I'm going to a potluck dinner tonight and was asked to bring "protein," so I invented the following salad. I'm calling it Greek because I'm using Greek dressing, and because of the kalamata olives.
Greek Bean Salad
Salad:
1 cup dry black beans
1 cup dry chick peas
1 cup dry red kidney beans
1 small red onion, finely diced
2 green bell peppers, finely diced
About 4 oz pitted kalamata olives, sliced in rings
Dressing (very slightly adapted from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook):
1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1 tsp dried oregano
Salt
Pepper
Soak the beans overnight, then drain, add fresh water to cover, and simmer until cooked to your liking. For best results, cook each type of bean in a separate pot. Or you can do what I did, and cook the kidney beans and chick peas in one pot, and the black beans in a second pot. Your chick peas will turn pink, but at least everything won't be stained purple from the black beans. Drain the cooked beans, rinse them in cold water, and combine in a big bowl in the refrigerator to cool off. If you don't want to cook your own beans, you could substitute two 15-ounce cans of each type of bean, drained and rinsed.
Once the beans have cooled off, add the other salad ingredients to the bowl and stir. Combine the dressing ingredients in a jar, shake it up, pour it over the salad, and stir until salad is evenly coated with dressing. Keep this at room temperature until ready to serve, so the olive oil doesn't solidify and get yucky. Om nom nom.
Posole (or if you prefer, pozole) is one of the foods I discovered when we visited the Southwest last fall. It's a soup made with chile, hominy, and, traditionally, something dead. According to Wikipedia, the original posole was made by the Aztecs and included meat from human sacrifices. Ew. After the Conquistadors arrived there were no more human sacrifices, so people used pork, the other white meat. Still ew. I make mine with beans -- in this most recent instance, cute little Sangre de Toro beans.
The hardest thing about making posole on the east coast is finding dried hominy. Canned hominy is easy to find, but canned hominy is gross. The first posole I made was with blue corn hominy I found at Whole Foods in Santa Fe. I haven't been able to find that here. The closest I've come is at our local mercado latino, where I found Goya brand white and golden hominy, which according to the people at Wegman's (where I searched in vain) is positively loaded with iron. Who knew? Goya hominy is not whole kernels, it's cracked, so it's not nearly as dramatic looking, but unless I'm going to nixtamalize my own corn it appears to be the best I can do.
One thing about making posole -- even after you soak it overnight, the hominy takes forever to cook. Hours. Longer than beans. So this time, I decided to try making it in the slow cooker. I soaked a pound of hominy and a pound of beans overnight, then the next morning I put them in my biggest slow cooker crock with an onion, a bunch of ancho chile powder, some Mexican oregano, a little cumin, and water to fill the crock. Lots of water. Plenty of water. Or so I thought.
When I got home from work, the corn and beans had slurped up all the water. Instead of soup, I had a big pot of stew thick enough to stand a spoon up in. Fortunately, it didn't stick to the crock.
I suppose I could have added some broth and tried to soupify it, but I decided just to eat it as is:
That's garnished with raw cabbage, a raw bell pepper, guacamole, and a lime wedge. It was kind of bland the first day, so I added some of my new favorite commercial spice blend, Trader Joe's South African Smoke. Over the next day or two, the flavors developed, and it was perfect as is.
My girlfriend doesn't like posole -- I think she had a bad experience with canned hominy as a child -- so I ended up eating the whole pot myself, mostly for breakfast. I didn't intend to make a stew rather than a soup, but I might actually prefer it this way.
I went to my neighborhood mercado latino on Saturday in search of cranberry beans. I didn't find cranberry beans, but I did buy a big bag of Roman beans, because I love them and they were the best price I've ever seen. Now Wikipedia is telling me that Roman beans are a variety of cranberry beans. But in Viva Vegan, Terry Hope Romero talks as if they are completely different. I don't know who to believe!
This morning I am eating some posole I made with Sangre de Toro beans. Gross name ("bull's blood"), but the beans are cute, very small and dark, glossy red.
I really like exploring different kinds of beans. I've been into Indian dals for a long time, and now I am getting more into the Latin American beans. In addition to Roman beans, on Saturday I bought Dominican reds (dark red with lighter spots, like pinto beans in reverse), and pigeon peas. Pigeon peas have been hard to find -- I think maybe we have a dearth of Puerto Ricans here in Baltimore. We've apparently got a critical mass of Peruvians, though -- the mercado has tons of Peruvian products, many of which I have no idea how to use (giant kernels of blue corn still on the cob, anyone?)
