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.

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.

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.

A Frugal Dinner

Rummaging through the freezer the other day, I came across snack bags stuffed with last year's carrots. They'd been cooked, stored and forgotten. I pulled some out to defrost and discovered they make a wonderful meal, simply heated in the microwave. The carrots are still tender and sweet--hard to tell they were harvested 8 months ago.

Toss the carrots with some leftover brown Basmati rice and fresh cilantro. Dress with red wine vinegar, extra-virgin olive oil, a little salt, some freshly ground black pepper. Voila: dinner.

Preparation time: 5 minutes

Shopping: none

Dark Days: One-Pot Chicken

This meal starts with the roasting chicken we received in our weekly CSA package from farmer friend Brett.

This is not to be confused with the stewing hen I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. Brett, being a man of many facets, deals in two kinds of chicken. One, the laying hen, needs to be cooked forever. The roaster cooks more like a conventional bird. Brett advises that it may be a bit chewier than the chicken you buy at the store. It does spend most of its time running around the farmyard pecking at things, after all.

We share our CSA subscription with friends Helen and Jeff so what we were dealing with in fact was half a bird. My visit to the farmers market over the weekend was intended to find some companion vegetables for the chicken. The dish that took shape--improvisational in the truest sense--was a one-pot affair with rice and squash on the side.

Divide the chicken into pieces and brown it in batches with extra-virgin olive oil at the bottom of a heavy pot or Dutch oven. Set the chicken aside and toss an onion, diced large, into the pot, scraping any brown bit off the bottom of the pot. When the onion has softened and browned a little, add about three cloves garlic, thinly sliced, to the pot and cook for a minute or two. Then add a large carrot and a large parsnip, peeled and sliced on an angle. Also add a large white potato and a sweet potato cut into 1-inch pieces. Place several sprigs thyme and a bay leaf or two amongst the vegetables and add two cups chicken stock and one can diced tomatoes with the juices.

Note: this dish cooks for about 1 1/2 hours on the stove top. If you like your potatoes and sweet potatoes more on the firm side, wait until 45 minutes or so into the cooking before adding them.

Bring the pot to a boil, then reduce the heat to very low and simmer until the chicken is extremely tender and ready to fall off the bone. Originally I had thought of serving this in a bowl with the broth, like a pot au feu, but changed my mind and decided to present it more in the Hispanic manner with rice.. I drained off the cooking liquid and used it to make brown rice, making the plate a bit monochromatic and bit redundant in the starch department. A squash I had intended to cook with the chicken was impossible to peel, so I baked it in the oven and served it--mashed--on the side, mixed with some brown sugar.

This simple, rustic dinner could have come out of your grandmother's root cellar, but of course you have the satisfaction of knowing you made it yourself from the best ingredients around.

Paella Deconstructed

Let me confess up front that I am new to paella and that the sum total of my knowledge comes from the two books on Spanish cooking in my collection: Delicioso!, by Penelope Casas, and My Kitchen in Spain, by Janet Mendel.

Paella is a dish I have always wanted to become more familiar with but was simply intimidated. I'm not a rice cooker by habit, and I don't have a Paella pan. I kept putting thoughts of paella aside, figuring some day I would bite the bullet and actually purchase an authentic paella pan and master the technique.

Sometimes fate intervenes. A catering friend recently called with an urgent request: she had a dinner for 20 to cater three days hence. Paella was the centerpiece of the buffet, and her chef was stuck in New York. Could we possibly intervene?

So I gave myself a crash course in paella making using the above references and here is what they said:

* Paella was a farmer's or field hand's dish, made of several different ingredients--but always rice--in a single, wide pan over an open fire.

* Paella originates from the area around Valencia and traditionally did not contain seafood but earthy meats such as rabbit, pork, sausage, snails and chicken.

* A short- to medium-grain Spanish rice is preferred for making paella, but similar rice from other sources, such as Arborio rice, can be substituted.

* Paella is a festive dish, usually reserved for gatherings of friends and family, much like a barbecue.

* Paella should have a bright yellow color, some from the addition of saffron, but largely as a result of yellow food coloring.

* The traditional pan for cooking paella is wide--17 or 18 inches--and shallow, and ideally used over a wood fire.

