Starting Beans

Suddenly it's raining every day. Too wet to plant things outdoors. But a perfect time to get things started in seed trays in the classroom.

I read three times a week to one of the classes at my daughter's charter school and in spring our attention turns to the garden. Sprouting seeds is always a fascinating activity for the kids. So I brought a bag of last year's bean pods and had the kids open them to see what's inside.


Even Kindergartners catch on fast. I didn't have to show them how to pry the seed pods open. As you can see, we have two different kinds of pole beans. If all goes well, they'll soon be climbing the chain link fence that surrounds the school's sprawling container garden.

I simply filled the seed cells with soil from the garden. It's mostly compost, very loose. Everyone planted two seeds along with a craft stick with her name on it. We also planted a few leftover cells for good measure and created a special germination exhibit, hiding some seeds in damp paper towel. We'll check on them occasionally so we can watch the plant emerge.

Kids love to mess with seeds.

Kids Make Black Bean Tamales

Kids love working with their hands, which makes tamales--mixing the dough, wrapping it in corn husks--the perfect assignment for our "food appreciation" classes.

This week on our virtual world culinary tour we are in Puebla, a city south of Mexico City known for its colorful ceramics and its clever chefs. But really, tamales are almost ubiquitous in Mexico, an emblematic part of a corn culture that stretches back thousands of years and is central to the country's cuisine.

An ancient technique for treating corn is to soak the dried kernels in a solution of lye or lime to remove the tough hull or pericarp. Although the original cooks surely did not know it at the time, this process--called nixtimalization--has the added benefit of making the essential niacin in the corn available for human digestion. The soft part of the corn can then be ground into a meal--or masa--that is the staple for so many uses, such as making tortillas and tamales.

Masa is readily available in Latin groceries or even in convenience stores catering to immigrants from south of the border. We look for a masa specifically designed for tamales. It is a rougher grind with a pleasing texture. You will also need corn husks, which are sold dried, usually in a stack of several dozen. Soak these 24 hours in advance in plenty of water to soften them. Remove and stray corn silk.

Tamales can be stuffed with almost anything: roast chicken or pork, beans or other cooked vegetables, even chocolate or other sweets to make dessert tamales. We stuffed ours with black beans cooked with onion, garlic and red and green bell pepper. But you could use any other savory bean.

Making tamale dough is usually a two step process, first beating a fat such as lard or vegetable shortening into a fluffy mass, then mixing the corn meal with other ingredients before combining with the fat. Some people like to do the mixing parts with an electric blender to work air into the dough. But it can also be done by hand.

The easiest way to procede may be to just follow the directions on your package of masa. We made ours as follows.

In a large bowl, beat 2/3 cup chilled lard or vegetable shortening until light and almost fluffy.

In a separate bowl, mix 2 cups masa with 1 teaspoon baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Add 2 cups warm broth (such as chicken stock or vegetable stock) or water and stir well. Empty the dough into the fat and combine. Use a wooden spoon to beat the dough until it is soft and fluffy. Add more liquid if it is too stiff.

Lay a softened corn husk on a flat work surface and spoon a small fistful of dough into the center (it helps to use wider rather than narrower husks). Use a knife or a stiff spatula to spread the dough out, leaving several inches of husk uncovered at the top and bottom and an inch or so on the sides. Into the middle of the dough spoon some prepared beans. Now fold the tamale over, rolling the dough into a sausage shape. Wrap the husk closed, like a big cigar, and fold over the narrow bottom part to seal the tamale on one end. The fold should be two or three inches long. Wrap the end with a length of string and tie snuggly with a firm knot to hold the tamale together.

The finished tamales are cooked in a steamer. Lightweight aluminum tamale steamers are sold fairly inexpensively in Latin groceries. We used a pasta pot with a strainer insert. Or you could improvise a steamer using a wire rack at the bottom of a large pot. Stand the tamales in the steamer with the open ends pointing up. Pour about 1 inch water into the bottom and bring to a boil. Cover the pot snugly and steam at reduced heat for about one hour, or until the tamales are cooked through and firm.

This recipe makes a dozen or more tamales, depending on how big your corn husks are. To eat them, cut the string and unwrap the corn husk. Serve the tamales with your favorite sauce or salsa. We dressed ours with crema, a kind of liquid sour cream, and a dusting of fresh white cheese, or queso fresco. The kids begged for seconds.

Kids Make Black Beans & Rice

They call beans "the poor man's meat" because they are full of protein. But beans are not a complete protein. They're missing some essential amino acids that are readily supplied by animal sources such as meat or eggs or by simple grains. That's why you so often see beans paired with grains in cultures around the world.

In Cuba, the next destination on the virtual world tour our "food appreciation" classes are taking, black beans and rice rank as a cultural icon. Add some fried plantains on the side and you have a meal that any Cuban would instantly recognize.

Normally we would prepare our beans by soaking dried beans overnight in plenty of water, then cooking them with onion, bay leaf and thyme. But for purposes of our classes, we used canned black beans from Goya, an excellent substitute. Simply scoop the beans into a colander and rinse with water.

Cuban black beans couldn't be simpler. Just add a few common vegetables--onion, green bell pepper and red bell pepper--and a little cumin for flavor. Yet the aroma of the beans simmering on the stove transfixes anyone who comes near and children quickly devour the finished beans with their meaty Latin flavor.

