed and drained out )
Boiling water
Salt at taste
¼ of a red pepper cut in slices (optional)

To be cooked in a microwave oven. In a big pan, (usually they sell the ones for cooking rice) you put the rice the salt and the vegetable oil , the onion, boiling water to cover the rice surpassing it 1 cm. or so (1/2”) set the heat to hi till it drays, take it out and stir with a fork one or two times. Lower the heat, add ½ a cup of boiling water, the red pepper and cook at low heat for 10 minutes, and should be ready. Take it out and stir again with a fork till is loose.

Beans:

In Costa Rica when you are going to cook beans we say “ Voy a poner frijoles” or I’m going to put beans, not cook. Over here you can get them at the supermarket in a 1 kilo (2.6 pounds) packages.

You wash them well and leave them in water for at least one hour. You can cook them in a slow cooker or better in a pressure cooker so you’ll finish sooner. You put them in the pan then you add 1 garlic, 1 celery straw, thyme and oregano, and if you like it coriander and sufficient water salt to the taste. After the sound of the valve you leave them cooking for 30 to 35 minutes more at low heat. You then let it cool, so you can open it, then the salt is verified to taste, and the tenderness of the beans.

In a fry pan with two spoons of vegetable oil, 2 spoons of chopped onion, chicken broth to the taste, till the onion is transparent, then you add it to the cooked beans. The first day we have what we call sopa negra if the beans are black or just bean soup if they are of other color, with cooked eggs, and avocado on it also with rice .

Gallo Pinto

Having already cooked rice and beans from the day before, in a big fry pan, cook 2 or 3 spoons of vegetable oil, 2 or 3 spoons of chopped onion till the onion is transparent.

Add 3 cups of cooked rice and 1 and a half cups of the baked beans from yesterday, stir and blend, add 1 spoon of Lea & Perrins sauce; we use Salsa Lizano .

(From Marce: I was not familiar with Salsa Lizano, so I went to our favorite Latin American/Caribbean grocery to get it. Apparently it's very popular; there was lots on the shelf.)

Then the onion is added then chopped red pepper and coriander. Blend and serve. If you like hot sauce you add it or leave it to the people to make the choice.

Enjoy.

These beans were incredible. I followed the recipe exactly except I cooked the rice in a pan instead of the microwave, and of course I didn't use chicken broth. We ate them with a Field Roast Chipotle Sausage and a couple of leftover sweet potato tamales in banana leaves. Delish! Thanks, cuz.

St. Patrick's Day, Police and Boston Baked Beans

2010-03-16T14:29:00.001-04:00

I love audiobooks and I find them particularly wonderful when I can't sleep. I can lie quietly with my earbuds and listen to a great novel or history or travel adventure and the insomnia time is never wasted. Sometimes, though, my brain wants something I don't have to focus on, something to just drone in the background while I swim from thought to thought to thought. Music doesn't do this for me because music demands my attention. I've never been one to have music in the background; if it's on, I must listen fully engaged, which makes it difficult to focus on conversations when there's "dinner music" playing.

Anyway, I recently found the perfect background generator for me: a police scanner. Laugh if you will, it's been enlightening. Poking around the iphone app store I found "5-0 Radio" which has scanner feeds from all over the US and the World. I started listening to it last Saturday night, the night of the annual St. Patrick's Day parade. It took awhile to figure out the protocols and get into the rhythms of the exchanges between the dispatchers and the cops, but eventually it could percolate just beyond my consciousness until a particular exchange piqued my interest.

Saturday night there were mostly "male intox" or "female intox" refusing to leave bars or stumbling down the streets making noise or mischief. Later there were "male-female domestics" as the drunks got home and started abusing the family. All the while I was impressed with the calm demeanor of both the dispatchers and the police, and especially with their strict adherence to protocol.

I grew up in a tiny little suburb of Philadelphia where we had maybe four policemen and they mostly parked by the lake and read the paper. During the hippie years they became a little edgy and tended to over-react at the slightest infraction, even once actually shooting at a kid who was caught with a joint and climbed a tree to get away from them. Luckily they didn't kill him, but suburban cops do tend to freak out whenever something interrupts their coffee and donuts. Yes, it's a cliche but it's true.

