honing in on the bean

Eating a low carb diet can be heart-breaking when you have a yen for beans, because beans, though excellent food, are not low-carb by any stretch of the imagination. But virtuous? Oh Man, are they virtuous! Full of vitamins and proteins and all kinds of good things. They even nourish the soil they grow in, setting nitrogen, if you remember. And they can be eaten sprouted or fermented, fresh and green or dried; of some you can even eat the leaves – think peas, which are beans, or legumes. Peanuts are, too.

So it was that I was fascinated when I stopped by Ryan Yoder’s stand last week at the Rutland Winter Farmers’ Market where another customer told me that his wife was on a so-called Slow-Carb Diet that included lots of beans as well as (grass-fed or pastured) beef and even pork, and chicken, and cruciferous vegetables, but not many greens,  because apparently olden people did not, really, eat many greens. And olden people were not fat, either, nor did they have cavities or tumors or fibrillations of their hearts or needy kidneys. “It’s a bit of the paleo diet,” he told me, and as well he said said wife had apparently lost sixty or so pounds in a matter of weeks, or at least months, by eating lots of beans and beef, as many as she wanted to, as a matter of fact.

When I googled this so-called “Slow-Carb” diet it seems to be based upon a book called The 4-Hour Body, by Timothy Ferriss and it makes remarkable claims, none of which I quite believe. One of the tenets of it is that you can have one day a week to eat all the white things and sugar that you want to, so many, in fact, that you would not want to look a white thing in the face for the next six days, at which time you were not only free, but encouraged, to eat them all over again. Think Mashed potatoes and Cherry Garcia Ice Cream.

I ran across this memorable quote from one of its fans:  “Just for fun, another reason to avoid the whities: chlorine dioxide, one of the chemicals used to bleach flour (even if later made brown again, a common trick), combines with residual protein in most of these foods to form alloxan. Researchers use alloxan in lab rats to induce diabetes. That's right-it's used to produce diabetes. This is bad news if you eat anything white or "enriched."

Well, be that as it may...

The reason I was stopping by Yoder’s booth is that they – Ryan and Rachel – grow a lovely variety of beans, all of which are freshly grown and dried this year, and they also grow two delicious and effective varieties of popcorn, with which I keep myself supplied all year. Too, I wanted to stock up on his little round black Coco beans, first because they are really good and second because Ryan doesn’t think they’ll grow them again because they are so difficult to shuck, to thresh, to pick over, and all that must be done to get them to your kitchen. I also wanted to pick up a supply of  his King of the Norths for their very nice beany taste. Yum.

The fact that Yoder’s beans are fresh this year means that they will cook up to a nice texture, their taste is much better than old beans, and they have fewer of the fartiness chemicals that are sometimes associated with beans. So there.  (For more in-depth explanations of beans, their history, their various uses, etcetera, etcetera, pick up Crescent Dragonwagon’s new book, Bean by Bean. It is fabulous!) Look for her mole (MO-lay) recipe at the end of this post. Or maybe I'll make it a separate post.

One of the nicest things about beans is how easy they are to prepare. Simply pick them over in the evening, cover them with water and soak them overnight and until you want to cook them. At which point, drain them, put them in a pan with some water (2 cups of beans equals about a pound and require about 6 cups of water). Add a bay leaf. Bring them to a boil, turn the heat down to medium low and let them simmer. Fresh dried beans will probably take about 45 minutes to an hour to cook. I salt them when they are almost done cooking.

Often I cook them with a beef shank, which is just a section of beef leg about 1 ½ inches thick, a bone with some meat on it. I put that into a pan and cover it with 7 cups of water, bring it to a boil, turn the heat down and simmer it for an hour before I add the beans. Cook the beans the way I told you above. And then there is:

Ruth Reichl's WONDERFUL BLACK BEANS

Pick through 2 cups of black beans and remove any stones or ugly beans.  Soak them overnight. Drain them in the morning, add 6 cups of water, one chopped onion, a sprig of epazote and a few tablespoons of lard (Mangalitza if you can get it) or bacon drippings. Bring to a boil, cover, turn the heat down and simmer for a couple of hours until the beans are tender.  Remove the epazote, stir in a teaspoon of salt, a very healthy glug of cream sherry, a few splashes of soy sauce and another splash of balsamic vinegar.  Taste for seasoning.  These will keep in the refrigerator for a week - but mine never last that long.