* As at a family barbecue, the paella is cooked for the guests with great fanfare, then served immediately.

Given that we had neither the paella pan nor the open wood fire, our challenge was to approximate as closely as possible a genuine paella in a catering situation where it would have to be transported to another location and reheated.

I genuinely like the idea of one-pot cooking over an open fire. One of my most vivid food memories is picking grapes in the champagne region of France where breafast consisted of the pickers and the owners gathering around a fire and eating bread and sausage and quafing generous quantities of wine. But I was not confident that I could make a one-pot dish of paella--especially for 20 people--without overcooking the meat or having the rice come out either undercooked or mushy.

So we kept the idea of using one pot, where all the flavors could meld together, but cooked the different ingredients separately, catering style.

To serve six persons, start with a heavy pot with a coating of extra-virgin olive oil at the bottom over moderately-high heat. Add 6 ounces of andouille or Kielbasa sausage, sliced. Brown the sausage, then add the meat from four chicken thighs, cut into chunks, season with salt and pepper and cook until the chicken is cooked through. Remove the sausage and chicken and set aside.

If necessary, add more olive oil to the pot, then add one green bell pepper, cut into medium dice, and cook until the pepper begins to soften. Lower heat and add 1 or 2 finely-minced garlic cloves. Continue cooking until garlic is cooked through. Remove pepper and garlic (add to sausage and chicken) and set aside.

In the same pot, add 1 cup short-grain Spanish or Arborio rice, along with 2 cups chicken stock, a generous pinch of saffron, about 4 drops yellow food coloring and 1 bay leaf. Season with salt to taste. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, covered, until rice has absorbed most, but not all, of the liquid. Add 1/2 can diced tomatoes, drained, and about 2 tablespoons pimentos. Stir into rice. Place 1/2 pound large shrimp, peeled with tails left intact, on top of rice. Replace cover and continue cooking until shrimp are just cooked through. Remove them (add to sausage, chicken and other cooked ingredients) and set aside. Add about 2 dozen cleaned and de-bearded mussels to the top of the rice, replace cover, and continue cooking until the mussels have cooked through. Remove mussels and set aside separately as garnish. (The juices from the mussels will permeate the rice.)

Lastly, stir about 1/2 cup frozen peas into the rice.

When the rice is cooked through, the paella can be served immediately, seasoning with salt and freshly ground black pepper and mixing with the other reserved ingredients in a large bowl. Garnish with cooked mussles.

Or, if serving the paella later in the day (or the following day), allow the rice to cool before mixing in the other ingrediens and simply re-heat it. Refrigerate the cooked mussles in a sealed container. Alternatively, refrigerate the rice and other ingredients separately, then reheat them separately before mixing.

Kids Make Pumpkin-Wild Rice Pilaf

Last week I wanted to make something with pumpkin in our "food appreciation" classes to coincide with Halloween. But wouldn't know there wasn't a single pumpkin to be found in the local stores. We'd heard stories that the pumpkin harvest was going to be light this year because of the drought that hit this part of the country. We assumed our East Coast farmers had simply run out of pumpkins.

Well, the pumpkins are back in the Whole Foods this week, along with tons of other squashes. These are not the huge carving pumpkins you display on your front stoop, but the smaller culinary pumpkins, sometimes referred to as "pie pumpkins" or "sugar pumpkins."

I knew this would be an interesting lesson for the kids because it's not every day you skin and slice a pumpkin and then eat it. In fact, it turned out to be an interesting lesson for me as well because--confession here--I've never cooked with a live pumpkin before either. The closest I've ever come is processed pumpkin out of a can.

So how do you skin a pumpkin?

Fortunately, these pumpkins are smaller than a bowling ball and no trick to handle. But you want to create a flat surface so they aren't rolling around the cutting board. Use a large chef's knife or serrated bread knife to cut off both ends--not too much, just a sliver so the inner flesh is showing. Then use that same serrated knife to cut off all the skin, working the blade from top to bottom.

Next, the pumpkin has to be sliced in half to get at the seeds. For this I use a very long chef's knife and a rubber mallet. Position the blade, then tap with the mallet, first at one end of the blade, then the other. This doesn't require too much force.