About ten years ago I was on a criminal jury in an insurance fraud case. The owner of a motel and restaurant had hired a man to run the restaurant. One morning the owner arrived and found that all of the big restaurant equipment was gone. He asked the manager what happened and was told it must have been stolen. The police and insurance company were called. In the investigation it was discovered that the manager sold the equipment to a broker and pocketed the money. When he got caught he told the police that it was a scheme cooked up by the owner. Turned out the manager had a criminal record of theft and fraud, yet he was -- except for the police -- the only witness against the owner who happened to be Jain, an adherent of one of the world's most peaceful religions. There was no evidence against the defendant.

The trial lasted a few days and when we finally received our instructions and went to the jury room, we immediately called for a vote. It appeared just from looking at each other that we might have a quick not-guilty vote and get out of there. One member of the jury objected to the quick vote, saying that she was convinced that the owner was guilty. When we asked what made her think that, she said she was the daughter and sister of police officers, and that police wouldn't have arrested the defendant if he weren't guilty. For the next two days eleven people tried to convince this one girl that there was no evidence against the defendant and that the police picked the wrong guy to try to convict. Eventually we prevailed, but the experience left a bad taste in my mouth for Pittsburgh police.

Things have died down from the St. Patrick's Day festivities and last night as I lay awake trying to adjust to daylight savings I tuned in again to the Pittsburgh public safety channel. It was a quiet night, a few burglar alarms. A break-in. An attempted suicide. A couple of neighborhood parking disputes. All conducted in the calm, reasonable tones that I'm finding restful and reassuring.

So I say hats off to our public safety workers, the police, the EMTs, the fire fighters. They may not be perfect, sometimes they're over-zealous, but it's comforting to know they're out there, watching over us, keeping us safe. And though they're not mostly Irish any more, in their honor we're having Boston Baked Beans and Boston Brown Bread.

Boston Baked Beans

1 lb. navy beans, soaked in water to cover for 8 hours or overnight
3 T. olive oil
1 large sweet onion, quartered and sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
1/3 cup dark molasses
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 T. dry mustard
1/4 tsp. cayenne
2 tsp. tamari
1 tsp. liquid smoke
1 bay leaves
1 tesp. salt
freshly cracked pepper

Cook the beans until barely tender. Drain and save the cooking water.

Caramelize the onion in the olive oil. Add the rest of the ingredients and some of the bean water. Add the beans, stir to combine then put in an oiled bean pot or casserole with enough of the bean water to just come up to the level of the beans. Bake in a slow oven (300 F) for 5 or 6 hours, adding liquid as necessary so the beans don't dry out.

Jack added some cooked ham to his beans. You could also add bacon or ham while the beans are cooking, but they're very tasty just as they are.

Boston Brown Bread

1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup rye flour
1 cup cornmeal
2 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2/3 cup dark molasses
2 cups milk
2/3 cup dried currants

Preheat oven to 350F. Butter 2 1-lb. coffee cans or 3 large vegetable cans. Combine dry ingredients, then stir in currants. Combine milk and molasses. Stir wet ingredients into dry and mix well. Fill cans no more than 2/3 full. I used 3 vegetable cans and the batter only came about halfway up the cans. They were fine.

Cover the cans with foil and tie tightly with string. Place a deep baking pan in the oven, put the cans in the pan and fill the pan with boiling water. My instructions said the water should come halfway up the can but my baking pan wasn't that deep and the water only came up about 2-1/2 inches. Not a problem.

Steam for 2 hours, adding more boiling water after about an hour. I thought maybe my smaller cans would take less time so I checked them after 90 minutes and they looked like they could use a little more time so I let them go the full 2 hours. Perfect!

The beans and brown bread are a delicious combination and we both ate too much. As usual.

PLOs

2010-03-09T14:51:00.001-05:00

We ate and drank way too much last week, a result of a couple of special dinners with family and friends. Too much wine and champagne, pasta and cheese, cookies and ice cream, and there are lots of small amounts of ingredients left in the fridge. So it's PLO night. PLO stands for Pieces Left Over and was my mom's name for a scrounged meal like what we had for our Monday Beans dinner.