Note: Epazote is a Mexican herb that we can grow right here in our gardens. I do. It looks a lot like ragweed and it tastes bitter but imparts a recognizable Mexican taste that some of us long for.

Now, some of you might be wondering if I’m going to give you a recipe for sweet baked beans. Not really!
Sweet baked beans seems kind of perverse now. I do have a recipe that is most like the baked beans I grew up on, which involves a great deal of granulated sugar. I made them last summer and they made my teeth itch with their sweetness.

Because, to my present taste, sweet, smoky, hot and sour is a nicer way of putting it, where a bit of maple syrup nudges beans toward the sublime, coupling sexily with bacon smoke and unctuous fat, with a nice smoked jalapeno (chipotle), and a bitsy sprinkle of  pungent cider vinegar showered over it at the end to tame the various unions from fierce to fancy. Yes, that’s where I’d go if I were, like a bird-dog, honing in on the real sense of beans.


About that word “hone”, before some of you get to the chase, claiming that it should be “home in” of all ridiculous things, let me just say that I am older than most of you and from the time I was a tiny child I have been hearing and even saying the phrase, “Honing in on...” some kind of prey. That’s because to find something difficult you must hone, or sharpen, your senses to the object of your quest. Your gaze starts wide and discards non-essentials as it narrows, and sharpens (you hone a knife), and then finally hones in on that cowering little rabbit. Or whatever. Our original ‘hone’ had nothing to do with ‘home’. It was wild and of the country, of darkness all around and skies full of immense mystery. It was not suburban. It was not village nor town nor city.

But perhaps you are unaware of this controversy in a bean pot? I asked Leo about it and he’d never heard of “homing in”. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, “Of course it’s ‘hone in’!”

So just eat your beans, and never mind!

of birds, bees, & breakfast

Red Bellied Woodpecker, art by Isobel Gabel Nimtz

“Why do bees make so much honey?” I demanded of Leo as I breezed into the kitchen this frigid morning.

“Why do birds fly so high?” he asked in return. Sometimes that man does not skip a beat.

“Don’t they-ay know, it’s the ennnnd of the wo-orrrld?” I trilled interrogatively as I opened the frigid door onto the frigid porch and snatched the frigid paper inside.

Refrains and verses might have been muddled stream-of-consciously, but who cared. The Out was cold, the In was warm. And we – how lucky could we be? – were IN. With the Herald and cups of freshly brewed coffee and no-one had forgotten to get the half-and-half.

Which was probably because it was an Audubon morning – brrrrrrrr – and Leo would join a dozen hardy souls to walk around the West Rutland marsh, counting birds and species and twittering intently when in doubt. And the night before Audubon mornings Leo is likely to soak some flattened oats to prepare his oatmeal in the morning. And one needs light cream for oatmeal as for coffee.

And the bees? Off the top of my head, they were lightly winter-dreaming around the queen in the shape and size of a quivering football (I can see Dave Fretz of Shrewsbury Laurel Hill Honey fame, measuring a football size lovingly with his hands), keeping her warm, protecting her, juddering lightly in their dreams, keeping their ownselves warm, the outer ones moving slowly in, pushing the inner ones out for their turn to cool down. Nipping a little high-energy honey from their stores to keep them going.

I would love to join the birders, but I have a morning meeting and I will wait till Leo’s gone and take his leftover oatmeal and sprinkle it with sea salt, side it with a scoop of plain, whole yogurt, and drizzle it with a spoonful of honey, just getting going a little later than he needs to.

Mmm Mmm Mmm, very good!

Of course I like it the way Grandma made it for me, too – a sliver of butter in the bottom of the bowl, steaming oatmeal on top, a crunch of sugar over that, the whole drowned in cream. Though I never eat it that way now because I am convinced of the evil of sugar and refined flour, though the latter is harder to escape.

And why does he soak it? Well, because I related to him a fact that I gathered from Nourishing Traditions, that soaking grains makes the nutrients in them more available to the body and friendly to the digestion.
Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon and Mary Enig, is a fascinating treatise on old ways, slow food, and the validity of ‘old wives’ tales’ and time-worn techniques. About grains, they write, “Traditional societies usually soak or ferment their grains before eating them, processes that neutralize phytates and enzyme inhibitors and, in effect, predigest grains so that all their nutrients are more available.”