It's easiest to scoop out the seeds at this point using a spoon. I use a grapefruit spoon with teeth on it. But to get the kids involved, I cut the pumpkin into thin wedges and passed these around so they could remove the seeds themselves. We collected all the seeds to roast later, and bagged the rest of the refuse to compost.

Now, on to the recipe. It's not at all difficult and it uses native ingredients (the pumpkin, wild rice, maple syrup), perfect for November, which is American Indian Heritage Month. For six to eight generous portions, simply cut the pumpkin wedges into 1-inch pieces (about 5 cups). Combine in a large bowl with a medium onion, cut into small dice. Mix in 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil and 2 tablespoons dark maple syrup. Season with coarse salt and freshly ground black pepper. Pour the mix into a baking pan, add 1/2 cup water. Cover tightly with aluminum foil and place in a 350-degree oven.

Meanwhile, cook the wild rice, placing 1 cup rice in a saucepan with 2 cups of water and a generous pinch of salt. Bring to a boil then reduce heat and simmer for about 45 minutes, or until the rice is very tender and beginning to crack open.

After the pumpkin mixture has been in the oven 30 minutes, remove the aluminum foil and bake another 30 minutes, or until the pumpkin is cooked through. Toss the pumpkin mix and wild rice in a mixing bowl and stir in 1/2 cup or more dried cranberries (some dried blueberries would also work) and chopped parsley. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve warm or room temperature.

This recipe came from The Washington Post, perhaps the first time I've used a recipe from that paper that I didn't write myself. And I have to say, if I were doing it again, I would probably do it differently. For instance, the pumpkin could be roasted on a baking sheet to caramelize a little for extra flavor. I would sautee the onions separately to caramelize as well, and I might use red onions rather than Bermuda onions for some extra sweetness and color. The Post's recipe did not call for dried fruit or parsley, but without them I think this dish is extremely plain. You could even add some toasted nuts, such as walnuts or pecans, and maybe some orange zest. At that point it comes very close to the sweet potato salad that we like so much.

While my assistant was mixing the pumpkin and wild rice and setting out serving plates for the kids, we read "Runaway Pumpkin," a rhyming story that just manages to bridge from the youngest kids to the older ones. As far as the food goes, even the younger ones like the combination of pumpkin and maple syrup, and they find the wild rice appealing. But then, kids seem to like rice no matter how it's prepared.

Simple Tools, Nature vs. Culture

Sometimes simple tools are the best, and I find that the simpler they are, the more I use them. Usually, I'd rather mash something up in my molcajete than go through the trouble of heaving my cuisinart out of its place in the kitchen cabinet, then disassembling it and cleaning all the parts, only to have to put it back together again and heave it back into its spot in the kitchen cabinet. (I suppose if I had a kitchen counter a mile long, or a professional kitchen, or a wife who did not insist that things be put back in their place, I could just let the Cuisinart sit out somewhere and not do all this heaving.)

Take this potato ricer. I think I bought it for a dollar at a flea market one year when we were vacationing in Maine. (We were actually looking for old cast-iron pots, only to discover--silly us--that old cast-iron pots are now collector's items and fetch a small fortune in the flea markets.) This particular potato ricer is probably older than I am. But unlike most of the tools made these days, it was built to last and it has. It performs one useful function that I know of--turning cooked potatoes into thin little micro-streams of potato--and does it without fail, every time. It washes fairly quickly, folds neatly and just sits in its place in a drawer, waiting for the next batch of potatoes.

Not that I personally advocate a potato ricer for making mashed potatoes. From what I can tell, the world is divided into two camps: people who gag on mashed potatoes that are not as smooth as velvet, with no discernable lumps, bumps or odd bits, and people who just like potatoes and don't care whether they're whole or mashed or squashed or smashed with the skins on or off or loaded up with a bunch of dairy or just infused with a little extra virgin olive oil. I happen to fall into the latter camp: You can serve me potatoes any old way, dressed with a little olive oil and parmesan cheese. I don't mind them lumpy. In fact, I think "perfectly" mashed potatoes--i.e. those made with the ricer--fall into the category of "fussy" food for "fussy" eaters, and normally I wouldn't make these for myself. These particular mashed potatoes are for a client whose preferences I don't know.