Here's what I managed to assemble: half a package of sliced baby bella mushrooms, 1/2 carton of Pacific brand French onion soup, 2 stem tomatoes, 1/2 red onion, some fresh chives and 3 green onions. On the bean shelf I had 3/4 cup of French green lentils and a new package of quinoa, which I've never eaten or cooked before.

Cook the lentils in onion soup to cover until just tender, about 15 minutes. Drain, saving liquid. In the same pot, put 3/4 cup quinoa and 1-1/2 cup onion soup, or if there isn't enough, add water to make 1-1/2 cup. Cook the quinoa like rice: bring it to a boil then reduce heat and simmer until liquid is absorbed, about 20 minutes.

Meawhile saute the chopped onion and mushrooms in a little olive oil. Add chopped tomatoes and chopped chives. When the quinoa is ready, add it along with the lentils to the onion-mushroom mixture. Stir to combine, season to taste with salt and black pepper. Garnish with green onions. Mmmmmm. Tasty and healthy. My guilt is gone.

Red Beans and Lillian

2010-03-01T19:12:00.000-05:00

My mother Lillian died two years ago today. She was almost 97 and had all her marbles so I can't really complain; I had a lot more time with my mother than most people get. Nonetheless I miss her every day.

Lillian was a gentle pioneer. She wasn't a nuclear physicist or an inventor or a modern dancer. She didn't march for civil rights or burn her bra. But she changed her own world with a quiet determination and in the process helped create the world my sister and I inherited.

Lillian was born in 1911, one of six children, and despite the fact that no woman in her family had ever gone to college, she decided that was the path for her. She worked her way through West Chester State Teachers College first as a waitress in a tea room, then later as the equivalent of an au pair with a local family. My sister is named for the baby she helped care for between classes and studying.

At the beginning of her last semester her father died suddenly at the age of 56, leaving her mother with three children still in school. Lillian and her older sibs pitched in and helped support the family but she was not about to give up her dream. She arranged to do her student teaching near home and worked at Wanamaker's department store after graduation until she found a teaching job.

It was the policy of many school districts in America at the time that only single women were allowed in the classroom. Women were required to resign if they got married and often had to agree in writing before their contract was approved by the school board. According to a 1932 National Education Association survey, married women teachers were discriminated against because they were thought to be inefficient and distracted by family needs and likely to miss school time, or that they would neglect their own families and do long-term damage to the next generation. Mostly they were discriminated against because married women were presumably supported by their husbands, and if they worked they were taking jobs away from men or single women who needed the income more.

Shortly before she died, my mom told me that in 1938 she went into her principal's office and annouced that she was getting married in June. And what's more, she said, "I'm not quitting my job."

"What did he say?" I asked.

"Well, he was mad," she said. "But he couldn't do anything about it. Things had changed."

Things had changed. Discrimination against married women in the classroom had been challenged in court in several states, and though the practice continued for decades in many areas, Lillian offered her own quiet challenge and kept on teaching.

I never knew that. She never told us. What she did, though, was set a subtle example of equality for women long before the feminist movement. We were nearly the only kids in school whose mother worked and I was proud of her, happy that she had her own life, that she didn't dote on us like present-day helicopter parents, that she had interesting things to tell us about her day when we traded tales around the dinner table. She had a sense of self-worth beyond being a wife and mother, and that image was absent in TV shows and movies in the 50s.

I asked her once what it was like to be a working woman in the era of perfect homemakers like Donna Reed and Harriet Nelson. She shrugged and said she never thought about it. She never knew what a pioneer she was and what an inspiration she was to my sister and me.

But what about beans?!?

Mom told me once her mother used to make red beans. I never asked her what they were like, and she never made them for us that I can remember. So in honor of my mother, we're having plain old red beans and rice tonight. This is just a guess, but I sure wish I could call and ask her how to make them.

Red Beans for Lillian

1/2 lb. kidney beans, soaked overnight in water to cover
2 T. olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 celery stalk, chopped
1/2 green pepper, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
2 cups vegetable broth
1/2 t. smoked paprika
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
salt and pepper to taste

Drain beans. Saute the onion, celery, pepper and garlic until just beginning to brown. Add the beans and broth, bring to a boil then lower heat and simmer until beans are just tender. Add paprika and parsley. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Punch it up with the hot sauce of your choice and serve on rice. For as simple as these beans are to make, they're really delicious.