It’s the same with beans. For years I advised readers that unless your dried beans were old – in which case you should not be using them anyway – they need not be soaked overnight, that they cooked up just fine without it. Which is true, but soaking, again, neutralizes those phytates and enzyme inhibitors, and they are much better for your body as well as the noses and ears of those around you. So, I take it back – soak your beans, People.

There are many more such ‘truks’ of the trade of being an old wife or a cook (not always the same thing) in Nourishing Traditions, and it is well worth the (fascinating) read.

But back to breakfast. In my growing-up house we often had corn meal mush as a cereal, hot, and prepared just the way Grandma made the oatmeal – with butter and sugar and cream. It was a favorite bedtime snack of mine for years until I realized just how much ‘nutrition’ was contained in one bowl of the delicious stuff, and that nutrition was sticking to my hips.

Of course corn meal mush is nothing but polenta under a different and more appetizing name, and sometimes a different preferred grind of the corn. Which brings us to the subject of sweet and savory as regards breakfast cereals.

Polenta is usually served in savory ways, but it can also be cooked, cooled in a flat pan, then fried up in crisp squares in butter and served with a drizzle of maple syrup. Or honey. Or strawberry jam, for that matter. In that case, it’s much like Johnnycake, which is a moist cornbread served with syrup, usually – in my case – for supper. Rice that is leftover from a chicken dinner can be warmed and served with – yup, you guessed it – butter, sugar, cream. Or cook it fresh, in the morning, with plumped raisins, and you won’t have to use a bit of sugar. It takes 20 minutes.

Or there’s congee – a Chinese breakfast wherein rice is cooked with more water than usual – say 3 cups of water to 1 cup of rice – and served with various toppings which might include “tiny squares of crunchy pickle, slivers of greens, velvety cubes of tofu, tiny smoke-dried Hunan fish mounded up in a crispy, silvery tangle.” That was a quote from another fascinating book – a novel this time – called The Last Chinese Chef by Nicole Mones. Her chef also has at the ready, “peanuts, shreds of river moss, crunchy soaked fungus, and matchsticks of salty Yunnan ham.” I would add a drizzle of soy sauce, a drop of sesame oil. Young-La sometimes serves this at the Farmers’ Market at her Flavors of Asia booth, although I believe she calls it jook. Most Asian countries have their own version.

Farro is another grain to start experimenting with. It’s ancient, perhaps the earth-mother of our wheats and spelts and barleys. It needs to be soaked overnight, or for a couple of hours during the day if you’re having it for a later meal, and takes only 20 or 30 minutes to cook after soaking. It’s good any time of day, alone, with butter and salt and pepper, or prepared in a sweet way, I imagine, though I haven’t tried it that way. The Killington Ave Market and Deli makes a pureed cannellini bean soup with the chewiness of farro grains in it. I’ve made that and it IS delicious.

Note: This is a little off the subject of grains, but smack-dab ON the subject of KAM&D, and that is the best sandwich I’ve ever had. In my LIFE. It’s Porchetta on Focaccio. In Italy, where Bob and Becky first fell in love with it, a whole, small pig would be stuffed with herbs like sage and fennel and roasted. Bob takes a whole pork shoulder, butterflies it, layers it with caramelized onion and sage, rolls it up and rubs it with roasted and ground fennel and coriander. Next day it’s roasted in a slow oven for many hours. It’s left to rest overnight, then thinly sliced and mounded on a halved, toasted, olive-oil-drizzled flatbread with... nothing else! Sublime. All roast porkiness with a faint anise scent and flavor, on that crisp-tender bread. Man-O-Man, it is a revelation! They roast it on Monday and begin offering it on Tuesday. When it’s gone, it’s gone until the next week. I’ve got a pork shoulder in the fridge just begging to be treated in this multi-stepped way, but when I’ve done it once, I imagine I’ll leave all that work up to them.

Okay, more grains for breakfast. Mark Bittman cooks up some bulgar, adds flax seeds, coconut, sautéed tofu, fish sauce, scallions (click on his name for more great suggestions). How about fried up leftover noodles (which are a kind of value added grain, as is bread) with an egg on top, maybe ginger and scallions over that.