To prepare the beans, cut a peeled onion into small dice. Add to it 1/2 large green bell pepper and 1/2 large red bell pepper, each cut into small dice, plus 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped. Heat 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil in a heavy pot over moderate heat. Add the onion, peppers and garlic and season with 1/2 teaspoon salt. Lower heat to low and cook, covered, for about 10 minutes, or until the vegetables are soft.

Empty a 30-ounce can of black beans into a colander and rinse thoroughly (or cook your own beans). Mix beans into pot with sauteed vegetables. Stir in 1 teaspoon ground cumin. Replace cover and cook about 40 minutes, or until the beans have started to give up some of their starch to create a sauce. (If the beans are too dry, add a little water.) Variations call for adding bay leaf, oregano, vinegar or olive oil to the beans. They all sound good, but they're not necessary. Some cooks like to mash some of the beans and add them back to the pot for a thicker sauce.

White rice has become the default rice around the world, but that is strictly a matter of status. People came to consider white rice as more refined and cultured. Brown rice was for poor people. In fact, brown rice has it all over its white cousin because so much of the nutrition--fiber, vitamins, minerals--is located in the bran. Remove the bran and all you have a lesser-quality starch. We are trying to teach our students to avoid starches that contribute to diabetes and obesity.

Quality brown rice has a wonderful chewiness and full flavor. I normally use a bulk brown rice from Whole Foods. But for these lessons I chose a long grain brown rice from Lundberg that cooked up big and fluffy--no clumping here. Just add the beans and you'll soon be serving seconds.

Steamed Brown Bread

Steamed brown bread, a New England tradition, was a treat for us even growing up in the Midwest. We ate it out of a can (I never knew it any other way) and it was always something exotic and mysterious when it arrived on our dinner plate, almost on a par with getting chow mein carryout from the local Chinese restaurant.

My memory is of the B&M brand of canned brown bread. This is a proud company from Portland, Maine, that first opened for business in 1867 and was canning corn long before it thought to can brown bread or Boston baked beans, the company's most important product. B&M has since been bought up by a succession of bigger food corporations over the years. But the brand and the factory still exist in Portland. The beans, cooked in open pots in brick ovens, come in a can as well as a jar uniquely shaped to look like a classic bean pot.

Making steamed brown bread at home is simple, but the technique may be new to you as it was to me. Instead of baking in an oven, the bread cooks in a pot of boiling water, usually in some sort of tin can or similar mold. (You can even make it in a flower pot). To get the can, I had to buy a pound of coffee at the supermarket. We don't normally get our coffee in a can anymore. Then, after I had mixed the batter, I found that the recipe I was following in Aliza Green's The Bean Bible was much more than enough to fill the 1-pound can she called for. I see now that James Beard, who included an almost identical recipe in Beard on Bread, called for "cans," plural.

An iconic New England food, steamed brown bread typically calls for three types of whole-grain flours, starting with rye flour, corn meal and either whole wheat, graham flour, oat flour or, in my case, since it was what I had in the pantry, barley flour. The batter must contain molasses--a staple ingredient in bygone New England--to give the bread its distinctive color and sweetness. Baking soda and buttermilk react to give the bread its rise. Traditionally, it can be made plain or with raisins.

If you are using coffee cans to make the bread, you'll need to grease the inside or line them with parchment paper. You'll also need a tall pot ( or pots) to steam them in, with a wire rack or empty tuna cans or something similar (I used stainless baking rings) to put at the bottom of the pot so that the bread is not touching the heat source. Since I only had one coffee can, I improvised at the last minute with a small, high-sided cake pan. It worked just as well. Either way, the mold should be covered with a double layer of aluminum foil tied securely with a length of butcher's twine.

To make your bread, mix together 1 cup rye flour, 1 cup cornmeal, 1 cup oat flour (or substitute barley, whole wheat or graham flour), 2 teaspoons baking soda and 1 teaspoons salt. In a separate bowl, mix together 2 cups buttermilk and 3/4 cup molasses.

Pour the buttermilk mixture into the dry ingredients and mix well. Pour the batter into 2 greased, 1-pound coffee cans (I used spray canola oil) or molds lined with parchment paper. Each can should be about 2/3 full. Place the cans into tall pots with a wire rack or empty tuna cans on the bottom. Fill the pots with water to a depth halfway up the side of the bread can (or mold). Bring water to a boil, reduce heat and continue boiling for about 2 1/2 hours, or until a skewer inserted into the bread comes out clean. When the can is cool enough to handle, simply remove the foil, invert the can and tap the bread out onto a cutting board. You may have to use a thin knife initially to separate the bread from the inside of the can.

Note: Aliza Green suggests cooking the bread 2 1/2 to 3 hours. Meanwhile, James Beard calls for cooking the bread 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Quite a difference. We cooked ours for2 1/2 hours and it seemed fine. If two loaves seem like too much, cut the recipe in half and just make one.

My wife thinks the bread gains from sitting a day or two before being eaten. We agree that the only way to serve it is with a generous slather of cream cheese and preferably a bowl of Boston baked beans.

How Do You Bake Your Beans?

Boston baked beans and steamed brown bread spread with Philadelphia cream cheese. Isn't this a dinner we all grew up with?

The memory leaped to mind when I went searching for bean recipes yesterday. It's high time The Slow Cook gives more attention to legumes, meaning dried beans of one sort or another. Beans are packed with nutrition, and one of the best sources of calories. No fat, lots of fiber. What more could you ask for? Plus, you can easily grow them in your home garden, even right here in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.