I've been making recipes from Viva Vegan and Vegan Eats World over the past couple weeks. Pictures and recipe reviews to follow.
After last week's broth debacle, I was still determined to cook a bean and barley soup. "Bean and Barley Chowder" was last week's "recipe of the week" over at the Physician's Committee for Responsible Medicine, and it sounded good to me, but maybe a little boring, especially once I knew homemade vegetable broth was not going to be part of the formula. Then I got an email from America's Test Kitchen about a vegetable barley soup that had deep flavors without homemade broth (warning: non-vegan site), and the way ahead was clear.
I combined elements of both recipes, and as always this dish was also influenced by what I had in the pantry. Lima beans and barley sounded good, but I didn't have either. I found barley at my local health food store, but no lima beans, so I went with the cannelini beans I already had in the house. I liked the idea of using ground dried mushrooms to add flavor to the broth, but didn't see any reason to stick to the stingy amount in the America's Test Kitchen recipe. I ended up grinding an entire package of mixed dried mushrooms (about 0.8 oz), and putting that in.
Two leeks, white and light green part only, halved lengthwise and then sliced crosswise
Six ounces portobello mushrooms (two big mushroom caps), diced
0.8 oz package mixed dried mushrooms, ground to a powder in an electric grinder (What? You don't have a coffee grinder you reserve for grinding spices? Why not?)
One pound cannelini beans, soaked overnight and then drained
In a large soup pot (6-8 quarts), saute onion, celery, and leeks in olive oil until onion is translucent. Add portobello mushrooms and continue cooking until mushrooms release their liquid. Sprinkle in poultry seasoning and powdered mushrooms and stir so they coat everything. Add all other ingredients (I would start with two quarts of water and see how you feel), stir, bring to a boil, then simmer, stirring occasionally, until the beans and barley are fully cooked.
A few notes on ingredients:
There's no poultry in poultry seasoning. It's a mixture of thyme, sage, marjoram, rosemary, black pepper, and nutmeg that makes things taste like Thanksgiving. If you don't have it, but have all those other herbs and spices, you can make your own.
Those ground mushrooms really added body and flavor to the broth. Highly recommended. I used a mix of mushrooms that I happened to have in the pantry. I think either porcini or shiitake would work fine.
If you don't have cannelini beans, any kind of white beans would work. I would advise against using canned beans, because the cooking beans add body to the broth.
I threw in some chick'n seasoning because I happened to have it made up, and poultry seasoning made me think of it. You could also use a couple tablespoons of plain nutritional yeast, or leave it out.
Can I just give a shout-out to Trader Joe's Organic Extra Virgin Olive Oil right here? That stuff is a revelation. It tastes like olives. It's probably really wasted on this recipe. If I were really feeling decadent, I would drizzle a little on top of my bowl of soup, right before I ate it. If you are the kind of person who likes to dunk bread in olive oil, this is the olive oil to use.
This soup was really yummy and reheated well. I ate it for breakfast for most of the week (the photo above was taken on my desk). My girlfriend pronounced it a keeper. And as a bonus, I got a good start on my next broth bag:
Onion, celery, leeks, mushrooms, carrots. No mystery ingredients this time.
I came across this recipe by Mark Bittman the other day and was intrigued. I love olives, capers, garlic, tomatoes, and thyme, separately or in combination, so it sounded like something I should try (and it was a good excuse to visit the olive bar at Wegman's). I was also curious about roasting the canned tomatoes, which I had never heard of doing before, although I have used the Muir Glen fire-roasted canned tomatoes in the past and was not particularly impressed.
The recipe suggests serving this with fish, but of course that wasn't going to happen. I pondered my protein options for a while and settled on giant lima beans, or butter beans if you prefer. I cooked them separately the night before.
I don't think I'd ever cooked fennel before. I wasn't even sure which parts we were supposed to eat, so I started off with this video:
I did put the stalks and fronds in a ziploc bag and stash them in the freezer for stock, as suggested. I diced the trimmed fennel bulbs in small pieces, like onions.
I decided to try roasting the tomatoes. I drained two 14 ounce cans of diced tomatoes (I needed about one tomato's worth for a different recipe, so I didn't end up using 2 full cans, but this is a pretty forgiving recipe and I think it would have been fine with a little more or a little less). I lined a cookie sheet with foil and sprayed it with cooking spray, then spread the tomatoes across it in a single layer with my hands:
After about 20 minutes in the oven, I had this:
OK, maybe that isn't as dramatic as I'd hoped. You can see a little caramelization on there, though, and I really do think roasting them concentrated the flavor.