My food-writer friend John Thorne (Simple Cooking Foodletter) likes steaming fresh-cooked spaghetti paired with a fried egg, all mixed together, though, in his case, he craves it as a pre-breakfast, midnight snack. Quinoa is a really neat little grain, but to tell you the truth it doesn’t appeal to me just now as a breakfast grain.

Both quinoa and farro make great side salads or lunch dishes when you combine them with bits of cooked vegetables and bits of fish or fowl and dress them with lemon juice, olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper.

One of my fave breakfasts is multi-grain bread, toasted, buttered, slathered with Vermont peanut butter, topped with really good horseradish, and sprinkled with salt and pepper. I see you grimacing, but I tell you – it’s delicious!

A note on cooking grains. Most need a ratio of 2 parts water to 1 part grain. A little more water won’t hurt. Salt will bring out the flavors. If you’re cooking cornmeal, pour the meal into cold water and bring slowly to a simmer. That prevents clumping and lumping you get when you pour it into boiling water.

So do you need a recipe for any of these breakfasts? Nah, I don’t think so. Get on down to the Co-op (Rutland’s is at 77 Wales Street) and walk straight back to the bulk section and fill yourself some plastic bags with whole or flattened grains, and maybe a few smaller bags with spices and seasonings. Best-kept secret in town, that bulk section. You can’t find less expensive, fresher spices and grains in the world, the variety is great, and many of those grains have been grown right here in this little state.

Think Out of the Box; think of those buzzing bee footballs, watch the birds at the feeder.

This morning while Leo’s out traipsing around in the cold, spotting birds, I spoon up my oatmeal with yogurt and Philip’s elderberry/apple jelly and watch the birds at my feeder: the big Red-bellied Woodpecker visits, as do his cousins Mr. and Mrs. Downy and Mr. and Mrs. Hairy. Goldfinchs and White-breasted Nuthatches. Cedar Waxwings. Mr. Bluejay and he legion of raucous brothers. Titmouses. Whoa, Mr. Cardinal’s scarlet blares out of the green cedar and then I spy Mrs. Cardinal, whose browns and mauves I think are, if anything, more beautiful than his one red. We have a new little guy, and Leo tells me it’s a Brown Creeper.

I will not feel guilty at how beautiful life can be! The oatmeal is good. It could feed the world.

Rutland County Audubon Society at a Lake Champlain picnic.
Snow and ice were scraped from the table before sitting down.

Cast Iron Dhal

When I saw the enormous cast-iron wok at a garage sale I wasn’t thrilled yet, but I asked Cassie how much she wanted for it. My sly young friend cocked her head at me and asked, “What’s it worth to you?”
I tossed off a figure – five dollars, maybe – and she accepted. I hefted it into the car – it’s a heavy thing – and thought that it might be just the thing to put on/over my Big Green Egg (a kind of outdoor grill/cooker), in order to cook with more variety outdoors this long hot summer.

As it turns out, of course, the summer, if that’s what this is, has not been onerously hot, and I’ve made good use of that wok on the stove-top. Its glorious expanse of hot cast-iron heats the entire kitchen nicely, not a bad thing in this subzero July.

I was struck by the quandary, recently, egged on by a website called Gherkins and Tomatoes, of whether cuisines grew up around available cooking utensils rather than utensils being invented to fit the cuisine. This wok (labeled Mr. Bar-B-Q and made in China) tapers from a 14 inch rim to a six inch flat bottom, and the cast iron conducts heat through the entire pan. You can make a pretty sizable stir fry in that without overflowing. You can also steam vegetables in it by setting a bamboo steamer over water in its bottom; you can make rice in it – a rather large lid fits down inside of it – and I imagine you can even make a soup or a casserole. It’s a pretty all-purpose, one-pot-meal kind of thing. Now I’m getting a little more thrilled.

That wok wasn’t my only new (or used) acquisition lately. Down at Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, I was checking out the cookbook section when Simon Hopkinson charmed me with his lead-in to a recipe, Spinach and Coconut Dhal, in his book, Second Helpings of Roast Chicken. He described it as "Sloppy, warming, comforting, and astonishingly delicious. Also, extremely gassy. Time to tether the duvet to the bedposts." That made me chuckle and it made me buy the book.

