Black bean soup

Did I say, in that last post on "veggie chili," that I make soup out of the leftovers? Well, I do.

Basically I just puree the leftovers with the cooking broth from the black beans, sometimes adjusting the seasoning with a little more salt or cumin.

Garnishing with sour cream and chopped cilantro is completely optional, though delicious.

Occasionally it will wind up a little thin, texture-wise, but fear not. I got a great little trick from (where else?) a Deborah Madison cookbook to thicken this soup: whisk in a couple of tablespoons of masa harina. (That's the corn flour treated with lime that you use to make tortillas from.) It adds a really nice flavor dimension as well as the thickening.

Oh, and regarding blenders: I have a hand-held "stick" blender that I've been using less and less. I don't know if it's just gotten old, and sort of worn out, or what -- but I really think that the standard countertop blender is more effective. Only problem is, it is more of a chore to wash.

I don't have a fancy one, either. It's an Oster that cost about $30 in about 1992, bought, if memory serves, at the Montgomery Ward in Morgantown. But it is effective for pureeing soups.

A final note: there's no picture with this post because this soup may not be the most photogenic thing going. Delicious, but kinda plain.

Beans and rice, redux

In my house, there is a dinner we eat easily once a week. Over the years, its name has evolved. Once it was "tacos" or "veggie chili." Then it became "Permission" (as in, "permission to eat junk food for dinner," because we'd scoop it up with chips that had cheese melted over them.) Its current iteration is "chips and cheese" because that's how the kids think of it. They also love the sour cream we serve as a condiment.

But, um, in recent months, I've been trying to watch what I'm eating a little more closely, and I decided I don't really need to gorge on chips and cheese, delicious though they are. So I've been experimenting with other sides to go with the veggie chili so I don't have to fill up on the chips. I'm trying to treat them as a garnish or whatever, instead of the main dish!

Polenta works well, as do potatoes boiled then combined with sauteed onions and chili powder.

But today I decided to make rice.

I've been relying more and more on cooking my own beans instead of canned, and that results in lovely broth that I often use to make soup (more on black bean soup in another post). But there's a recipe of Deborah Madison's where she uses the black bean broth to cook rice. It's not perhaps the prettiest thing going, but it is tasty.

"Veggie chili"

I usually use black beans, though kidney or pinto beans also work, as does a combination.

1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
2 tsp chili powder
2 tsp cumin
2 tsp coriander
1 tsp oregano
1 cup frozen corn
1/2 to 1 cup diced canned tomatoes, including the liquid (or salsa)
3 cups or so of cooked beans (or canned)
salt to taste

Saute the onion in oil for 10 minutes or so, then add the corn. Let it thaw and even get a little browned. Add the spices and garlic and stir constantly for a minute or two. Add beans and tomatoes, and simmer for as long as you have. I often add some bean broth to make it a little juicier.

Oh, and I used corn from the freezer from the farmer's market last summer! As I said earlier in the week, I've finally been using all the local produce I froze last summer.

The rice is pretty standard: saute a little onion and garlic plus 1/8 tsp anise seeds with a cup and a quarter of rice and 1/2 tsp of salt. Add 2 cups bean broth and bring to a boil; turn down the heat and let it simmer till done.

Leftovers of this veggie chili make a great base for black bean soup. But I'll write about that in another post.

Indian-inspired dinner

Okay, I'll get that top picture out of the way right away. People sometimes ask me how I cook so much with small children in the house. That picture provides one of the answers: those are brown mustard seeds that Anne was playing with while I cooked. You wouldn't believe how long she enjoyed those for . . . or how long it took me to clean up afterward. This was about three weeks ago and I'm still finding them around the kitchen.

The second picture is the sort of standard red-lentil dal that I make -- I used to make it a LOT, but then Arij kind of lost interest in it so I don't make it as often. It's almost not worth posting a recipe for, because you could find it in any number of cookbooks, but what I do is this:

Red lentil dal

1 cup red lentils, sorted and rinsed, then cooked in 2.5 or 3 cups water till soft
1 large onion, chopped
(1 T minced ginger -- I don't always have it on hand, so I don't always include it)
2-3 cloves garlic, minced
1 T Penzeys sweet curry powder
salt to taste

Saute the onions in a couple of tablespoons of oil till nicely soft and browned -- then add garlic and ginger (if using). Stir constantly and keep cooking for another minute or two, then add the curry powder. Turn off heat and stir all this into the cooked lentils.

This time I also added a cube of frozen eggplant from last summer into the simmering dal. It kind of melted in and nearly disappeared, but still provided some depth of flavor.

Potatoes with Indian spices

This time, I sauteed twice as much onion, garlic, ginger and curry powder, and then kept half of it out to combine with the cubed, boiled potatoes.

Green beans

This recipe I adapted from one that Phantom Scribbler gave me. It is seriously yummy.