Vancouver to Ethiopia

2010-02-23T14:40:00.003-05:00

Vancouver has a great public transportation system. It didn't take long to figure out how to get where we were going, and if you had a ticket to an Olympic event, all public transportation was free for the day. The trains and buses were crowded with people bedecked in Olympic gear and in a festive mood. Every time I thought we were at capacity we'd stop at another station and somehow we'd squeeze in dozens more. There were very few seats, so most people stood, hanging on straps or seat backs or poles.

In the Skytrain the first day I saw an ad for Yellow Pages that made me chuckle. The headline read "Touched the pole?" and the text said you could find anything in the Yellow Pages, including hand sanitizer.

Well, I touched the pole. By the time we left Vancouver I had the sniffles, and when we got home a week later I was ready for my usual sinus-clearing comfort food, something spicy and mushy. This time I decided on an Ethiopian dish called Mesir Wat.

I love Ethiopian food. Until recently we didn't have any Ethiopian restaurants in Pittsburgh; now we have two. Many of the common dishes are quick and easy to make at home, especially if you keep a few basic ingredients on hand, like berbere and niter kibbeh. It's best to have three or four dishes served together that you share communally, but in a pinch, one dish will do, and it really is comfort food.

Mesir Wat

1 large onion, cut in 8ths
2 cloves of garlic
2 tbsp fresh ginger, peeled and roughly chopped
2 tbsp niter kibbeh
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tbsp paprika
1/4-1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tsp berbere, either purchased or homemade
1/2 lb red lentils or masoor dal
2 cups vegetable stock
1 small can chopped tomatoes
salt and pepper

Puree onion, garlic, and ginger in a food processor or blender.

Heat niter kibbeh in a saucepan. Add turmeric, paprika and cayenne pepper and stir, about 30 seconds. Add onion mixture and sauté on medium heat until moisture evaporates, about 5 minutes. Add lentils and stock. Bring to a boil and simmer till lentils are cooked through and fall apart, about 30 minutes. Add tomatoes and berbere and simmer for another 20 minutes or so.
Stir in salt and pepper to taste and serve.

Serve this on injera and eat with your hands by tearing pieces of injera and scooping it up. Between the unpacking and the laundry I didn't have time to make injera, so I warmed whole wheat tortillas, put one on each plate and scooped some mesir wat on each. We used additional tortillas to eat it. Close enough.

As I served it Jack said, "That looks like plop."
"It IS plop," I said.

He had two helpings. So did I.

To the Olympics!

2010-02-15T14:29:00.001-05:00

We took off last week while we went to the Olympics in Vancouver, then on to the San Juan Islands in Washington. As it happened I did have beans on Monday, in the form of a snack pack of hummus and pretzel chips on the Amtrak Cascades.

Black is the New Bean

2010-02-09T12:30:00.016-05:00

When I decided to stop eating meat, I was determined to be smart about it, especially since I was feeding a growing child. I read whatever I could find about a healthy vegetarian diet and discovered that most sources emphasized the need for protein. For ovo-lacto vegetarians that meant eggs and cheese, and for all vegetarians, grains and legumes. Not only was vegetarian cuisine new to me, but I was also transitioning from a classic German meat and potatoes diet. (We were so German that my mother referred to cream cheese as "smearcase", an Anglicization of Schmierkaese, and Swiss cheese as "Schweizer." And she was two generations away from a native German speaker!)

Legumes were a new world to explore because I hadn't eaten many different kinds of beans growing up. We had the usual New England baked beans at big family picnics in the summer. Occasionally we had lentil soup, which I found boring. Later I learned about hummus and fell in love with it, but I didn't know what else you could do with chick peas. And red kidney beans were the basis for the gummy re-fried beans served at chain Mexican restaurants as well as an essential ingredient of Complementary Pie, the signature dish from Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet, the official post-hippie, pre-locavore cookbook.

