Pound for Pound, Bean for Bean

How to stretch your dollar and nourish your body while the world economy continues to crumble

Hiatus no more, we are so back - and here comes a long requested recipe intro to legumes and their friends with taste in mind, along with sourcing tips and an attempt not to linger on how the fuck we’re expected to buy groceries at all these days.

For a number of years in my early 20s, I was dead broke, in possession of one horrific pot without a lid, and very hungry from riding my road bike as a means of transport to and from very physically taxing barback shifts during which I made about $12. At two different apartments during this time, I did not have a refrigerator - well, I had one, but it was so infested with black mold and roaches that I actually once threw a party where I invited my friends to throw it over the railing of my apartment as it was a literal biohazard. After that, I scraped together enough money to buy an equally shitty, but way less infested, used fridge that most definitely ‘fell off of the truck’, only to get it up the stairs to find it would not fit through the doorway. If you were with me in those years, congratulations on making it through the trenches. It was dark.

This combination of factors would eventually lead me to challenging myself to make the cheapest possible meal while maximizing its caloric count so that I didn’t simply blow away, and I entered the glorious universe of lentils, curry powder, and caramelized onions. Ten years later, my comfort meal is very much the same - a quick combination of S&B Oriental curry powder, red lentils, and a spoonful of yoghurt. And with grocery prices being what they are now, I find myself feeling less secure at the grocery store unless I’m in the bulk aisle. Considering similar fare has kept monasteries holy for millenia, I don’t think there’s much wheel reinventing to do today - but when every dollar counts, I want to arm you with the knowledge to make the best choices for your body and your schedule.

Now, I have raved and ranted about fiber before, and it’s worth mentioning yet again that this country’s gastrointestinal landscape is about as bleak as it gets. The overabundance of processed foods, bleached, GMO wheat, starches upon starches and an almost total absence of good bacterias leads to skyrocketing colon cancer numbers in progressively younger age groups, not to mention record shattering cases of IBS, a total misunderstanding of ferments, and a deep fear of beans most have come to know in a can. We depend on packages of glyphosate drenched oat granola to tell us that just two spoonfuls will satisfy our fiber requirements, and we begrudgingly eat kale for which our hatred acidifies our bellies and somehow makes it worse. I am here, your bean queen, your lentil liason, to liberate you from a life of slow motility and $40 probiotics. You don’t need those. You just need beans.

Now, before we get into the nitty gritty, y’all know I love a formula, so let’s get through a few of those. The first important combination to consider on your bean quest - easy fiber + harder fiber + ferment = happy belly. You have heard, and likely been stopped by, the rumor that soaking beans is required prior to cooking. Well, yes and no. Soaking beans prior to cooking will significantly reduce the farty parts of them, known as oligosacchardies. I seriously encourage you to experiment with this - you can soak overnight, if you really want, you can blanch in boiling water, and you can soak for short times with acid. You can also sprout a lot of legumes and avoid these starches altogether. These methods are entirely up to you, but if you really want to beat the game, the stacked digestive method of mostly farty, less farty, and then fermenty, i.e. beans cooked with greens and eaten with kimchi or sauerkraut. When we talk about a whole body solution, we want to create a supercharged digestive machine inside of our body by strengthening and diversifying the beneficial bacterial colonies that already live there - consider this a workout plan for your gut.

A significant concept to consider here is this: monocropping is death to the most fertile of fields, and mono-eating is the death of your health. When you grow corn in a field, year after year, harvest it, plant it, fertilize it and repeat, you murder native colonies in soil which existed there originally in a homeostatic way. Many of you have heard of companion planting or cover cropping - I want to drive this home now so we can move forward talking about your bellies like the beautiful, thriving gardens we deserve for them to be. Within the soil of a forest, billions upon billions of very different, but very compatible, microbiota party to what I imagine is a very good four to the floor house music track beneath the surface. The leaf litter, the decomposing logs, the jewel orchids, the ferns, the goldenrods, the yarrow, all attract very different creatures which interact with their roots and create symbiotic bonds between the atmosphere, the plant, and the soil. This is sort of like a scene in a Viking movie where all sorts of dragons, oarsmen, and hatchet wielding witches get together to defeat the impending enemy siege - when something is everybody’s job, it’s nobody’s job, but when everybody has a purpose, the community is unstoppable - this goes for bacteria, humans, and basically everything in between. We are born with a finite amount of colonies in and on our body, stemming from our time in utero, our mothers, the pets we touch as children, the water we drink and the places we live. As we continue to devolve our diets, drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, increase cortisol, and stop eating whole foods, these colonies start to die, and most of them are utterly irreplaceable. I know we aren’t friends with him right now, but Huberman has a fabulous podcast about this from a few years back, discussing a potential future innovation where long lost bacterial colonies will be available to consume as supplements. That sounds like some rich people shit though, so I’ll bring it back to beans - rather than running from things that are hard to digest, we should use them to strengthen our ability to digest everything else. Consuming a probiotic product - kraut, yoghurt, kvass, etc., with something that is hard to digest, will, believe it or not, make it easier to digest.