I made it with Drumlin Farm green beans from the freezer -- they have been delicious!

2 T oil
2 tsp brown mustard seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 lb green beans
1/4 cup water
1 tsp ground coriander
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar

Heat the oil and add mustard seeds and cumin seeds. Have a lid handy, because those mustard seeds pop everywhere! Fry for a couple of minutes; add the beans and stir fry for 2 or 3 minutes. Add water, cover, and cook for 4-5 minutes.

Uncover, raise heat to boil off any remaining water, and add remaining ingredients.

Blueberry pancakes

These are pretty standard pancakes (from an old edition of The Joy of Cooking) that we have used for years, with the addition of BLUEBERRIES FROM THE FREEZER. (That is, from Honey Pot Hill.)

It's funny, it takes me until about March to start realizing that I froze all this wonderful produce for a reason, and I need to use it! Whee! Arij has been requesting these so much that, alas, the blueberries are gone. Next summer, I'm going to freeze more. Well, I will if I can convince Arij to help me pick them ;-)

Beans and rice

Isn't this a beautiful combination of food? I feel I can't post the recipes, because I make them more or less verbatim from Vegetarian Suppers from Deborah Madison's Kitchen, but I had to post the picture, and I'll describe the dish. If you're desperate, email me and I'll send you the recipe, but I feel weird posting HER recipe without permission.

Basically it consists of a "sauce" for the black beans with onion, cilantro and coconut milk, and then you use the other half of the can of coconut milk as part of the rice cooking liquid. I think it's saffron making it yellow, though maybe it's both turmeric and saffron. (It's been awhile since I made this.)

The pickled red onions on top are so delicious and make a nice contrast in flavor and texture.

Elemental bean soup with polenta croutons

This is the soup I made with some of the Baer's "money" beans I cooked the other day. I'd been reading Deborah Madison soup recipes for days, and this is what materialized in the kitchen. It was good enough that I wanted to jot it out.

The beans: I cooked a pound of them with an onion, a garlic clove, two bay leaves and a couple of pinches of asafoetida. Toward the end of cooking, I added a teaspoon or two of salt.

The soup:

1/2 an onion, chopped fine
1 carrot, diced fine
2 garlic cloves, halved and finely sliced
1.5 cups cooked beans PLUS another 1.5 cups pureed till very smooth in the processor
about 3 cups of bean cooking water
a splash of balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper, to taste

Saute onion in olive oil over medium-high heat; add a few pinches of salt. After 5-10 minutes, add carrot and continue to saute for another 5 to 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the garlic and stir constantly for another minute, and then add 2 cups (or so) of bean broth and bring to a boil. Simmer till the carrots are tender. Add the beans and bean puree and enough additional bean cooking liquid to make it soupy.

The polenta:

Earlier in the day, I made a batch of my oven-baked polenta and put it into a loaf pan to cool. About 20 minutes before I served the soup, I made 4 or 5 thick slices of polenta and then cut each slice into cubes (see picture above). I fried it up in an unholy amount of olive oil, turning it after 3 or 4 minutes to be sure at least two sides of each cube got toasty. A spatter guard was essential -- the popping and spitting was really unreal. I wish I could have put in an audio file so you could actually hear the noise it made.

The combination of the creamy soup and the cruncy polenta cubes was really amazing.

Cooking beans, again

If you've read through much of this blog, you know I have a fixation on cooking beans. I do use canned beans, but I prefer cooking them myself. However. Just when I think I've got it all figured out, I'll cook some up that refuse to cooperate.

I bought an 8-lb bag of chickpeas from one of the Indian groceries here in town, and I have had terrible luck with them. They were a lot cheaper than the ones I'd had previously from Whole Foods, but they are taking forever to cook. Like, 3 hours or more. The last batch that I'd bought from Whole Foods cooked like a dream -- after soaking, they took barely an hour. And they tasted wonderful: sweet and rich. The ones I'm using now? They don't even taste that good, and the texture is weird. It's really aggravating.

I've had similar things happen with kidney beans -- the Baer's Best ones (a Massachusetts grower) cook up beautifully, by and large, but a large bag of kidney beans I bought just won't soften properly without that salt-water soak thing.

What's the lesson here? I'm guessing that it's an age issue. The ones I've had better luck with are fresher? But how do you always know? I have been toying with the idea of trying to find a buyer's club/co-op thing to buy bulk foods, but what if I buy, say, 20 lbs of chickpeas and find that they're not good ones? But what I'm doing now doesn't seem surefire, either, by any means.

All that said, an old friend from college who found me on Facebook suggested that I try using whey in the soaking water, a la Sally Fallon's book Nourishing Traditions. I tried that last night and I'll see how it goes. But I used it on a 1-lb. package of Baer's "money" beans, so I'm guessing that they'd have cooked up pretty well regardless of what I did.