The book is organized alphabetically, somewhat haphazardly, mostly by ingredients but sometimes by genre. For instance, Cabbage, Celery, Chicken, Chillies, lead to Cocktails. After that comes Cocoa, Cucumber, and then Curry. Under each chapter heading are three recipes, and under Curry is Mrs. Pringle’s kofta curry, Constance Spry’s original coronation chicken salad dressing, and the aforementioned Spinach and coconut dhal. The paper is thick and very white, which I know is just wrong, but I love the texture. But the best thing about this book, besides the originality and imagination of the recipes, are Hopkinson’s words. He has a sly and irreverent take on everything, and I find myself looking forward to his description and humor.

I had everything I needed for the Dhal except the black mustard seeds. I substituted black radish seeds which I had, somehow, in my spice cabinet. I always have a quantity of roasted cumin seeds because they are a favorite snack. For the tomatoes – which are not yet in season – I used almost a quart of crushed canned ones from Foggy Meadow Farm. I have onion, garlic, cilantro, and mint in my garden. And I happened to have red lentils and canned coconut milk in my pantry. As for the spinach, mine is either not growing or bolted, but it’s the usual spinach contest between Dutchess Farms, Foggy Meadow, and Boardman Hill at the Farmers’ Market. I hold really sweet taste photos in my mind of each of these spinaches, and perhaps will tell you about them in the future, but for now, let’s just say that I’ve bought spinach from each of them, it is all excellent, and I cannot remember whose this is in a plastic bag in my fridge.

As you’ll see, Hopkinson recommends serving this Dhal with Naan, a flat – well, puffed – Indian bread made with yogurt, enriched with egg, risen with yeast. I remember seeing a recipe for it that I trusted lately, but I cannot find it when I need it, of course. I’ll pass it along when I do. At its lack, I served this with thinly sliced, lightly toasted Bear Mountain Honey Oatmeal bread, which was not awfully authentic but was awfully good. So now, without further ado...

Spinach and Coconut Dhal
Serves 4
9 oz onions, peeled and finely chopped
6 tablespoons butter
1 ½ tsp whole cumin seeds, roasted
1 tsp whole black mustard seeds, roasted (I used black radish seeds because that’s what I had)
4 cloves
4 cloves garlic, peeled and thinly sliced
2 tsp ground turmeric
½ tsp chilli powder
¾ cup plus 2 tbsp split red lentils
1 2/3 cup water
1 2/3 cups coconut milk
3-4 thick slices of fresh ginger, unpeeled
1 lb fresh ripe tomatoes, peeled and roughly chopped
9 oz fresh leaf spinach, washed, trimmed, and roughly chopped
plenty of freshly ground black pepper
juice of 1 large lime
1 tbsp freshly chopped cilantro
2 tbsp freshly chopped mint
1 tsp salt
Serve with
naan or pita bread

Fry the onions in 4 tbsp of the butter until pale golden. Add the whole spices and half the garlic and continue to cook gently for a further 5 minutes. Stir in the turmeric and chilli powder until well blended, and cook for a couple of minutes. Tip in the lentils and the water, coconut milk, ginger, tomatoes, and spinach. Bring up to a simmer, add the pepper, and cook very gently, stirring occasionally, for about 30 – 40 minutes, or until the lentils are tender and have all but dissolved into the liquid.

Remove the pan from the heat. Melt the remaining 2 tbsp butter. When it starts to froth, throw in the rest of the sliced garlic and stir around vigorously until it starts to take on a little color, and the butter starts to smell nutty. Immediately tip into the lentils and stir in. (There will be spluttering, so watch out.) Add the lime juice, the cilantro, mint, and salt to taste. Cover with a lid and leave to mellow for 10 minutes before serving, remembering to remove the slices of ginger before you do so. Eat with hot and fresh flat bread, such as naan or, failing that, pita bread.

**

I find that my beautiful cast-iron wok retails for less than $30 on Amazon.com, and receives less than glowing tributes. Apparently a better one is made by Lodge, and sold for slightly less than $80, though it would probably be over $100 by the time you paid Amazon's shipping. Nevertheless, I made the Spinach and Coconut Dhal in mine, and it was nothing short of delicious. Incredibly satisfying, not at all gassy, and the duvet stayed put.