I cracked open my copy of The Bean Bible, by Aliza Green. It's overflowing with excellent background information about beans. Unfortunately, the first three recipes I tried were failures in one way or another. Not by a little. By a lot. Green's recipe for Boston-style baked beans, for instance, took me at least 10 hours to cook. There was simply too much liquid in it. Mea cupla for assuming that a "bean bible" is actually the last word. I have since returned to my library and done some additional research.


Fact or fiction: Beans need to be soaked before cooking.


Some cooks insist on soaking beans to make them more digestible,or simply to reduce the cooking time. I usually soak mine overnight. Green advocates a hot soaking and a pre-cooking process, wherein 1 pound of Great Northern beans are brought to a boil in 8 cups of water and cooked for 2 minutes, then taken off the heat and allowed to soak for 1 hour. The beans are then drained, covered with another 8 cups of water, brought to a boil and simmered for 1 hour. All this before any other ingredients are added. Meanwhile, The New Best Recipe, the kitchen tome put out by Cook's Illustrated, says their numerous trials showed that soaking or pre-cooking is completely unnecessary.


Fact or fiction: Salt added too early to beans will toughen the skin, preventing them from absorbing liquid.


Aliza Green contends that both salt and sugar have the toughening effect. Hence her convoluted process of pre-soaking and pre-cooking her beans. Harold McGee, meanwhile, writing in his seminal On Food and Cooking, says salt does slow the absorption rate somewhat, but that beans pre-soaked in salted water actually cook faster. Furthermore, acids and sugars strengthen the cell walls of beans. Hence molasses--with its classic mix of acid and sugar--is particularly good at helping beans keep their shape during a long cooking process.


Boston baked beans traditionally start with a small white bean (smaller than Great Northern, but that's what I had in my pantry), along with molasses, dark brown sugar, dry mustard and salt pork. These are all classic ingredients that permeate the cuisine of New England. How to finish the beans becomes a matter of taste, and deciding how much of each ingredient to use.


The baked beans I made following Aliza Green's instructions eventually turned out fine--a dense mass of dark beans with a strong molasses flavor. They were much closer to the baked beans I remember from childhood than the beans from a can of Bush's Boston Recipe Baked Beans, which to me tasted like ordinary beans. (But then Bush's Beans hail from Tennessee. What do they know about Boston baked beans?) You can see the difference in this photo--my beans on the right, Bush's beans on the left.


I like the Best Recipe approach, which offers some simple refinements to the classic recipe. For instance, they added diced onion for flavor (Aliza Green calls for placing a whole onion studded with cloves in the bean pot). Also, they suggest cubing the salt pork and browning it before mixing it with the beans. Again, more flavor, compared to the traditional method of simply laying a scored slab of salt pork on top of the beans. They prefer using prepared mustard rather than dry mustard on grounds that most home cooks are more likely to have a jar of prepared mustard on hand. And they like a bit of cider vinegar added to the mix to cut the sweetness of the molasses.


So where does that leave us? I'm not exactly sure, since I liked the end result of Aliza Green's method, but I would gladly incorporate some of the suggestions from Best Recipe. If you pre-cook the beans as described above, proceed by lightly browning 6 ounces salt pork, trimmed of any rind and cut into small cubes, at the bottom of a heavy pot or Dutch oven. Add 1 onion, finely diced, to the pot and cook until the onion is soft, another 8 minutes or so. Remove from heat, skim off excess fat and reserve.


In a large bowl, mix 3/4 cup molasses with 1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar, 1 1/2 tablespoons prepared brown mustard, such as Gulden's, 1 tablespoon ground ginger, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper and 4 cups water.


Pour the prepared beans into the pot with the salt pork and onion. Mix well. Add the molasses mixture,which should easily cover the beans. If not, add more water. Cover the pot and place it in a pre-heated 300 degree oven and cook for about five hours, or until the beans are almost cooked through, adding water to the pot from time to time as needed. Remove the lid, stir the beans, and continue baking until the beans are completely tender and all of the liquid has been absorbed or cooked off. What you should have is a thick muddle of beans, not a sloppy bean soup. If necessary, continue baking with the lid off until any excess liquid is eliminated. Finally, stir in a tablespoon of cider vinegar.


If you do not pre-cook the beans, Best Recipe calls for adding 9 cups of water to the molasses mix and cooking for 4 hours, then removing the lid and baking another 1 hour.


Note: Cooking times for these baked beans are all over the map. I consulted all of my New England cook books, as well as the Fannie Farmer Cookbook (Farmer, a real person, ran the Boston Cooking School for a time around the turn of the 20th Century). Most call for a cooking time of six or seven yours. Be your own judge.

But enough of how I bake my beans. Let's return to the original question: How do you bake yours?

Tomorrow we'll be looking at steamed brown bread. It's hard to beat the stuff out of a can for childhood memories. But if you can't find it at the store, you can make your own.

Homegrown Cassoulet

Here's an old-fashioned pleasure: shelling beans.

We grew a hefty crop of lima beans in a our kitchen garden here in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House. I let them dry on the vine and finally just the other day got around to removing the beans from the pods.


I reckon most people have an image of something green and plump when they think of lima beans. But these--Jackson Wonder beans--are a mottled brown and cream color when they emerge from the pod. When cooked, they turn a solid brown. They are luxuriously meaty, and I can't think of a better place for them than in this quick "cassoulet."


