Homework

Once you’ve got your supply of shelled, washed, cooked beans, what next?

There are so many options it’s honestly hard to know where to begin, but here are two of my favorites.

For beans that will lend themselves readily to Tex-Mex, Cajun, and many Southeastern US style meals, stew your cooked beans with a large quantity of minced onion, sauteed in some plain oil (peanut or canola or whatever) with a somewhat smaller quantity of bell pepper and a similar quantity of celery, a few crushed cloves of garlic, and a little cayenne or other spicy pepper.  Sautee all the veggies first until the onions are transparent and soft, then add the beans and enough water or broth to just barely cover the beans.  Simmer until about half of the water has cooked off.  This will give the flavorings time to penetrate the beans, and vice versa.  Salt, stir, then wait 10 minutes, and taste and add more salt if it needs it. To further Tex-Mexicanize this method, add ground cumin.

My favorite way to eat beans as cooked above is in a bowl, topped with an approximately equal volume of fresh homemade pico de gallo or salsa of whatever kind I happen to have made lately.  Today’s salsa is diced Tula Black and Pink  Brandywine tomatoes from the garden, lots of onion and garlic, two huge bunches of cilantro diced fine, salt, lemon juice, and three fresh ripe guajillo chiles and one fresh ripe tientsin chili from my garden.  It’s awful tasty.   My second favorite way to eat beans cooked like this is with hot cornbread.

For beans that will make your imaginary Italian granddad smile, stew the beans with a moderate quantity of minced onion sauteed until just turning brown in a generous sufficiency of good olive oil, then add a couple of cloves of sliced garlic and several large fresh sage leaves cut into a chiffonade (roll the leaves up like a cigar, then slice across into thin threads).  Or use a slightly smaller amount of dried sage.  Sautee the onion, garlic, and sage until they smell awesome, then add the beans, and again, just enough water/broth to bring the water level up to the top of the beans.  Add a little salt and a little black pepper and simmer it down until the water is halfway gone.  Taste, correct the salt if need be.

If you like, you can toss beans prepared this way with a small shape pasta like farfalle or rotini.  Gild the lily with a little slosh more olive oil, and some chopped parsley, which are also nice even if you don’t have the pasta with it.  I also like sometimes to dribble a tiny bit of good balsamic vinegar (not the $2.99 crap) over the top of the beans.

Do you recognize the objects in this picture?  They look a little like bean pods, don’t they?  Not the nicest bean pods, perhaps.  A little dried-out looking, a little brown and spotty. Probably not good to eat. Or are they?

The little hints of red you can see in there might be a clue as to what’s really going on here.  These aren’t way over-the-hill green beans, as it happens.  They’re kidney beans.  If you have never encountered shelling beans still in their pods, it can be a little startling to realize that they start their lives looking quite different to what we think of when we think about kidney beans, or black beans or flageolets, or any other kind of shelling bean.

They look so different, in their raw and completely unprocessed state, in fact, that many people won’t buy them, afraid that they won’t know what to do with them.  That’s more or less why I ended up with these: a greengrocer friend gave me heaps of them earlier today because they’d been sitting unloved in her coolers for several weeks.  Ironically, the very customers who had told my greengrocer friend how much they loved beans and how they wished they could buy fresh local beans from her had simply not bought them.

When my friend told me a week or so ago that the beans weren’t getting purchased, I said “I bet customers are freaked out by the way they look.  I bet they don’t know what to do with beans that have to be shelled.”  Seems that I was right.  Which is her loss, but my gain, and as a thank-you, I’m  writing this little shelling bean tutorial, so that next time she sells shelling beans, she can point people to a blog post that explains what to do with these unpromising little podlets.

What you do is quite simple.  You sit down with a bowl, and a bowl or bag to toss the empty shells in, and you pull apart the pods with your fingers.

The pods are pretty sturdy.  If they are on the dry side, they will be leathery or cardboardy in texture.  If they are just off the vines, they will be woody but flexible.  Usually all you have to do is pinch the bean to open the seams up, then split down one seam or the other (or both!) with your finger, taking the beans with you.

Discard any beans that are discolored, moldy, extremely shriveled, or extremely tiny.  Throw the shells into the trash or onto your compost pile.

When you’ve shelled them all, give them a good wash in a colander and let them drain for ten or fifteen minutes.

Shelling beans is a fairly quick process.  I know it sounds tedious, but really it doesn’t take long at all.  I shelled almost five quarts of beans in about 40 minutes today, while hanging out in the kitchen with my Belovedary.  That is a lot of beans.  But still not a lot of work.

It’s worth doing large batches of bean-shelling and bean-cooking when you have the time, so that then you will have the beans available when you want them.  Beans can be frozen directly after shelling and washing, or you can freeze them after you cook them.

To cook fresh beans, put them into a large heavy pot or a slow-cooker on the high setting with an equal volume of cold water.  Boil until they are nice and soft all the way through, but not mushy.

You can eat them as-is once they are thoroughly cooked, or use them in recipes, just as you would use canned cooked beans.

