Monday Beans

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

School's Out Masala

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!

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Early CSA Overload

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.

Wednesday, June 9, 2010

Tuscany on 21st Street

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

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.

Saturday, May 29, 2010

Black Lentils for a Busy Week

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.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Oil and Water

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.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Lillian R. Again and Again

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.