A true cassoulet includes sausage and confit of duck and of course beans, all cooked in a lidded pot slowly for a long time. It's pure peasant food. My quick vegetarian version involves cooking the beans first, then baking them in the oven with bread crumbs. All the flavor comes from the beans, which makes this one of the world's finest bean dishes--flavorful and cheap. This time I used some of our own canned tomatoes, making it a very home-grown cassoulet. Then at the last minute I remembered that our friend Bob, on a recent visit from France, had brought us some canned confit.



Canned confit? Don't laugh. We're not usually into canned goods. And I just assumed this variety--Les Recettes de Maite--was the French equivalent of Dinty Moore or something. Just look at the picture of this woman on the label. Some merchandizer's fantasy of a French homemaker, no? But when I started snooping around on-line, I discovered the woman is real. She has a restaurant in a place called Rion des Landes in Southwestern France and apparently makes canned goods on the side. Which makes her closer to the equivalent of Lidia Bastianich--a confit capitalist. Check out her singing website.


In an interview with a French women's magazine, Maite declares that the Southwest has the best ingredients: meat, duck, foie gras. "And with that, you can make miracles." I had some doubts about the confit coming out Maite's can. How good could it possibly be? It's covered in great globs of fat. The meat itself--two large thighs--is shockingly pink and otherworldly looking. But baked with my beans....transcendental. You're eyes will roll back in your head and you would never guess it came out of a can.


So thanks, Bob, if you're reading this: We loved the canned confit.


To start, soak your dried beans overnight. (Use cannellini or Great Northern beans, or something similar, if you don't have these wondeful lima beans.) I had about two cups, and covered them with water in a large bowl to a depth of several inches. The following day I cooked them in a heavy pot with an onion, halved, 2 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed, 2 bay leaves and a small fistful of fresh thyme sprigs. Cover everything generously with water and cook over moderate heat until the beans are tender, about an our. Drain the beans but save the cooking liquid. You can toss the onion, garlic, bay and thyme.


Next you will need a large onion, peeled and cut into small dice, along with three cloves of garlic chopped fine. Place these in a heavy pot over moderate heat with extra-virgin olive oil or, if you are planning to use confit, some of the duck fat. Season with salt and cook, covered, until the onion is soft and perhaps browned a little, about 10 minutes.


In a large bowl, mix the beans with the onion mixture and 1 pint of canned diced tomatoes. Add a tablespoon of finely chopped sage leaf. Mix everything together and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper as needed. Add pieces of confit, if using, and pour into a ceramic casserole.


Cover the bean mix with reserved bean cooking liquid if you remembered to save it or with chicken stock, preferably homemade. Top everything with a generous dusting of toasted bread crumbs (I used part of a Tuscan loaf from Whole Foods, crust removed and run through the food processor.)


Cover the casserole with aluminum foil and bake in a 425 degree oven until the cassoulet is bubbling, all the flavors have melded and the bread crumbs have begun to absorb some of the liquid, about 1 hour. You can serve this hot, or save it for another day. It will only get better with age.

Cooking Rice in the Oven

To some of you, this is probably going to sound like a cheap catering trick. Most likely, it is. But when I asked my wife, the catering chef, how she thought I should make rice for 90 people for tomorrow's "Parents Night" dinner where I teach "food appreciation," she didn't hesitate. "Do it in the oven," she said.

She wasn't sure exactly how that should be done. For instance, at what temperature should the oven be set? I toddled around the internet for a few minutes and came up with a plan. The most important thing, it seemed, was that the liquid the rice was cooking in should be boiling before the pan went into the oven. Second, there should be a tight seal on the pan.

You may be wondering why there's a picture of Uncle Ben so prominently displayed here. Isn't the Slow Cook supposed to be exclusively about healthy, long-cooking, whole grain rice? To which I answer: Yes, the Slow Cook is about all those things. Except what I am cooking is Hoppin's John--the Low Country version of rice and beans--and Hoppin' John traditionally calls for white rice (originally grown in South Carolina). I was determined not so serve a gloppy, overcooked mess of rice to our parents. Hence, a chicken-shit resort to good ol' Uncle Ben and his converted rice. Hopefully, it would be true to the label and turn out "perfect."

So I dumped five pounds of rice (about 11 1/2 cups) into a large aluminum catering pan and covered it with 23 cups of a boiling broth made of water and smoked turkey necks. Notice, the cooking ratio is two cups water for every cup of rice. I sealed the pan with aluminum foil and put it on the middle rack of the oven pre-heated to 350 degrees.

Originally, I was counting on the rice being done in 30 minutes. I checked it, but there was still a lot of water in the pan. I checked it 15 minutes later and still it was not done. Finally, about an hour after first putting the pan in the oven, the rice was fully cooked and fluffy, almost spilling out of the pan. And it was, as advertised, not overcooked or gloppy but just as Uncle Ben had claimed: perfect.

So that's how you cook rice in the oven.

Okay, so this is not exactly how Hoppin' John is traditionally made. Usually the rice and beans are cooked together in a pork broth. But this is another catering shortcut: I used canned chickpeas and mixed them into the rice, seasoning with salt. Heretical, I know. Avert your eyes, all you purists! But for the shortcut artists out there, maybe this is helpful.