Then in 1980 I was part of a film crew that traveled to the archaeological site at the Mayan ruins of Copan in western Honduras to make a documentary of the dig. As anyone who's ever taken an introductory course in Anthropology knows, there are many theories about the decline of the Maya civilization including war, overpopulation, peasant uprising, and the decline of trade. More recently the theories have focused on environmental factors like disease, climate change and mismanagement of land. The director of the dig we were shooting claimed that to satisfy the ruling class's desire for more wealth the good agricultural land was used for cash crops -- cacao in the Mayan era -- forcing subsistence farming into the hills where the yield was not enough to support the masses, leading to malnutrition, disease, and a steep decline in the population.

Our job as filmmakers was to illustrate this theory, a job made easy by the fact that, as the director pointed out, the same conditions existed then as in the Mayan period. The population was rising, the good agricultural land was being used for tobacco, and much of the local population was growing subsistence crops in whatever little patches of arable land they could find. We loaded into a pickup truck and bounced into the hills along the Guatemalan border to film the process. First we shot a couple of men scaling the steep slopes planting wherever they could by poking a hole in the ground with a long stick, dropping in a seed, then tamping the soil with a foot. Then we found a father and his two small boys harvesting their plot of beans by hand, bending over to pull up the plants with the dried beanpods attached. From there we filmed a man threshing the beans, and then wind winnowing, all by hand.

It gradually dawned on me during the day that these were black beans, much smaller than kidney beans, dark and beautiful. I learned that these are the preferred beans of this area of western Honduras and of Guatemala. And I learned, as I ate them for lunch made by the local women who cooked for the archaeologists, that they are delicious. From that point forward I've loved black beans, of course because of the taste, but more because of seeing those beautiful descendants of the Maya eke out a simple living in a most beautiful place. To this day I feel privileged to have been allowed into their world, and to record a way of life that may, for all I know, be long gone.

Black Bean Chili

3 cups black turtle beans
2 bay leaves
2 large onions, quartered and thinly sliced
6 cloves garlic, minced
3 Tbsp corn oil
1 ancho chili
1 Tbsp ground cumin
1Tbsp oregano
1 1/2 tsp smoked paprika
1 1/2 tsp Hungarian paprika
1/4 to 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 to 1 tsp chipotle chili in adobo sauce
1 26 oz box of chopped tomatoes
salt to taste
juice of one lime
1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro

Soak the beans overnight in water to cover. The next day, drain the beans and cover with fresh water. Add the bay leaves, bring to a boil, then turn down heat and simmer until beans are just about tender.

Place ancho chili in 350F oven until it's puffed up. Stem and seed the chili, then tear it into small pieces and grind it in a spice mill. Add to that the cumin, oregano, the paprikas and the cayenne.

While the beans are cooking, saute the onions and garlic in oil until the onions are golden. Add the chili mixture and stir for a few seconds, then add the tomatoes. When the beans are nearly tender, add the tomato mixture to the pot. Add the chipotle. Simmer for a while until the beans are fully cooked, then add salt to taste, lime juice and cilantro.

I like to make this chili a day or two ahead because it really improves with time. Serve garnished with any combination of cheese, more cilantro, chopped egg, green onions, sour cream or anything else you can think of.

We ate the chili with quesadillas. It's a stick-to-your-ribs meal for cold and snowy weather, which is what we've got here now.

Turkey at the Wall

2010-02-01T22:27:00.005-05:00

Back in the 1980s my son Drew and I spent some time in West Berlin. We lived in the Internationales Begegnungszentrum in Wilmersdorf and Drew went to the John F. Kennedy School.

Germany is not so different from America, but living behind the Wall we were constantly reminded of WWII and the cold war, from the lines of tanks rumbling down the street in front of Drew's school to the guards armed with machine guns in the center of town. Both sides of the city were still rebuilding forty years after the end of the war and even in the West there were areas that had not yet been scrubbed of the evidence of the Battle of Berlin.

Berlin, like London, is a collection of small villages that were gradually knitted together, with the districts retaining their unique character and atmosphere. We especially liked Kreuzberg, a working class neighborhood along the Wall where the buildings were still pockmarked with bullet holes and the population was more immigrant, more radical, more punk.