A note about kidney beans/red beans:  Red and white kidney beans are high in haemagglutins, a class of chemicals that can cause a form of usually nonfatal but highly unpleasant poisoning whose symptoms include vomiting and diarrhea.  The way to avoid it is thorough cooking of the beans.  A minimum of ten minutes in which the entire pot of beans is at or above the boiling point of water — 212F, or 100C — takes care of it.  This is why if you cook them in a slow-cooker, you should cook them on the higher heat setting, not the lower, and ensure that things do boil properly.

Some of this weekend’s greens haul, a nice smallish head of napa cabbage, was cut into ribbons, sauteed with onions and garlic, and used as a base for a fava bean and ham hock broth.   Some of the scraps of ham perch on top, for extra juju. Especially with a starchy broth like a bean broth, using greens as a base is an excellent idea, and balances the textures well, whereas using a starch like noodles or rice would just get stodgy.

And speaking of ham hock… Miriam asked, in a comment on the previous post, where to look for local, sustainably-farmed meat and poultry.  This will be a Baltimore-centric answer, so I hope that’s what you were looking for, Miriam.

For convenience, you can go to Mill Valley General Store, at 28th and Sisson (2800 Sisson St. is the actual address).  They’re open Thurs-Sun and they carry meats from Gunpowder Bison, Wagner’s, Five Cow Farm, and I think perhaps others.  I know they’re working on bringing in chickens also. Mill Valley also carries a fine, well-chosen selection of local dairy, eggs, and produce and the freshness is impeccable.  I am particularly fond of the Five Cow Farm beef, which is always salutary.

At the Waverly farmer’s market on Saturday mornings,  you’ll find Broom’s Bloom’s stall.  They sell chicken, pork, and lamb, as well as eggs, all raised north of town.  Gunpowder Bison also has a stall at Waverly.  I’m not sure if Truck Patch Farm is selling at Waverly or only at the downtown (Sunday) market this year, but if you like pork, Truck Patch is  my favorite and I recommend them highly. (Truck Patch is also bringing in beef, I seem to recall, starting nowish… haven’t tried it yet but I expect it’ll be good.)

There are a couple of other meat vendors at the Sunday market under the JFX, but I haven’t actually shopped around too much as I so often get my meat at the Saturday market or at Mill Valley.  One whose meat I can vouch for, though, is the goat from Jeanne Dietz-Band at Many Rocks Farm.  It’s very well reared, well cut, and of high quality.

My standbys are Truck Patch for pork, Many Rocks for goat, Broom’s Bloom for lamb, Gunpowder for bison, and Broom’s Bloom again for chicken.    That said, I keep an eye out for specials and unusual items as they show up.  I recently had a lovely beef heart from Broom’s, and this ham hock was from them as well.

Goodness, Wednesday dinnertime already?  That was how I felt when I walked into the kitchen tonight, with honestly no idea what to cook.  But I had boiled a batch of chickpeas yesterday, and we had a pound of kale in the fridge.  Beans love greens and greens love beans, but how to make it interesting?

The answer I came up with was to roast the chickpeas in a very hot oven, with lightly smashed whole garlic cloves, olive oil, and some crushed dried Aleppo pepper… and to braise the kale in a bit of water until it was tender… and to make a bit of a ragout that would bridge the two.  The ragout was a quick and dirty one, several onions caramelized with oil, with a handful of oil-packed anchovies, then the leftover half a can of diced tomatoes left over from Monday’s dinner.  Simmered for a while, they made a lovely chunky sauce that went well with both the kale and the chickpeas.

I think I may make it again.  On purpose, next time.

Since what I’m eating for dinner tonight is exactly the same as what I ate for lunch, I figured I’d take y’all on a little tour of the garden instead of subjecting you to yet another photo of my food.

This rose is “Mermaid,” an old, simple rose with a vigorous and sprawling habit, a territorial nature, and exceptionally vicious and numerous thorns.  It blooms prolifically and grows at a gallop… I planted this rose at the back fence just a little over a year ago.  It’s been duking it out with the ornamental grasses I inherited from the previous owners of the house ever since.

Just inside the back gate you can see my Rouge Vif d’Etampes pumpkin vine, beginning to grow, as scheduled, through the bottom of a little tripod built of branches.  Growing up the tripod itself is autumn clematis, a volunteer that appeared when we chopped down some old diseased thujas that were slowly dying on the spot when we bought the house.  The pot holds my “Penelope” rose, past her first bloom already.  She’ll have another in the early fall, though, don’t worry.

In the Forest of Volunteer Herbs, at the corner of the back porch, we have oregano and dill, thyme and lovage and Bavarian sage, purslane, some baby basil that I bunged in down front recently, and a few garlic chives.  I note that this is what happens when you aren’t careful about pinching off the blooms when your herbs start to bolt: the following year you get surprises.  I’m just amazed there isn’t any cilantro.  By rights I should be up to my elbows in it.  Off to the right is some Kentucky Colonel dill I rooted from a bunch some friends gave me, which seems to be doing all right and will doubtless be having turf wars with the sage before summer’s out.