Black Bean Soup with Smoked Butt and Butternut Squash

The inspiration for this soup was a hunk of butternut squash sitting unused at the bottom of the crisper drawer and a 1-pound bag of dried black beans that came back from one of my "food appreciation" classes.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of butternut squash and black beans together. My mind has been occupied with Southern food lately, so thoughts naturally drifted toward pork in the soup somehow. I wasn't sure if this was becoming a Southern soup or something Cuban or Caribbean. It just evolved. I stopped at the market for a piece of "smoked butt," something we used to eat all the time when I was a kid. You don't see much mention of it anymore. It's really just a cured ham, but made from the shoulder--or "butt"--end of the pig rather than the hindquarters.

This soup is a two- or three-day affair. Not much work, in fact, but you do need to cook the beans. Pick over a 1-pound bag of dried black beans and remove any stones. Then pour the beans into a large mixing bowl and cover with lots of water. There should be several inches of water over the beans. Let this soak overnight.

The following day, in a large, heavy pot or Dutch oven, saute a large onion, peeled and cut into small dice, along with three or four stalks of celery, peeled to remove the tough fibers and cut into small dice. You can cook this with bacon fat or extra-virgin olive oil. Stir in a teaspoon of coarse salt to season and draw out the juices.

Cook the vegetables over moderately low heat until the onion is tender, about 8 minutes. Place a smoked ham hock in the center of the vegetables along with four thick slices of pork fat back (or "streak-o'-lean) that have been quickly browned in a skillet. Drain the beans and add these plus 3 1/2 quarts water. Make a spice sachet by tying in cheesecloth a fist-full of parsley sprigs, several sprigs of fresh thyme, two or three bay leaves and a half-dozen peppercorns. Use a length of string long enough so that you can tie off one end to the handle of your pot for easy retrieval. Drop the spice sachet into the water, bring the whole thing to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer, with cover slightly ajar, for about 3 hours, or until the beans are perfectly tender and the soup is redolent of smoked pork.

At this point, I would remove the pot from the heat, cover it completely and let it cure overnight on the stovetop. But you don't have to. The next step is remove the spice sachet, the ham hock and the fat back and run the soup through a food mill or blender until it is smooth and creamy. If it's too thick, add some water. If it seems to thin, cook it some more with the lid off. Then add to the soup 1/2 of a medium butternut squash, skin and seeds removed and cut into medium dice. Also add about 1 pound of smoked butt, cut into medium dice and browned in a skillet for extra flavor.

Bring the soup back to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until the squash is cooked through and tender, about 30 minutes. Do stir the soup frequently, especially around the bottom to prevent the beans from scorching. To finish the soup, stir in 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander and 1 tablespoon molasses. I could also see finishing this bean and squash soup with some balsamic vinegar, some red wine or sherry. There's plenty of room for improvisation.

To serve, ladle into hot, shallow bowls and garnish with chopped cilantro. A slice of buttered corn bread would be perfect on the side.

Kids Make Hoppin' John

Where would mankind be without beans?

Beans are loved the world over in flavorful bean dishes and in processed foods such as tofu. They're full of fiber and iron and lots of protein. But as the kids in our "food appreciation" classes learned this week, beans do not provide the complete protein needed to grow healthy bodies because they lack some important amino acids. That's why beans are so often paired with grains such as rice and corn. Not only do grains taste great with beans, they bring the required amino acids to the table. The proliferation of bean and rice dishes around the world is no accident.

As we continue our virtual food road trip, we made our way to South Carolina where the "low country" once was an important source of rice in America. You can still find lowcountry rice, but its importance to the nation's food basket has faded. What lives on is a bean and rice dish traditional to the region called "Hoppin' John."

This is a very simple dish made by cooking the beans in a pot with onion and ham hock, then adding the rice to cook in the flavorful broth. An easier one-pot dish could hardly be found, and this one is very kind on the budget as well. Hoppin' John falls into the category of poverty food, yet like so many traditional country dishes, this one is so delicious and so satisfying.

This recipe comes from a book appropriately titled, Hoppin' John's Lowcountry Cooking, written by John Martin Taylor. It's a book worth owning for the many simple, hearty dishes we associate with this particular region.

The cooking time required for making Hoppin' John is a bit longer than we have in our "food appreciation" classes, so I made the dish ahead. What the kids did was shell the beans we had growing in our garden, as shown in the photo of blackeyed peas above. I brought the whole plants--brown and dessicated--to school in a recycling bin.

Kids are funny. Sometimes the simplest things will occupy them totally. They go from being utterly unteachable one minute, to completely absorbed in the task of shelling beans the next.

Normally I use brown rice for nutrition, but white rice is traditional for this dish. You might try using brown basmati rice--it's not quite so brown and does not take too long to cook.

1 cup dried beans such as cowpeas or blackeyed peas
5 cups water
1 smoke ham hock
1 medium onion, cut into small dice
1 cup long grain rice
salt to taste

Pick over the beans to remove any stones or damaged beans. Add them to a heavy pot with the water, removing any beans that float. Add ham hock and onion. Bring pot to a boil, then reduce heat and cook, uncovered, until beans are tender, about 1 1/2 hours. Add rice and cook until tender. Remove pot from heat, cover and allow rice to steam another 10 minutes.

Serve warm, preferably with some boiled greens (the vitamin C in the greens helps absorb the iron in the beans) and a slice of corn bread.