At the time we lived there Berlin was the second largest Turkish city in the world, right after Istanbul. Our favorite destination in Kreuzberg was the Turkish Market, a lively, exotic mashup of German and Turkish culture on Maybachufer. The market offers everything from socks and yard goods to spices and produce, and we bought olives, feta, hot peppers, chick peas, tahini, grape leaves and all the other ingredients for the Turkish and Lebanese food that we love so much, including delicious fresh, soft pita bread.

Because of the large Turkish population, döner kebab and falafel have joined the ubiquitous currywust as favorite Berlin fast foods. We had a falafel shop right on the corner and we'd send Drew down the street to pick up the delicious sandwiches -- warm, fragrant pita filled with crispy falafel patties, lettuce and onions, and dressed with a creamy tahini sauce.

I'll never be able to make falafel as good as what we got at the corner shop, mostly because the pita available to us here in Pittsburgh is the same dry cardboardy imitation pita that's sold in every grocery store. But making homemade falafel definitely beats the mixes you can buy in grocery and health food stores and it's not hard to do. You just have to think ahead.

Falafel

2 cups dry chick peas, soaked in water to cover for 24 hours

Drain soaked chick peas and put in food processor with:
1 large onion, cut in chunks
1/2 cup fresh parsley
1/4 cup fresh cilantro
2 tsp. salt
2-4 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tsp. ground cumin
2 tsp. ground coriander
1/4 tsp cayenne

Pulse until the chick peas are coarsely ground and everything is mixed, but don't overprocess. You want the mixture to be somewhat crunchy. If you grind the beans too much you end up with a mushy texture and you might as well have bought the mix.

Turn into a bowl and stir in:
2 Tbsp lemon juice
2 tsp. baking powder
about 1/3 cup flour
black pepper

Stir until well mixed, then squeeze a handful and see if it holds together. If not, add a little more flour. Cover and refrigerate for a few hours.

Heat a couple of inches of oil in a wok or deep fryer. Falafel comes in all shapes and sizes from round balls to patties. I use about 1/4 cup of the mixture and form it into a flattened ball, kind of a small rounded puck.

Fry in oil, turning once, until a deep mahogany color. Drain on paper towels.

Wrap pita in a clean dishtowel and microwave for 30-60 seconds, just until softened and fragrant. Cut pita in half. Fill each half with as many falafel as you want, depending on the size of your pita and falafel. Add sliced tomatoes, lettuce and onions and tahini sauce (tahini, lemon juice, crushed and minced garlic, salt, thinned to taste with water) or for a lighter sandwich, yogurt sauce (yogurt, lemon juice, cilantro, crushed and minced garlic, salt.)

Modified Can Night

2010-01-25T21:48:00.001-05:00

Awhile back we enjoyed a series of books by Lin and Larry Pardey about their sail around the world in the 24-ft Seraffyn. The books are charming and adventurous and worth a read. The Pardeys sailed -- and still do -- without refrigeration, and used to rely heavily on canned food on their long passages. When they needed to reprovision they would scout local stores and buy one of each kind of canned food that appealed to them and have "can night" where they would cook from the cans and decide which ones were good enough to lay in.

We don't eat anything from cans but I do have the habit of tossing things in the freezer when I cook too much or when I don't have time to use something before it will spoil. So today we're doing our version of can night -- cooking whatever is in the pantry and freezer. I scrounged around and assembled a bag of dried giant lima beans, a box of vegetable broth, a bag of mixed mushrooms I had sauteed and frozen about a month ago and some CSA kale blanched and frozen last summer. I don't even like limas so I can't remember what possessed me to buy them, but they're beans and it's Monday so let's make something of it.

Giant Limas with Mushrooms and Kale

1/2 lb. dried giant limas, soaked overnight
1 red onion, chopped
4 cloves of garlic, minced
3 c. vegetable broth
1 lb. mixed mushrooms (I used shitakes and baby bellas)
1/2 bunch kale, blanched, squeezed dry and chopped
a few sprigs of thyme
1 to 1-1/2 tsp. or more berbere

Now here's where my lima inexperience revealed itself. When I drained the beans in the morning I noticed the skins were loose and yucky looking. Whenever I cook edamame I slip the skins off, so I figured I had to do this to the limas, too. Tedious, but zenlike.

