Category

Beans

  • Things You Can Do With A Big Pot of Beans (Or: My Take on the Mediterranean Diet)

    Things You Can Do With A Big Pot of Beans (Or: My Take on the Mediterranean Diet)

    The New York Times recently published an article with a powerful first sentence: “About 30 percent of heart attacks, strokes and deaths from heart disease can be prevented in people at high risk if they switch to a Mediterranean diet rich in olive oil, nuts, beans, fish, fruits and vegetables, and even drink wine with…

  • One Bag of Beans, Three Meals (Balsamic Pork Chops, Chorizo Dinner Tacos & Breakfast Tacos)

    One Bag of Beans, Three Meals (Balsamic Pork Chops, Chorizo Dinner Tacos & Breakfast Tacos)

    If I’m lucky enough to write another cookbook, I’d like to write one about using pantry staples. That’s how you separate a cook from a recipe follower: the recipe follower makes a list, buys what they need for that recipe, cooks it and repeats that process again the next day. A cook opens the refrigerator,…

  • Summer Black Bean Chili with East Coast Grill Corn Bread

    Summer Black Bean Chili with East Coast Grill Corn Bread

    My cookbook photographer Lizzie Leitzell is in town for a wedding and, of course, I had to have her and her fiance Kyle over for dinner to catch up, to reminisce about our cookbook travels and to talk about what we’re working on now. The nice thing about having Lizzie over for dinner is that…

  • Yesterday’s Beans Are Today’s Bruschetta Topping

    Yesterday’s Beans Are Today’s Bruschetta Topping

    This post combines three recent posts into one scrumptious bite: (1) Rancho Gordo beans; (2) My Love Affair with Toast; and (3) My Very Own Herb Garden. Let’s start with the toast: instead of a jam-topped breakfast concoction, this toast moves in a more savory direction. I toasted it just like normal (I couldn’t cut…

  • What’s Up With These Black Chickpeas?

    What’s Up With These Black Chickpeas?

    At Cookbook, the delightful store in Echo Park where I bought my first bag of Rancho Gordo beans, I came upon a bag of black chickpeas. “What’s up with these black chickpeas?” I asked the nice people there. “They’re just like regular chickpeas,” said Robert, one of those nice people. “Except…well…they’re black.” With a sales…

  • One Bag of Lentils, Two Dinners

    One Bag of Lentils, Two Dinners

    There are two kinds of people who cook at home: the first kind chooses an elaborate recipe, buys all of the ingredients, spends hours cooking it, invites friends to eat it, spends hours cleaning it, and takes the rest of the week off. The other kind has long-range vision, makes a large batch of something…

  • Rancho Gordo’s Good Mother Stallard Beans with Lamb Sausage (By Way of Echo Park)

    Rancho Gordo’s Good Mother Stallard Beans with Lamb Sausage (By Way of Echo Park)

    The best dinners are the ones that have a story. This is one such dinner. It started on a typical day: I was driving to Silverlake to eat lunch at Forage (one of my favorite places to grab a bite here in L.A.) and to have coffee and do work at Intelligentsia. Only, it was…

  • Chickpea Curry

    Chickpea Curry

    One of my favorite things to make on a weeknight, these days, is a kitchen cupboard chickpea curry. It goes like this: I open my kitchen cupboard, pull out a can of chickpeas, a bag of rice, a tube of tomato paste, a can of coconut milk, and as many spices as I feel like…

  • Stewed Borlotti Beans with Polenta

    Stewed Borlotti Beans with Polenta

    My favorite way to cook, the cooking that makes me happiest, is the kind of cooking you do on the fly: no planning, no prepping. You just see what you have already on hand and you make dinner. And often that dinner is way better than the dinner you spend a week prepping for, shopping…

  • The Best Beans of Your Life

    The Best Beans of Your Life

    If someone asks my friend Diana what I got her for her birthday this year, she’s very likely to answer: “Beans. I got beans for my birthday.” That sounds like a negative thing, but in the case of Diana’s birthday dinner, it was entirely positive. These beans, like the beans Jack trades his cow for,…