A wonderful way to increase the mineral content and aide in the digestibility factor of many legumes is by sprouting them. I would not recommend sprouting something like cannelini beans, as the sheer waterlogging and growth of volume is much better suited for soaking or boiling. But for mung beans, chickpeas, or lentils - sprouting is an excellent option you can accomplish in a mason jar, a shallow bowl or a tupperware container. Cleanliness is key here - YouTube is full of tutorials and options so I won’t teach you about that here. If the fear of mold is too much, you can always purchase pre-sprouted grains - my favorite source for all things legume is www.nuts.com and here is a link for their sprouted things.

Alright, let’s get to some recipes. In my opinion, your best options here are mung beans, garbanzo beans, lentils, and great northern (white) beans. Are there other beans? Yes. Are there even fancy beans? Also yes - if you want those, check out heirloom bean farm Sheridan Acres. But as far as what you can get easily, what is consistently affordable, and what cooks up great from raw or sprouted, you’re looking at excellent nutrition and general ease of use + stock. The following four legumes come in at low prices per pound, and these recipes are guides to cook a lot of them all at once so you have one square meal, or two, accounted for every day. If you’re ready to be a bean queen, I will say that two investments I’d recommend are a dutch oven and good chicken stock. Another note is that the age, quality, variety, and harvest time of your beans will greatly influence their water requirements. During the cook time, please do pay attention to ensure you do not run out of water. Until beans are beginning to be fork tender, they should be fully submerged. You can always drain water out, but saving a bean that’s got too dry is a nearly impossible feat.

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MUNG BEANS! If you’ve never eaten a mung bean, I hope today is the day you change your mind. Absolute powerhouse of a bean, with just over 30g of protein per pound (cooked), phenomenal for sprouting, and extremely low in ogliosaccharides - which means they’re easy to digest and also pretty quick to cook. My go-to method of consumption is with coconut milk, lime, ginger and garlic - served as a blender soup with kimchi and some fried lime juice. Yum.

3 cups mung beans

1 can coconut milk, whole fat

6 cups water

3 tbsp soy sauce

2inch ginger root, grated (skin is good)

5 garlic cloves, grated (trust me)

2 limes, halved, zested

1 bunch cilantro

Kimchi for serving

This is the easiest soup you will ever make. Combine mung beans (no soaking required with garlic, ginger, and the juice of two limes, soy sauce, coconut milk and water. Stir well, simmer on medium-low until tender. In the meantime, cut your cilantro, with stems, into tiny bits, small enough to where you won’t mind chewing on the stems. When your mung beans are tender, turn off the heat, toss in your cilantro, and allow to cool slightly before blending. I would use an immersion blender here, but a vitamix will do. Blending is also not required - but recommended. Serve cold or hot, topped with lime zest, and a healthy spoonful of kimchi - I’d throw on chili crisp, too. Yum.

GARBANZO BEANS! Okay, I know it’s really easy to buy these in a can, but trust me - it’s worth cooking them and doing so by the pound, or two, or three. I find the texture and flavor of garbanzo beans to be the most agreeable with the most amount of foods - toss them on a salad, eat them under a chicken breast, put them into chicken soup or pulse them into a dip. The options are endless, and cooking them from dried is so god damned cheap that you’d be a fool not to. Here’s my go-to recipe for utilitarian garbanzo beans for the week.

3 cups dry garbanzo beans

9 cups water

One white onion

One head garlic

Two fennel bulbs

2 cups canned tomato puree

Olive oil

4TBSP butter

One lemon, halved

Soak your garbanzo beans overnight or not at all, fartyness dependent. Rinse them thoroughly. Mince onions, fennel, and garlic into uniform sized particles. In a heavy bottomed pot or dutch oven, heat up olive oil on medium and fry everything on medium-low until it’s super fragrant. This should take time and nothing should burn or particularly brown. Once your onions are totally translucent, add your butter, then tomato, then your garbanzos, make sure all are coated and top with water. Add a healthy pinch of salt. You can taste your water in an hour and see how much more salt you need, and you can add whatever - bay leaves, chili flake, spices of your choosing. Squeeze your lemon into the water and discard the rind. You can use chicken stock rather than water, as I do, but please stop buying stock at the store, that is silly. Water with salt and an onion is plenty. We want to bring this pot up to a gentle simmer, not a true boil - and cover as soon as we do. Once they’re fork tender and easy to eat but not mushy (about two hours, maybe more), drain the liquid and immediately toss in some olive oil to prevent the skins from drying out. Store however you want. Thank me later.