Put the beans in a pan with the broth and thyme, bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer until beans are tender. (And here I realized that without the skins to hold the beans together, they pretty much disintegrated. Onward.)

Saute the onions and garlic in olive oil until golden; add to the beans. Saute the mushrooms on high heat until browned; add to beans along with the kale.

Add berbere or, if you don't have any, try a little smoked paprika, or cayenne pepper, or whatever appeals to you. You want the beans to be a little spicy. Season with salt and pepper to taste.

We thought these were delicious, and ate them with a loaf of Irish soda bread from a mix I found in the pantry.

Haitian Heartbreak

2010-01-18T21:39:00.001-05:00

We listened in dread last Tuesday as the first reports of the earthquake trickled in, and just like during Katrina and Aceh, dread turned to horror as we began to comprehend the extent of the destruction and human suffering.

Haiti is never far from our minds here in Point Breeze because we live just up the street from The Friends of Hôpital Albert Schweitzer Haiti, the Pittsburgh fundraising headquarters of Hôpital Albert Schweitzer. The office is a double storefront on our quiet block-long business district where they display and sell Haitian art and sponsor events to benefit the hospital (which survived the quake and is up and running ) and other health, economic and environmental projects in Haiti.

Despite seeing images of Haiti every day, all we really knew about the country is that it used to be a French colony and it's the poorest country in the western hemisphere. Jack and I turned to each other and wondered "why is Haiti so poor?" Google lead us to this essay, a good summary of Haiti's history and the factors that have kept the people in such dire circumstances for 200 years. It's worth a read.

There are many ways to help the relief effort. Here's a list to help you decide but please don't delay. There's an immediate need for water and medical supplies.

It's no surprise that beans and rice are a staple of Haiti's creole cuisine. Today we're having Diri Kole Ak Pwa Rouj, based on this recipe from A Taste of Haiti by Mirta Yurnet-Thomas.

Rice and Red Beans
Diri Kole Ak Pwa Rouj

1 cup dried kidney beans
3 teaspoons salt, or to taste
2 tablespoons oil
4 garlic cloves, crushed and minced
1/2 onion, finely chopped
1/2 scallion, finely chopped
1/4 teaspoon black pepper, or to taste
2 cups long-grain rice
2 whole cloves
1 green Scotch bonnet pepper
1 thyme sprig
1 parsley sprig

To cook dried beans:
Wash beans and drain. Place in a saucepan with 6 cups water and 1 teaspoon salt and bring to a boil. Lower heat and boil on medium-low heat, uncovered for 1 to 1 1/2 hours. When the skins wrinkle, taste to see that they are fork tender. Drain and keep liquid for cooking rice. This gives the rice a very nice color and lots of taste.

Heat oil in a cast iron pot on medium heat. Stir in garlic, onion, scallion, 2 teaspoons salt and black pepper for 2 minutes. Add and stir the cooked beans and fry for 5 minutes until the beans are crisp. Add 4 cups of liquid from the beans and bring to a boil. Add rice and cloves, stir and boil until the water evaporates. Lower heat, stir rice and place the whole Scotch bonnet pepper, thyme and parsley on top of rice. Cover and let cook for 30 minutes. Remove hot pepper, thyme and parsley. Stir before serving.

I reduced the rice to 1 cup and the liquid to 2 cups because in addition to promising to make beans every Monday, I'm also trying to not have leftovers. I probably should have just cut the recipe in half for the two of us because we had a lot left over.

I couldn't find a scotch bonnet pepper in January but I did manage to find a habanero. Whether that made a big difference I don't know because these beans were not at all spicy as we expected. Next time I would cut the pepper up and add it with the onions and garlic.

The beans were good and we spent the meal thinking about the trauma in Haiti, and sending golden healing vibrations their way.

Still with the flu

2010-01-12T09:35:00.003-05:00

Believe it or not I'm still not over the lingering flu, and because of that, tonight's beans will be the comfort food I crave when I'm sick -- simple Indian dal. For this I'm relying on my personal cooking goddess, Anna Thomas, author of The Vegetarian Epicure Books One and Two, The New Vegetarian Epicure, and the newer Love Soup.