Looking down the side yard, where the raised bed lives.  Most of the day it gets full sun, only after about 5 pm does the back half get shaded.  Down front there are tomatoes — Tula Black, Brandywine, and Green Zebra — and peppers of the “Biscayne,” “Lipstick,” “Chi Chien,” and guajillo varieties.  Further back a bit, Good Mother Stallard beans, Flor di Castilla beans, both of which are shelling varieties, and a couple hills of “Eden” pole beans, a string bean.  Beyond that, there is chard aplenty, a couple varieties of gai lan, some bok choy, broccoli “Belstar,” and Brussels sprouts, along with a few starts of Roma tomatoes tucked into odd corners.  To the right, with the white flower heads, is one of the elderberry bushes.  To the left you can see the rainbarrels.  Yeah, actual barrels.  Actual whiskey barrels, actually.  They still smell of it some.

The baby blueberries are still working on it.  I planted these berries just this year, so any fruit at all is a nice surprise.

Over the fence is my neighbor’s yard.  He likes roses, can you tell?  It’s nice to be able to enjoy all these roses and still have lots of space to concentrate on growing good things to eat.  Speaking of which, do you see my tiger lilies there in the lower right?  Lily buds are good eating… when I can bear to pick them.  I do so love watching them open.

Another view of the raised beds, with chard and broccoli in the foreground, beans and elderberry bushes in the back.

Up front in the mostly-unkempt, once-and-future shade garden, to which I haven’t yet done much, my astilbes are beginning to bloom.  There’s a volunteer black-eyed susan just to the left, too, that I’ve decided to let run riot if it will.

This is a Sea Holly (Eryngium “Blaukappe”) surprise.  I’d started some of these from seed last year, and felt all studly when I planted them out, whereupon they promptly died.  Or seemed to, at least, until a few weeks ago when they reappeared as if nothing had ever happened.  In the background, Echinacea purpura, and more tiger lilies.

Last but not least, here on the front porch, my $2 begonias.  They started out, a month or so ago, as dinky little three-inch pots of completely rootbound begonia for sale cheap at Trader Joe’s.  I purchased their freedom and brought them home and installed them somewhere with a little breathing room, namely a porch planter, and promptly enrolled them in the patented regime of benign neglect to which I treat all my plants.

They seem to like it fine.

Oh, look, she’s eating something that’s not a salad.  In addition to the thing that is a salad, anyway.

The unlovely lumpen mass in the bowl on the left is what we around my house call a mess of beans.  It is, you will doubtless concur, aptly named.

A mess of beans can be cooked in any number of ways.  The only constant is beans, and, especially by the time you’re getting toward the end of the batch, a certain messiness.  This particular mess of beans is canary beans with lots of diced canned tomato, sauteed onion and garlic, and a nontrivial quantity of ground cumin and crushed dried piri-piri peppers.  It’s very tasty.  Messes of beans typically are.  But it is ugly.  Messes of beans typically are.

It’s a bit of a challenge, as a food blogger type, to figure out what to do about ugly food.  I could dispense with the photos, but people like the photos and furthermore, the whole point of doing these thrice-weekly rundowns of my dinner is to show off a bit of one person’s culinary life in medias res.  Not primped and fluffed and posed, not with menus carefully chosen for their diversity or luxury or skill of preparation.  This is what I really eat.  And like you, sometimes I eat food that is just plain ugly.

But here’s the thing about ugly food: it can taste fantastic.  Your average lasagna may look lovely on the top, all crusty and bubbly and golden with cheese, but once it’s been cut into, it is not exactly the tower of prettily distinct layers that you see in the food magazines, is it?  Oatmeal, which is hands down my favorite porridge and one of my two or three favorite grains, is gloppy and beige.  Without even getting into the visual horror of many prepackaged foods — we’d be here all night — there are just a lot of foods we eat that aren’t so pretty to look at.  Most stews aren’t so attractive.  Coq au vin, pot roast, any braise is likely to smell fantastic and look…. well, like something that has been cooked with liquid for a long, long time.  Tuna noodle hotdish is one of my beloved comfort foods (Midwesterners represent!) but sexy on the plate it is not.  Not even if you put a pretty garnish on it.  And heaven knows there are few things we commonly eat that look more like a bad sneeze than a raw oyster.

This is, of course, why the food stylists of the world make the big bucks: they know all the tricks to make food, much of which is not actually related to the food it is portraying in the photo shoot (mashed potatoes impersonating ice cream, etc.) look beautiful on the page or on the screen.  I imagine that given sufficient time and no need whatsoever to make the food that was being photographed actually edible, a food stylist could even make a mess of beans look pretty.

But I am no food stylist, and these photos are of real food that I actually eat at my very own kitchen table.  Some of it is not beautiful to look at.  But I guarantee you it all tastes pretty damn fine.  And as my mother used to say to us whenever we would complain about how something we’d been served “didn’t look good” (and you must imagine a curt Ohioan schoolteacher’s voice here): “That’s all right, your tongue hasn’t got eyes.”

Good enough for me.