Just to illustrate how important rice and beans are around the world, a parent came up to me while I was washing the cook pot after our lesson and exclaimed, "Oh! You're making a rice cookup." I must have given her a quizzical look, because she went on the explain: "That's what my mother always called it, 'rice cookup.' She'd make it just like that--beans and rice, some beef tripe and coconut milk...."

Turns out the parent grew up in Guiana. Not so far from South Carolina, it seems.

Black Bean & Corn Salsa with Golden Cherry Tomatoes

We don't normally advocate food out of a can, especially at the peak of produce season. But beans are one thing that emerge from a tin perfectly edible, and I have no problem recommending canned black beans for this quick garden salsa. (Then again, if you want to cook your own black beans, by all means do so.)

This mix of black beans and fresh corn is familiar enough, especially with a Southwestern seasoning of cumin and cilantro. I've dressed it up a little with our own Dr. Carolyn golden cherry tomatoes. I can hardly think of a better place to show them off, in this case to go alongside some homemade crab cakes destined for a client. You could just as easily serve it next to flank steak, grilled fish or your favorite tacos.

This takes very little time, but do go to the trouble of using a freshly shucked ear of corn. Cook it in a pot of salted water, then remove the kernels from the cob. (My favorite method for this is to set a ceramic bowl, inverted, in the bottom of a large mixing bowl, then stand the corn cob on top of the bowl to cut away the kernels with a bread knife.) Mix the corn with a 14-ounce can of black beans, well rinsed, plus about 1/3 cup diced red onion. Mix in a tablespoon or two of extra-virgin olive oil, a generous splash of sherry vinegar (or lime juice), coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste. Add about 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin and 1/4 teaspoon ground coriander, or to taste. At the end, toss in a dozen cherry tomatoes, halved, and a small handful of cilantro, chopped.

This will keep very well overnight in the fridge.

First Green Beans

I've been watching the beans swell in the bean patch and calculating when the time might be ripe for a harvest. The moment arrived yesterday with friends coming for dinner. I was amazed to see what a bounty my little plants had provided.

These are the Italian Romanette variety, a wide and flat bush bean I prefer for its gentle texture and meaty flavor. They always remind me of the year I spent in Switzerland when I was a youth. My host mother would cook a great heap of these beans in the pressure cooker until they were nearly falling apart and weeping with flavor.

My own plants--really just a small patch in a far away bed in the garden--were so heavy with fruit, they literally had fallen to the ground. I harvested close to two pounds in no time at all and began planning a prominent spot for them on the menu.

When our friends arrived we had a fresh guacamole displayed in our molcajete with blue corn tortilla chips. We also composed a relish assortment of pickled beets and pickled green tomatoes along with some of our latest deli-style dills and the refrigerator pickles that are now perfectly brined.

Dinner began with a platter of squash carpaccio with fresh Maryland goat cheese. I grilled a flank steak very simply with our favorite dry rub and served that with our own potatoes, browned and tossed with caramelized onions, and the green beans, cooked in salted water until tender, then tossed with sweet butter and finely chopped mint.

As usual, my wife presented a stunning dessert: cherry granita parfaits layered with almond-infused whipped cream and drizzled with aged Balsamic vinegar. We could not have ordered a more pleasant summer evening on the back deck.

Peas & Beans: Progress Report

Our row of pea plants has come up lush and strong with many pods that are just beginning to swell. Capturing the image with a camera is not so easy. Perhaps you can make out one of the pods just to the left of center.

The fava beans made a dense patch of tall and incredibly architectural foliage. This being our first year planting favas, I had no idea. They produce many clusters of white flowers shaped almost like butterflies with their wings folded. To enhance the effect, each flower has a big black spot on it, like an eyeball.

The cranberry beans seam to be happy, even though spring in the District of Columbia this year has been cooler and wetter than usual. These are planted in the aborted spinach bed. We don't let our vegetable beds sit vacant for long, just add some more compost and away we go with the next crop.

Breakfast: Beans & Barley

Actually, the leftovers from a recent cholent, our favorite Jewish pot roast. A pot of cholent makes a lot of beans and barley, infused with all the wonderful beef flavors.

Not exactly heart-healthy, but unctuous, earthy and very satisfying.

I could easily see a poached egg nested in there in place of the parsley.

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Shopping: none

Calories: don't want to think about it, but a great way to start a cold February morning.

White Bean-Fennel Soup

Sometimes through luck or merely endless repetition we hit on something that seems to have been perfectly designed. That's the way I feel about this soup, a delicious melding of earthy white beans and the sweet flavors of onion, carrot and fennel.

I've made the soup so many times I no longer remember when or how it occurred to me to add the fennel. But I think the faint notes of anise lift the humble beans into another realm.

There is a bean soup served in the U.S. Senate dining room that has become famous over the years. Called, appropriately enough "Senate Bean Soup," it is often imitated as a sort of holy grail of the white bean potage. But I wager that my soup is every bit as good, if not better. I make a large quantity of it and freeze it in smaller containers, ensuring that we will have enough to last us through spring.

This recipe calls for chicken stock as a base. But the beans and vegetables are so flavorful, I'm sure you could use plain water for a vegetarian version. I highly recommend it if you have time to sit yourself down with a bowl and watch the snow drift outside the window.