WHITE NORTHERN BEANS*

I don’t believe there is any greater joy in the world than eating a cheesy, slutty, glorious bowl of oven braised beans with a crusty piece of bread. You deserve a reward for eating so much healthy shit, so this recipe is not one for a waistband watcher - rather, this will nourish the ever living shit out of you and make you feel like a little bean man gave you a hug from the inside. I also think this recipe is a great starting off point for your future braised beans - everything can be substituted in our out, added, subtracted and changed, so long as the formula remains the same:

well seasoned, cooked vegetables + good stock + soaked beans + cheese rind + time

3 cups soaked white northern beans

8 cups homemade chicken or vegetable stock

1/2 cup pancetta, bacon, pork belly, proscuitto, spicy salami, whatever the hell, or, if you don’t want, then don’t. I use proscuitto

3 leeks, cleaned (watch for the dirt between the leaves), sliced into 1/4” medallions, greens and whites (stop fucking throwing away leek greens!!!)

1 bunch lacinato kale, stripped from stems and torn, and stems cut into small bits

1 head of garlic, cut crosswise in half

2 shallots sliced how you like, not too thin

2 yellow onions, sliced how you like, not too thin

1 parsnip, half mooned

Parmesan rind, if available - or 1 cup of finely shredded parm (do it yourself - no store bought corn dust)

2tbsp white pepper

2tbsp aleppo or red pepper flake

1tsp nutmeg

Into a cold dutch oven or hotel pan, dump your fatty pork product of choice and set on a burner. Bring up to medium heat. Starting a fat thing in a cold pan renders the fat out gently and provides a lot of it to cook things in. If you aren’t using a pork product here, then heat up olive oil as you normally would. Once the product of choice gets just slightly crispy and browned, scoop it out, add your onions, parsnip, kale stems and shallots, and add a hit of olive oil. With a nonstick spatula, mix everything together and let it go for about ten minutes on medium-low, slowly cooking the onions. Once they start getting transluscent, add your leeks. Make sure everything is coated with olive oil + pork fat. Add your spices - hold off on any salt at this point, there is enough in the pork. Add half of your drained beans, stir gently to cover, then add your kale leaves and the rest of your beans. Add your crispy pork and feel confident in a total incorporation of ingredients. Add your water or stock - I promise you, with a base like this, water will still yield a very flavorful broth, and you can aspire for chicken stock for next time. Add in your parm rind or grated parm, one more mix, then bring to a very brief boil. Cover and set into the oven. Cook at 375 for about two hours, though time will depend on the condition of your beans. Check every 45 minutes to ensure your beans are not drying out. Add water as necessary and stir.

When they’re done, serve with a healthy dusting of more cheese, some crusty bread, or a dollop of sour cream/yoghurt if you’re really feeling crazy. Enjoy.

LENTILS!

Lentils are the holy grail of protein, minerals, ease of cooking and cheapness. There is so much you can do with a lentil, and again, it comes down to a good formula. To me, making a sauce to cook them in is huge - forget just onions or just garlic, opt for a labor intensive front-end cook and a really easy finish.

Chimichurri + coconut or yogurt lentils

1 bunch cilantro

1 bunch parsley

1 bunch scallion

1 bunch mint

1/2 cup cashew

2 shallots

4 cloves garlic

1 tbsp salt

1/2 tbsp pepper

Zest of one lemon + juice

1 bunch of nutritious greens you usually hate, like dandelion, swiss chard, or kale

1 can coconut milk or 1 cups yoghurt

1 cup olive oil

1/2 stick butter

2 cups red lentils, rinsed well, no soaking necessary

Chop everything into small bits and throw into your blender. Pulse greens with olive oil, lemon juice, lemon zest, shallots, cashews and garlic. Use the stems!

Into a heavy bottomed pot, add butter and melt, then toss in your blender mix. Fry this on medium until extremely fragrant, browning, and not green at all. Into this mix, dump your coconut or yoghurt, stir aggressively. Add in your lentils, coat entirely, then add just enough water to cover the mixture by about a half an inch. Simmer, gently, on medium heat, stirring often, and cover. Return to your pot every so often to make sure nothing is sticking to the bottom. Cook until lentils are puffy and all liquid is absorbed. Serve as is, or pulse into a dip.

Well, that’s all you need to make good choices this week - please do let me know when you try these beans out and think of me fondly as the breeze, uh, moves through you. Here’s to happy digesting, being fuller for cheaper, and humbling ourselves to eat more like our ancestors.

See you next week!

In Health,
Anna