I became vegetarian sometime in 1976 and struggled with how to cook without meat for a few years. I had some fairly radical input from friends who were macrobiotic, and experimented with unusual ingredients that were hard to find at the time. What I found challenging was putting food on the table that was both meatless and hearty without being overly dairy-laden. I was raised on meat and potatoes and I wasn't ready to live a life of salads.

Enter Anna Thomas, who proved that meatless cooking can be hearty and flavorful.. Many of her foods taste like they might be heirloom dishes handed down through generations, largely because she honors her Polish heritage even as she explores other cuisines. Book Two includes a chapter of Indian recipes and I admit they were the first Indian foods I ever ate. I think I made every one of those recipes, then went on to learn some more authentic Indian cooking, but the simple Dal on page 310 became an instant household favorite. During college I would make a batch and take it to school for lunch. Through the years it's been my go-to easy comfort food, especially when a head cold or upper respiratory infection calls for something spicy and sinus-clearing that doesn't require slaving over a hot stove all day.

The rice accompaniment on page 311 is another Anna Thomas favorite, Plain Pilaf. It's an easy, fragrant rice flavored with green peas, almonds, cardamon, cinnamon and raisins. Together, the rice and lentils constitute a vegetarian meal we categorize in this house as "brown and lumpy," but it's so delicious and comforting that we don't care what it looks like.

Thanks, Anna Thomas!

Success, I think

2010-01-05T09:48:00.000-05:00

We had the beans Monday tonight with crostini I made from a small sourdough loaf that needed to be eaten, and Jack had some leftover rice. I still only have about two working taste buds because of the lingering flu but as far as I could tell, these were pretty good. Not traditional Tuscan flavor perhaps, but I don't really know what else to call them. For me, the key was the roasted red onion. It's my favorite ingredient in a lot of food, and of course it's better to grill them but with a few inches of snow on the deck that was out of the question.

2010-01-04T18:00:00.001-05:00

The beans are in the pot

2010-01-03T17:59:00.002-05:00

Every year two circumstances coincide to force a New Year's resolution. I get buried in the last huge CSA boxes of root vegetables, and I buy too much food for holiday entertaining. When I see how full the larder is I resolve to EAT WHAT WE HAVE, damn it, and not keep buying things just because they're on sale or they look good or I'm in the mood for something else or I want to try a new recipe.

This year is even worse than ever because I came down with the flu two days before Christmas and had to cancel the big family Christmas dinner with all the food already bought and much of it half prepared. I could feed the block for a week with what's in the house. Luckily not too much of it was fragile, and what was I managed to salvage by cooking and freezing.

All of this is to say that until further notice, while Jack WILL have his Monday beans, I'll be making them with whatever we have in the house and hoping to reduce the ridiculous overflow in the pantry and fridge.

It's Sunday, the Steelers game is starting in half an hour, and I've already got the beans in the pot for tomorrow. I'm still on the tail end of the flu and don't trust my tastebuds so Jack will be the judge of how these turn out.

Tuscan White Beans

1 lb. great northern beans (I'd have preferred cannellini but didn't have any)
1 large red onion
2 cloves garlic
1 Trader Joe's Italian Sausage-Less Sausage (use meat if you want)
1 small sweet potato
1 box Kitchen Basics Vegetable Stock
3-4 sprigs of fresh thyme
1 tsp. minced fresh sage
1 tsp. minced fresh rosemary
salt and pepper

Soak the beans overnight in water to cover, then drain and put them in the slow cooker with the stock.

Cut the onion in half lengthwise, then in thin wedges. Toss with a little olive oil and roast in a hot oven until browned and nearly crisp. Add to the bean pot. Mince the sausage (I only had one; I'd use another if I had it) and brown well in a skillet; add to bean pot. Dice the sweet potato and brown well in skillet, adding the minced herbs and garlic toward the end. Add to the beans, along with a little salt and a lot of freshly ground pepper. Set the slow cooker on high until mixture comes to a boil, then reduce to low and let cook for 8 hours or so.

I know the sweet potato isn't traditional, but it was half-peeled and unused from another meal, so rather than dump it I thought it might add a little body and sweetness to the beans.