October 5th, 2008 - Beans and rice
Thanks to a number of reasons, Eric and I have spent the past two weeks eating a lot of beans and rice (sometimes together, sometimes not). I’d like to give credit to some of the influences:
The blog Lentils and Rice is not a direct influence but I’ve been reading for a couple months now and it’s nagged me to think about more legumes and rice. Let’s say it watered the seed (I can’t say planted since I’ve long known beans and rice are good to eat, hence the rice in the freezer I had Eric get 6 weeks ago that we didn’t eat right away).
L&R recently pointed me to Simply Living Smart which I finally looked at Friday (it’s mainly about stocking up and storing foods long term, but also has tips for eating that food!). After registering (free and simple), I was able to view the section on beans. One tip was to add beans to tuna, chicken, or ham salad. Ding ding ding! Last week, I pulled ham out of the freezer for ham salad. (The first salad I made with light mayo. I’m not doing that again!) With the second pressure cooker of beans, I threw in the last of last year’s scarlet runner beans. Eric didn’t care for the texture (they may have been undercooked, as they were actually larger than the kidney beans, and they never split like the kidneys did), so picked them all out. They have dark purple skins (and white interiors), so are perfect for ham salad. I added them in. And, as Anitra promised, you wouldn’t know they were there! The purple skins (I chopped them with the ham in the mini chopper or you could puree them) just look like bits of well cooked ham skin. There’s no taste at all. And they made the ham salad with mayo worth about the same calories as the ham salad with light mayo! Part of that is that their creaminess meant I could put in less mayo (about twice the ham and I used the same amount of mayo).
Another piece of it is that beans and rice both store well. We want to build up our stored foods a bit more–we generally don’t keep a whole lot of extra food around. More than the average family perhaps, but not a ton. If the power goes out, for instance, or the flooding had been worse, it would be nice to know we had plenty of good food for a few weeks. Plus, the more food we buy now, the less it will cost since prices seem to just be going up (if only we’d bought more a year ago, or the year before!).
And finally, Eric was looking for something with a lot of protein and few calories. Beans fit the bill nicely!
I’ve had less beans than he but more rice I think. I’ve made Spanish rice twice. Tonight, Maggie adores it so much that I think she’s eaten at least half of what I made–meaning I won’t have the leftovers I was hoping for! (And she’s still eating….) I’ve often thought I’d like Spanish rice, but I just never made it. Since I was pulling rice out to go with the beans, it came to mind and I said “I’m going to do it!” The first time was a little funny: I had only ONE ripe tomato! (So I used a couple not quite ripe ones.) It was during the cool weather last week when things just slowed down in the garden. Tonight, I had plenty, all from the CSA since mine are still slow to ripen.
But we’re nearly out of rice, so Eric will need to head back to the Red Radish–or perhaps to the store here in town–to pick up some more and make a bulk order. Oh, and I forgot something important: It’s all brown rice. No non-nutritious white rice for us! This is also great as I don’t think Eric’s ever had brown rice before. Far as I can tell, it tastes the same, but I was never much into rice so I’m not sure.
One Response to “Beans and rice”
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October 6th, 2008 at 2:21 pm EDT
waaaaah! my wife hates all beans except green beans.
:-(