i could eat a vat of this: all purpose beans and rice

Here’s a favorite thing I make. It is:

• Cheap
• Easy
• Quick, in the sense that it requires almost no hands-on time
• comfort food
• Voluminous. Yay for not having to cook for a few days when I’m trying to write my dissertation proposal.

I just ate a bowl almost as big as my head full of it. Here are the steps:

• Make a pot of brown rice. Let it cool off a bit and put it in the fridge.

This takes about a minute to throw rice and water in a pot, and a few minutes waiting for boilage. Those few minutes may be spent doing some dishes or wiping off the counters or something else useful. And then you turn the heat down and leave it alone for 45 min to an hour. It’s forgiving. Then there’s nothing else to do to it.

Then, make a pot of pinto beans. I guess other beans would work too, but I like pintos best. My recipe is as follows:

• Before going to bed one night, dump the beans in a big bowl and cover them by a couple of inches with water. Put a plate on top so the cats don’t drink the water. (1-2 minutes)
• The next morning, dump out the water, rinse off the beans, and do a cursory look for any rocks. They will not have expanded any in the water, so they will be easy to see. (1-2 minutes)
• Preheat oven to 250°F.
• Put the beans in a pot that can go in the oven at low temperatures and cover them by an inch or so with water. Put on the stove and bring to a boil.
• While it is coming to a boil, I usually add a few things: salt, a pinch of asafetida, a generous teaspoon of ground cumin. If I’m feeling ambitious I peel two or three garlic cloves and toss them in whole. And plop in some dried whole Indian chilli peppers. (5 or so minutes, depending on bean and water temp)
• I usually also dice half an onion while waiting for the beans to boil. Put the cut up onion in a small container in the fridge.
• When the pot boils, put on the lid and pop it in the oven. In an hour, check a few beans. If they aren’t soft, put back in the oven for another half hour. Again, forgiving. It doesn’t matter if the beans get quite soft. Try not to drop the pot when returning it to the oven, splattering your cat with bean juice. (2-4 minutes hands on time)
• When done, let the beans cool a bit, fish out the dried peppers if you have used them, and then put the beans and cooking liquid in a container in the fridge

Now you have a bunch of rice and a bunch of beans. Yawn. But! The beauty comes at each time you need a meal for the next few days.

First, put rice and beans in your favored proportions in a microwave safe bowl.

Then, dress them up and heat them up.

I don’t know what you keep on hand, so these might not work for you, but with my general staples, I choose from the following options or make something new up on the fly.

• Probably my favorite, and what I just finished eating: Dump in a generous amount of frozen collard or turnip greens. After you heat the whole thing up in the microwave, stir in some of those diced onions and a good dollop of mango pickle.
• Heat up with some salsa, cheese, and diced onions. If you are being extravagant and have an extra few minutes, cut up an avocado and stir it in after heating. If you dip your beans out with a slotted spoon on this one, you can then wrap this mush up in some tortillas.
• Add a splash of balsamic vinegar, some sun-dried tomato slivers, and some sliced kalamatas. Some feta cheese makes it even better.

You now have a hearty, yummy, not unhealthy meal.

This usually takes me 5-6 minutes to put together and heat. Almost as good: the dirty dish count is (in my house anyway): a bowl, a spoon, a fork, and a serving spoon.

Now get back to work.

Notes:

• After soaking, you can put the beans in the fridge if you want to cook them later that day. You can freeze the soaked beans so that you won’t need so much lead time to make beans at some point in the future. You can dump the frozen beans in a pot, cover with water and cook as usual. It just takes a little longer for them to come to an initial boil.
• YES, put salt in your beans! You are cooking them in the oven where they are getting heat from all sides, instead of on the top of the stove where the beans near the bottom are really hot and the ones at the top are not. You will find the unevenly cooked, hard beans are not the salt’s fault. And the beans soak up the salt as they are cooking and taste better than they ever could if you just added salt after.

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