While the tomatoes were roasting, I worked on sauteeing the fennel. The recipe says not to let it brown at all, but I found that impossible. Here's what the dish looked like when I got all the ingredients in the pan:
That's fennel, tomatoes, olives, capers, garlic, and thyme. I used big olives, with pits, and put them in whole as instructed. I can't tell you what kind they are -- I just picked what looked good at the olive bar.
To serve this, I heated up the butter beans I'd cooked the day before. I was worried about them drying out in the microwave, so I cooked them in the leftover juice from the canned tomatoes. Then I drained them and mixed them with the compote.
That's my Sunday lunch. We served the beans with baked potatoes and a second rendition of the massaged kale salad.
Verdict: delicious. I was afraid the fennel flavor would be really strong and overpower everything else, but it was subtle. I'm not sure how I feel about the few big olives. Next time I might use Nicoise olives, or cut the olives up. The leftovers tasted even better the next day, with a baked potato and some steamed green beans.
I would definitely make this again. If I couldn't find fennel, I think it would work with onions, too. In fact, that sounds great.
Tara Parker-Pope of the New York Times's "Well" blog has put up a nice post titled "How to Go Vegan." She interviewed my favorite vegan blogger, Susan Voisin, and the post has generated a lot of great comments. In fact, some of the comments are better than the original post. It's worth a read, and it inspired me to come up with my own list of "how to go vegan" tips.
Do it for the animals. Lately it seems like a lot of people are adopting vegan diets, or veganish ones, for their health. A vegan diet can certainly make you healthier -- it's done that for me -- but from my perspective, that's more of a side effect than the main goal. My personal experience is that if I'm trying to make a dietary change for my own health, I'm much less likely to stick with it than I am if I'm doing it for ethical reasons. Read about factory farming. Check out the pictures and videos Compassion Over Killing has taken at farms and slaughterhouses. Watch "Meet Your Meat." I know, I know, PeTA, but they really have done some good work here. Visit a farmed animal sanctuary, get to know the animals, and hear their stories. Your mileage may vary, but my own experience has been that even after a significant health scare (or series of scares), compassion for other creatures is a much stronger motivator than fear for my own well-being.
Don't neglect umami.Umami, the "savory" taste, is one of the things people miss most about meat and cheese. Seeking out vegan sources of umami -- miso, tomatoes, nutritional yeast, mushrooms -- will help make your meals yummy and satisfying without animal products.
Skip the substitutes, at least in the beginning. Commercially available vegan substitutes for meat and dairy tend to be highly processed, full of salt and fat, expensive, and not very satisfying. Especially in the beginning, they will seem like very feeble substitutes for the real thing. Daiya cheese, probably the best vegan cheese widely available in the U.S., may satisfy your Velveeta jones, but it won't take the place of a good aged cheese, and if you expect it to you will just be disappointed. On the other hand, six months after you last tasted "real" ice cream, a bowl of So Delicious coconut milk ice cream -- especially the Turtle Tracks flavor, OMG -- will really hit the spot (so much so, that I can't eat it any more).
Expand your culinary horizons. Take this opportunity to learn new ways to plan a meal, and explore new tastes. If you don't cook now, learn (or you can be one of the laziest vegans in the world, but I don't recommend this). There are a zillion vegan recipe sites on the Web -- Fat Free Vegan and the Post Punk Kitchen are two of my favorites -- and many of the recipes are quick and easy. Explore cuisines that have a strong tradition of meat-free cooking. Asia is now your favorite continent.
Learn to love beans. Cheap, high in protein, high in fiber, low in fat, and very satisfying -- beans are the word. Beans are how you get protein-rich satisfaction without relying too heavily on soy products and fake stuff. There are so many varieties, you could eat a different bean every day for weeks. Dry beans are cheaper than canned and, in my opinion, healthier and tastier (and there's a much greater variety available), but canned beans are also very good and with canned beans, you don't have to plan ahead to have a great meal ready when you want it. I eat beans at pretty much every meal. Yes, including breakfast. Baked beans on toast are a traditional part of an English breakfast, but it's also worthwhile to expand your concept of what constitutes appropriate breakfast food. There's no law that says you can't eat the same things for breakfast you eat for lunch and dinner, and in my opinion "lunch and dinner" foods can be a much more appropriate way to start the day than the sugary crap so many people eat for breakfast.
