Beans

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 street cleaning day which means half of the normally available spots were no longer available. I circled and circled and started to go a little crazy. Trying to find a parking spot isn’t something I had to do in New York; here, it can be a totally maddening experience, especially as you pass the same landmarks again and again, not one car budged, not one person dangling their keys.

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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 using. It also helps to have an onion, garlic, ginger, lemons (or limes) and cilantro, but only the onion is essential there–the other stuff just makes it that much better.

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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 for and methodically executing. I have a theory about this. The theory involves cravings: the food that you crave in a specific moment directly correlates to something that your body wants. So, when you’re making dinner on the fly, if you add an extra pinch of red chile flakes? That’s because your body’s craving some heat. And that’s why the dinner you make on the fly is often so satisfying.

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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, were no ordinary beans: they were magic beans. Specifically: the Barefoot Contessa’s Baked Beans, which bake in the oven for six hours with bacon and ketchup and maple syrup and come out a deep rusty red and taste smoky, zippy and intense. In other words: the best beans of your life.

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Baked Red Kidney Beans with Chorizo

Is cheating on a recipe like cheating on a test? I wondered that as I made the “Red Kidney Beans Baked with Chorizo, Chilli, Garlic, and Olive Oil” from Simon Hopkinson’s sequel to “Roast Chicken & Other Stories,” “Second Helpings of Roast Chicken.”

Simon, or Mr. Hopkinson (that feels more appropriate), calls for dried kidney beans in his recipe “soaked in cold water overnight.” I have a philosophy about recipes that call for dried beans soaked in cold water overnight: I hate them! Who plans a recipe the night before? I mean, ok, there’ve been times I knew I was having guests the next day where I made a cake ahead or marinated meat ahead, but I’ve never soaked beans ahead. I just refuse to do it; I use canned beans instead.

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Cranberry Beans

My first experience with cranberry beans was a failed attempt at a soup (see here) where dried cranberry beans were cooked for an inappropriate amount of time, leading to a texture so unpleasantly undercooked it was like eating unpopped popcorn kernels. The years have passed, but the scars took a while to heal: I wasn’t too eager to cook cranberry beans again. Not even fresh ones. That is until I saw a beautiful mound of them at the farmer’s market and, knowing I was cooking a dinner for Stella two weeks ago, I said: “What the ‘ell!” (I had a British accent.) I bought the beautiful bag of beans you see above.

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Rachel Wharton’s Bodega Beans

Monday night I went to a friend’s play reading that let out at 9:30. I was starved. I considered grabbing a bite (I was in the No Man’s Land of 35th and 8th Ave.) but then I decided I’d head home and grab a can of chickpeas from the bodega and make bodega hummus. (See here).

As fate would have it, though, on the subway I ran into the unmistakable, inimitable Rachel Wharton of The Daily News who I journeyed to Queens with this summer. Rachel has a degree in food from NYU, so I put her to the test: “Rachel,” I said, “I want to make a quick easy dinner with something I can get from my corner bodega.”

“Beans,” she answered.

“Beans?”

“Yes,” she continued. “Beans. I ate beans all through college. With some onion, garlic, or whatever you have, they’re delicious.”

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