1 pound dried cannellini or Great Northern beans, soaked overnight in plenty of water

3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

1 large onion, peeled and diced small

1 medium fennel bulb (tops removed), diced small

2 medium carrots, peeled and diced small

3 garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt

1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves (or several sprigs, tied in a bundle)

freshly ground black pepper to taste

7 cups chicken stock (preferably homemade)

½ cup toasted bread crumbs for garnish

Drain the beans and set aside. Over moderately low heat, heat olive oil in a large, heavy pot. Add onion, fennel, carrots and garlic, season with salt and pepper. Sweat the vegetables, stirring frequently, until onions are soft, about 10 minutes. Stir in thyme and season with pepper.

Add beans and stock. Raise heat and bring soup almost to a boil. Then lower heat and simmer gently, covered, until beans are very tender, 2-3 hours. Remove from heat. Carefully ladle half the soup into a blender and blend until smooth, holding the lid in place with a kitchen towel, or pass the mix through a food mill. Stir puree back into the pot. If it seems too thick, add more stock or water.

To serve, ladle soup into large, shallow bowls and garnish with a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and toasted bread crumbs.

Meatless Cassoulet

We catered a dinner party for a client last night and we were especially puffed up over the fact that most of the food came from our garden here in the District of Columbia about one mile from the White House.

The world may be going to hell in a handbasket elsewhere, but our front yard here is still making great food.

The opening salad, for instance, was harvested just hours before the guests arrived: a half-dozen varieties of greens provided a background for Purple Cherokee and Brandywine tomatoes tossed with multi-colored beets. Around an entree of sweet-and-sour braised chicken thighs, we served minted orange and golden carrots, and this incredible casserole of beans, tomatoes and toasted bread crumbs.

I'm calling it a meatless cassoulet but of course it isn't a cassoulet at all. It only cooks in the oven for about an hour, but the flavors so remind me of the famous dish of confit and sausage and beans from Southwestern France that a comparison is almost inevitable.

I saw Alice Waters demonstrate this dish on television where she used cranberry beans. I wanted to see if it would adapt to the "lima" beans we grew in our garden this year, of which there was a ton still to be eaten. I put quotes around the "lima" part because these were not the lima beans with which I have been familiar since childhood--those bright green beans that some people love so much to hate. They came out of the pods a mottled brown and white and turned a deep chocolate brown when cooked, reminding me more of the dried fava beans you find in the Middle Eastern grocery.

Whatever they are, they have a wonderfully deep, meaty and satisfying flavor. I thought they would compare favorably to cranberry beans and I think they actually outdo them for flavor in this casserole.

For a small casserole, you need about 1 1/2 cups of cooked beans, saving the cooking liquid (I cooked mine with some onion, garlic, thyme, bay leaf). Set those aside and saute in some extra-virgin olive oil 1/2 medium onion, diced small, and a large clove of garlic--or two--finely chopped. Season with coarse salt. Add several sage leaves, chopped fine to make about 1 tablespoon.

Meanwhile, toast fresh bread crumbs made by removing the crusts from a couple of thick slices of rustic bread (we've been using a loaf with rosemary) and pulsing them in a food processor until broken down into small pieces.

Toss the cooked beans, the onion-garlic-sage mix and a medium heirloom tomato roughly chopped (about 1 cup). Season with salt and pepper and pour this into your casserole. Pour leftover bean cooking liquid into the casserole to just cover the vegetable mix. (You can use chicken stock if you don't have bean cooking liquid). Top with bread crumbs and place in a 375-degree oven. Bake until the bread crumbs are golden brown and the liquid has been absorbed. Serve warm.

Beans, onion, garlic, sage--what a great combination, and the bread crumbs almost make the dish a meal in itself. Try this and see if it doesn't taste like a meatless cassoulet to you. You will be hungering for the leftovers.

Bean Novice

I'm not a complete neophyte where beans are concerned. This is my second year of a successful pole bean harvest. My favorite are these Italian flat beans that grow on fairly small plants but happily turn out one wave of pods after another with very little tending.

There is one small issue with these beans. I've been planting them along an alleyway that leads to the basement, which puts the beans about five feet in the air if you are standing in the alley. The vegetable bed is too deep to reach the beans from the ground level, so I have to fetch a step-ladder if I want to harvest beans. It's a bit of a disincentive. On the other hand, you have to pass the bean plants walking from the driveway to the front door, so monitoring their progress is a snap, so to speak.


Fresh, these pods have a deep, meaty flavor, unlike anything you buy in the store. I use them more like an ingredient. As soon as I've harvested, I cook them in a pot of salted water, then chill them in cold water. They're great just to pick at as is, but I usually toss them into a pilaf of some sort--brown basmati rice, say, or quinoa--with other ingredients. This way they will feed us several times during the season.

Where I'm having more difficulty is with the shell beans. This was my first year planting lima beans. I had the seeds, just never got around to it last year. I planted one bed nearly full with bush beans, then several pole bean seeds to grow up a trellis in the middle of the garden. The bush beans seemed to thrive much more readily than the pole lima, of which I ended up with one very vigorous plant.

The problem: I don't know when to pick these beans. Never done it before. No idea. I described my dilemma to a cohort at the Washington Youth Garden (so much garden knowledge walking around there amongst the volunteers) and she advised picking the pods as soon as I detect beans in them. "They're wonderful steamed," she said.

So after not focusing at all on these beans--either the bush beans or the pole beans--the entire season, today I went out to do some harvesting and realised that very nearly the entire crop of bush beans is weeks past prime, meaning the pods are dry and brown and the beans have turned into seeds. I dug up all the plants and did manage to salvage some pods that were still green. Those went into a bowl.