Abstinence is easier than moderation. Again, your mileage may vary, but this is my experience. If you keep eating animal products "once in a while," you won't lose your taste for them, nor will you really learn how to thrive without them. Just quit. When it gets hard, watch Earthlings.
I do have a criticism of the Times post. It focuses completely on food, and there's a lot more to being vegan than that. Finding nice winter clothes and shoes that don't contain animal products can be a challenge, and you may need to start shopping for cleaning products and personal care stuff at the health food store to find things that aren't tested on animals (or made by a parent company that tests on animals). Shoes, sweaters, and lip balm have been the toughest ones for me, but it's all doable, and there are a lot more choices now than there were even a few years ago. It's not that hard. And it's worth it.
What are your best tips for new and aspiring vegans?
In honor of the new year, I quickly whipped up some Hoppin' John, Maryland-style. I threw a bag of frozen black-eyed peas in a pot with a chopped onion, green pepper, 2 stalks of celery, a can of diced tomatoes, smoked paprika, Old Bay (the Maryland element), and water. Cooked it uncovered until the veggies were done and the water was almost gone. Here it is served with a baked potato and some plain kale. It seemed kind of bland to me, so I sprinkled more Old Bay on everything. Om nom nom.
I think next year I'll take more time with it and start with dried black-eyed peas. Or I may do something non-traditional, like Goan black-eyed peas with coconut milk. Actually, I don't think I'll wait until next year to make that one.
The first thing I actually made with the roasted poblanos was refried beans, but the first thing I thought of making was chili. After some googling, I settled on a recipe from the Irreverent Vegan as a starting point, and followed Mark's instructions for roasting the poblanos, as well.
I said starting point, right? I referred to Mark's recipe a few times, but basically did my own thing. I post the result here not because it was so amazing (it's perfectly fine chili, but not necessarily something I would make again), but to show how my twisted thought processes work when I'm playing with a recipe.
I love refried beans. Canned or from scratch, at home or in a restaurant, to me they are the ultimate comfort food. Traditionally, refried beans are cooked pinto beans that are fried in lard and mashed ("refrito" actually means "well-fried," not "re-fried"). Of course I don't cook with lard. Ew. I actually haven't seen any canned refried beans made with lard, either. They're either made with vegetable oil, or they're fat free, which would mean they aren't fried at all. But they still taste great.
I usually avoid cooking with oil, unless I am really convinced the recipe will suffer without it. Since I like the fat free canned refried beans just fine, I don't use oil when I make refried beans from scratch. I use my own recipe, which I adapted from the one here. And this week, I've been making an exciting variation with roasted poblano peppers.
Basic Slow Cooker "Refried" Beans
Pinto beans, as many as you want to cook (I love refried beans, so I cook anywhere from 2 to 4 cups of dry beans at a time). No need to presoak.
Yellow onion, chopped
Whole garlic cloves, peeled and trimmed
Salt
Exact amounts are not critical here. For this batch, I used 2 cups of dry beans, one big yellow onion, and five or six cloves of garlic.
I have a cooker with 3 different sized crocks. Fun!
Put the beans, onions, and garlic in your slow cooker crock. Add water to cover by at least two inches. Cook on High until they are really soft. Anywhere from 8 to 12 hours should be fine. I like to set up the slow cooker after dinner, and then let the beany, oniony, garlicky aroma wake me up the next morning.
The next day, turn off the cooker and drain the beans, reserving the thick, rich liquid. Now it's time to mash the beans. I use my immersion blender for this, but you could just use a potato masher. After all that slow cooking, the beans will be very soft.
Now season to your liking. I thought a tablespoon of salt would be about right, but it turned out to be too much. Desperate to salvage all those over-salted beans, I threw in some black beans I had in the refrigerator, and mashed them up. Turns out I really like that combination, and will probably be using it from now on. The black beans are less mushy than the pintos, and stay more intact for a nice color and texture contrast.
You could stop right there and have perfectly good beans. But I took it a step further, and mixed in a couple tablespoons of chopped poblano peppers.
Here's a closeup of some beany goodness. You can see the little flecks of black beans and poblanos. Now it's time to serve the beans. You could do all sorts of yummy things at this point -- make tacos, tostadas, Mexican lasagna . . . . but lately I've just been eating them plain, with some kale and corn. I really like the contrast of textures and the bitter, sweet, creamy party in my mouth.
Greek Bean Salad