And that is what I find most interesting about mashed potatoes, that our cultural default setting is the smooth-as-velvet kind of potatoes, usually with a load of butter (not olive oil) and cream or possibly milk. Add up the ingredients and it is immediately apparent that these kind of potatoes on a macro level are not a healthy food (the butter, the cream), although they may be texturally pleasing on the level of, say, baby food. And on a micro level we are finding that mashed potatoes are a poor choice because the starch contained therein enters the blood stream that much more quickly when the potatoes are pulverized to the point of being atomized, causing spikes in blood sugar, resulting in spikes of insulin, resulting in a spiral of hunger-eating-weight gain and eventually--potentially--diabetes. Am I saying that one little scoop of mashed potatoes with butter or gravy will lead you straight to hell and elevated blood sugar? No, but isn't it interesting that we have a cultural preference for the texturally (and I might add, visually) less interesting and less healthful super-fine mashed potatoes over the just-smashed-and-drizzled-with-olive-oil variety...

Yet it is thus almost everywhere you look. Not just with potatoes. Our biases run in the same direction with virtually all foods. Whole grains, for instance, are still shunned by most. Yet anyone who has tried a loaf of well-made, whole-wheat bread knows it is vastly superior in taste and texture to the ubiquitous white bread. Anyone who has tried steel cut oats, or oat groats, knows they beat the pants off any brand of instant oatmeal for flavor and for chew. And anyone who has tried brown rice knows that is far superior in taste, mouth feel and healthful benefits than your standard white rice. The cultural bias that we cooks are constantly fighting has always been toward the more refined, the smoother, the plainer, the whiter. And that's because this is not a matter of taste or texture or health, people. This is, in its cultural origins, a matter of class. Those who can afford it want their bread white, not brown. Those who can afford it want their rice white, not brown. Whatever it is, they want it polished and refined and bleached. The whiter the better. If nutrition and flavor are lost in the process, so be it...

This made sense to me, and yet it did not, specifically in the area of rice. I have never been a big fan of white rice. My daughter loves white rice smothered with soy sauce. But to me, white rice is just the Asian equivalent of Wonder Bread. It has no flavor. It's too white. It is the culinary equivalent of library paste. I much prefer brown rice, its chew, its nutty flavor, the woodsy aroma of it bubbling slowly in its pot on the stove. So if brown rice is that much better, and white rice would be the rich man's rice, why is white rice the poverty food of Asia? This question lay there on a subliminal level for ever so long, a question for the ages with no answer in sight. Then I experienced a Eureka! moment while reading a small book called The One-Straw Revolution by a Japanese farmer/author named Masanobu Fukuoka.

Fukuoka has become a cult figure through his Zen-master style of no-till, natural farming, or what he calls "farming among the weeds" and "growing vegetables like wild plants." He grows rice in dry fields, exchewing the traditional flooding or paddy culture. He believes that flooding to prevent weeds merely results in weaker plants more vulnerable to pests and disease. Fukuoka advocates no chemicals, no fertilizers, and less work in the fields. He confounds the experts with crop yields equal to or better than those of his neighbors who practice modern methods advocated by the agricultural establishment. Fukuoka argues that foods grown naturally, with less work, should be cheaper than those grown with high investments in machinery and chemicals. All very interesting, especially to an organic gardener such as myself. But the Eureka! moment for me came when Fukuoka turned to the subject of food, flavor, culture and, specifically, the eating of rice.

"Most people today have even become separated from the flavor of rice," Fukuoka writes. "The whole grain is refined and processed, leaving only the tasteless starch. Polished rice lacks the unique fragrance and flavor of whole rice. Consequently, it requires seasonings and must be supplemented with side dishes or covered with sauce. People think, mistakenly, that it does not matter that the food value of the rice is low, as long as vitamin supplements or other foods such as meat or fish supply the missing nutrients."

As far as I'm concerned, hearing this from a very wise Japanese farmer seals the deal on brown rice. But for Fukuoka, there is even more at stake. "When people rejected natural food and took up refined food instead, society set out on a path toward its own destruction," he says. "This is because such food is not the product of true culture. Food is life and life must not step away from nature."

To which I say, Amen brother. And keep your potato ricer in the drawer.