I then got out a tall ladder to inspect the pole lima and found it flush with bean pods. Some have already dried and browned but most of them, remarkably, have not yet ripened. They are still several days away.

When I examined my bowl of pods, I found a real variety, ranging from beans not mature at all, to some that are deliciously ripe and desperate to be eaten. My impression is that the best beans are in pods that are just beginning to lose their color. Opening the pods--or shelling the beans--is much easier. The younger beans tend not to open so easily.



Anyway, I shelled everything I had, in all the various stages of ripeness, and set them to cooking in a pot of salted water. When I judged them tender, I strained them into a bowl, dressed them with some extra-virgin olive oil, coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper and some finely chopped mint leaves.

I have to say, even if I know next to nothing about beans, these are wonderful. A big meaty flavor, nicely seasoned with the mint and olive oil. A squeeze of lemon would work, too.

Perhaps some of you out there can tell me how to be a better bean farmer?

Pantry Soup

After months of complaining about all the stuff jammed into our too-small kitchen pantry, my wife reached the end of her patience and started re-organizing during this week's bitter cold snap. (Really, I was just about to do it myself, I swear!) We set up a folding table in the foyer and, under threat of death if I touched anything, I watched my wife pull everything off the pantry shelves and begin composing little groups of similar items on the folding table, and on the kitchen counters, and on the kitchen table. "Look! How many bags of brown sugar do you suppose I've found?" she asked with just a bit of sarcasm in her voice. Can I help it that I teach classes where we use a lot of brown sugar?

What I did notice among all the odds and ends were small, half-used bags of pink beans, bundled together with rubber bands, and another little balled-up package of pearled barley. I remembered an eight-cup container of left-over chicken stock I'd recently made, just taking up space in the fridge. And the idea of some kind of soup began to form in my head. Because I don't have a recipe for this particular soup, and because I can't think of a better way to celebrate our newly organized pantry, I'm calling it "Pantry Soup." Otherwise, you might call it "beans and barley soup," but as you will see, this soup really is a mongrel.

I confess, "Pantry Soup" is not entirely my invention, merely a riff on a dish I found years ago in Bert Greene's The Grains Cookbook. (But isn't the power of suggestion wonderful, to say nothing of one's food memory bank?) Besides being a terrific reference for just about every grain in the world, this particular book contains a few recipes you'd have to consider definite keepers. One is the recipe for chollent that Greene borrowed from My Mother's Cookbook by someone named Fanny Silverstein. Those familiar with Jewish traditions may have fond or not-so-fond memories of chollent, the pot roast traditionally served on the sabbath. In orthodox practice, Jews are not permitted to engage in any kind of work--including cooking--on the sabbath day. So what they did in order to have a hot meal was take the cooking pot containing the pot roast ingredients to the local baker's the day before. At the end of the day, the pot would go into the oven as the fire was dying and remain there until the following morning, when it would be retrieved by the family intending to eat it. Apparently, some pot roasts survived this overnight treatment better than others. For those not interested in waiting overnight, Bert Greene's (or should I say Ms. Silverstein's) version only takes four hours of baking at 250 degrees. The main ingredients are: One big slab of chuck roast, preferably a blade roast with the bone in; one cup of pink beans; one cup of pearled barley; the usual soup vegetables, along with a small fistful of Hangarian paprika and powedered ginger. This was the sort of thing I had in mind when I saw the little bundles of pink beans and barley coming out of our over-stuffed pantry, minus the slab of beef.

Besides making a huge pot of soup, I also discovered something about my friends the pink beans. I had always assumed that the intense flavor of my chollent owed to the unctuousness of the beef blade roast. But after making "Pantry Soup," I realized this impression was faulty. Much of the intense flavor actually comes from the beans. Otherwise, the soup looks very much like the chollent, with the starchy barley, the beans, and not-too-much stock combining in a wonderfully velvety, deeply flavorful pottage. I wish I could say I measured exactly what I was putting into the pot as I was making this soup. But in the spirit of just cleaning out the pantry, I didn't, and now I regret that a little, but not too much, regret not being an ingredient we use around soups. I know the finished soup was a little heavy on the beans and barley, and required adding more stock. This is where we get to the mongrel part, because I ran out of the pre-made chicken stock and had to use what was left in a container of beef broth. Then I had to fetch a can of what I thought was chicken stock from our other pantry, but that turned out to be beef broth as well. So in the end the soup tasted even more like the aforementioned chollent than I would otherwise have a right to expect.

Anyway, here's approximately what you do to arrive at "Pantry Soup":

3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 large onion, peeled and diced small
2 large carrots, peeled and diced small
1 teaspoon coarse salt
2 large cloves garlic, smashed and minced
1 cup pink beans
1 cup pearled barley
8 cups stock (can be chicken, beef, vegetable or combination, more as desired)
Freshly ground black pepper to taste

In a large, heavy soup pot or Dutch oven, heat the oil over high heat until it just begins to smoke. Toss the onion and carrot into the pot and lower the heat to medium-low. Stir in salt. Cook until onion is soft, about 8 minutes. Stir in garlic and cook another minute. Add beans, barley and stock. Increase heat until soup just begins to boil, then reduce heat to low, cover the pot and allow soup to cook until the beans are perfectly tender, three hours or more. Season with pepper. If the soup seems too thick, add more stock or water. Serve hot with a good, crusty bread.