Recipe: Cranberry Beans and Rice

[coraa]

When I mentioned buying cranberry beans for my cranberry beans and rice dish, vom_marlowe asked for my recipe. So here it is! Coincidentally, I'm also making it tonight.

Beans and rice (of which cranberry beans is one of my very favorite variants, although you could sub in dried black or kidney beans if you don't have cranberry beans handy) is one of those dishes that I have made so often I can make it on instinct—my family growing up ate various bean and rice dishes often, since we liked them and they're inexpensive, and then when I was in college I made them whenever I had a stove, because, again, cheap and tasty and filling.

Because I've made it so often, it's also one of the dishes that I make without a recipe, by ear, adjusted for what I happen to have, or not have, in the pantry. So the recipe has a lot of 'if you happen to have this, then use it; otherwise, use this other thing.' It's a good recipe to play with to suit your own taste.

It can be made with meat (although the meat amount is pretty light even so) or vegetarian, or, as I am making it today, vegetarian with meat on the side, to be added by those who like it.

Cranberry Beans and Rice

• 1 cup dried cranberry beans (or substitute kidney, or black, or other beans that you like)
  
• Fat, one of the following: (For the terminally indecisive, my favorite is sausage.)
  
  • 2 tbsp vegetable oil, OR
    
  • 1/4 lb chopped or crumbled sausage, OR
    
  • 2 slices bacon
  
  
• Onion-type vegetable, one of the following: (For the terminally indecisive, my favorite is a plain yellow onion.)
  
  • 1 yellow onion, OR
    
  • 1 leek, OR
    
  • 2 shallots
  
  
• Aromatics, at least two of the following: (I use as many as I have on hand)
  
  • 2 celery stalks
    
  • 2 small or 1 large carrot
    
  • 1 red or green bell pepper
  
  
• 1 tsp sugar
  
• salt
  
• 2-5 cloves garlic, depending on your garlic tolerance
  
• 2 tbsp tomato paste (optional, but nice)
  
• black pepper
  
• 2 tsp dried or 2 tbsp fresh thyme (or sub oregano if you have no thyme; the flavor isn't the same, but either works)
  
• 1 tsp paprika (smoked is nice, but any kind will work)
  
• 2 bay leaves
  
• 2 cups rice
  
• a few splashes of Tabasco sauce, or other hot sauce of choice
  
• a squirt of lime juice, or a splash of cider vinegar

First, cook your beans however you like to cook beans. I say it this way because bean cookery is one of those things that's almost more like religion than science. That said, if you're curious, my bean cooking method—per Cook's Illustrated—is this: Soak the beans in cold, salted water for 6-8 hours, or overnight. (Folk wisdom says that salted water makes bean skins tough, but Cook's Illustrated says that the opposite is true, and I have faith in CI.) Drain and rinse briefly, then cook in plenty of plain water for 35-50 minutes. The wide range of times is because beans take longer to cook depending on how old they are, how they were stored, how moist or dry they were to start with, et cetera. Around the 35-40 minute mark I start fishing out a bean and tasting it every five minutes. You want to pull the beans off the heat when they are tender and creamy but still hold their shape.

Drain and briefly rinse the beans again, then set aside.

Now here's the first decision point: vegetarian, meat-optional, or meaty? For vegetarian beans, or meat-optional beans, just measure 2 tbsp of vegetable oil into a sturdy soup pot. (If you're going meat-optional, you'll prep the meat later, so it can be added on a person-by-person basis.) Hurrah, you're done. For meaty beans, you can choose sausage or bacon. Crumble the sausage, or chop the bacon, and heat it in the same sturdy soup pot over medium heat until much of the fat has rendered out of the meat and the meat is starting to brown. Then spoon the browned meat out onto a plate, leaving the fat in the pan.

Then consider your onion or onionlike vegetable. If it's a regular onion (yellow, red, white, or brown), chop it coarsely; I usually split it into quarters, then slice the quarters, so as to make long narrow pieces. If it's a leek, split it and slice it to make half-rings, using only the white or pale-green parts; the coarse dark-green parts don't, in my experience, soften well. (Also be sure to rinse well, since leeks are often sandy. I dump all the sliced pieces in a sieve and rinse well; this serves both to get rid of the grit and to break up the half-moon slices into half-rings.) If it's a shallot, chop similarly to the onion, though, as shallots tend to be smaller, the pieces will probably be smaller.

On to the other aromatic vegetables. If you're using celery, slice it into thin pieces. If you're using carrots, dice them. If you're using bell peppers, cut into bite-size pieces.

Go back to your sturdy soup pot full of fat, whether it's vegetable oil or rendered sausage/bacon fat. Turn the heat up to high and dump in your onion and other aromatics. Cook, stirring constantly, over high heat, or until the vegetables just start to color. Then drop the heat to low and stir in a teaspoon of sugar. If you used vegetable oil rather than bacon or sausage fat, this is a good time to add a teaspoon or so of salt. (If you used bacon/sausage, it's already contributed some salt.) Give it another stir, and walk away for ten minutes. Come back and stir again, and then walk away for ten more minutes. Repeat until the onions are sort of a toasty medium brown, which usually takes me about 30 minutes. (If this looks very similar to the caramelized-onion recipe I posted, that's because it's exactly what it is. A lot of bean and rice recipes just sweat the vegetables, but I like the flavor depth brought in by caramelized veg, especially if I'm going vegetarian.) When they're medium-brown, add the garlic and tomato paste and cook and stir for a couple of minutes, or until the fragrant cooked-garlic smell starts to waft up from the pot.

When the vegetables are well and thoroughly caramelized and the garlic is fragrant, add your cooked and drained beans, along with a teaspoon of salt, a few grinds of black pepper (if I'm going vegetarian, I usually bump up the pepper a smidge), thyme or oregano, paprika, bay leaves, and enough water to cover. If you're serving to meat-eaters, also add the cooked, reserved bacon or sausage. Turn the heat up to medium-high until the water just starts to boil, then turn back down to a simmer and simmer for about an hour. It will reduce, so that the water gets thicker, and some of the beans may burst; this is fine. (In fact, sometimes I burst some of the beans on purpose by mashing them with the back of a spoon, to thicken the sauce.) You're not aiming for a soup-type liquid, you're aiming for a thick, bean-rich sauce. You might add a bit more water if it starts to look too dry, though, to prevent scorching.

Meanwhile, in a separate pot (or, in my case, a rice cooker), cook the rice, and then keep it warm for serving.

If you're making the dish meat-optional, now is the time to brown your sausage or bacon, and chop or crumble it up. Then set it aside.

When the bean and veg mixture has cooked down so that it's thick and flavorful and fragrant, taste and adjust the salt. Then add Tabasco or other hot sauce (you'll want to make it spicy to suit your tastes), and either a splash of lime juice or a tablespoon or so of cider vinegar, for a little bit more oomf.

Serve the beans ladled over rice. If you are a meat-eater and it was made meat-optional, sprinkle sausage or bacon over the top.

Garnish with parsley if you're a garnishing type of person. If not, don't. Sour cream is also nice, if you're in the mood for it, as it chopped tomato. So is a mild cheese, like queso fresco or Monterey Jack. But really, it's also perfectly nice on its own, just beans and rice.

Comments

[coraa.livejournal.com]

Of course! Hallo. :)