Beans, Beans, They’re Good for Your Snow-Day Dinner

It snowed here, today -- making it an especially good day to stay off the road to the supermarket and use up some of my ingredient excess. Stuck my head into the pantry and... Oyoyoy. Can someone please tell me how I ended up with two jars of molasses? (Molasses, which I normally use at a rate of about 1/4 cup per annum...So I need TWO jars exactly why?) Five jars of mustard (for real), and half-a-shelf full of canned beans? Someone? Anyone?

I don’t understand it, either. But I vaguely remembered seeing a recipe for bakes beans, once, that called for molasses and mustard. So I googled “baked beans,” got a basic sense of the how-to’s and proportions, added the frankfurters I had in the freezer, and threw in a splash of beer. (I sometimes put beer in my brisket, too. It adds a really nice -- and not at all "beer-y" --taste to slow-cooked meat.)

Then, while the beans took a long, sweet nap in the oven, I took a long, sweet nap in my bed. Two effortless hours later, snow-day dinner was served.

If you, yourself, are not currently stuck with the odd embarrassment-of-riches combination of molasses, mustard and frankfurters, you may not have occasion to make this particular pantry-purging dish…but the strategy I used is applicable to almost any ingredients you want to weed out of your own cupboard: Go to epicurious.com, food.com, or another big recipe website you trust, type in the name of a finished dish (e.g., baked beans) that you think might use some of the ingredients together, or  type the names of some of the individual ingredients you have on hand (beans, mustard, molasses) into the search bar together and just see what pops up. Tweak and adapt the recipe to suit your dietary needs (I left out the pork fatback that many baked beans recipes call for...) and the contents of your own pantry. Taste as you go along, adjust at whim, and see what you come up with. I wouldn't try it when the boss is coming to dinner. But for a snow-night supper? Go right ahead.

Here’s the recipe for the franks and beans:

1 large onion, diced

2 Tablespoons vegetable oil

5 beef frankfurters (or 4… or 6… whatever) cut into rounds

Two 15.5 ounce cans white beans, rinsed and drained (I used cannellini. Navy beans are fine, too.)

½ Cup molasses

¼ Cup Dijon mustard

¼ Cup ketchup (I use the Heinz organic, because it doesn’t have high fructose corn syrup. My kid, the ketchup maven, says it tastes exactly the same as the original.)

½ Cup mild-tasting beer (I used Miller).

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

In a stovetop-to-oven-safe pot or Dutch oven, over medium heat, sautee the onions and franks until the onions are soft and the franks deepen a bit in color – about 5 minutes. Drain off the extra fat from the pot.

Add the remaining ingredients, raise the heat to high and cook for five minutes, to evaporate some of the liquid and burn off the alcohol in the beer.

Cover pot, transfer to the oven, and bake for 1.5-2 hours.

Bean there. Done that.

Pepper Rally

You know those peppers Peter Piper picked? Well, guess what: They weren’t pickled after all; they were roasted. And jarred. And tucked so well in the far reaches and back corners of my pantry that I kept thinking I didn’t HAVE any roasted peppers, and kept buying more. And more. And… total roast-pepper-tally when Steve organized the pantry last weekend? Four big jars. (And that’s just the sweet peppers. Let’s not even talk about the chipotles right now…)

But now we’re down to two jars, thanks to a strategic pantry attack that used up not only half of my pepper stash but also the half-box of currants I’d had since God was in knee pants; some of the many, many slivered almonds I have accidentally accumulated; the open jar of capers in my refrigerator (leaving room for the unopened jar in the pantry to take its place); the itty-bitty bits of wine vinegar I had left in two separate bottles, some random cloves of garlic sitting on my kitchen counter… and, oh, yes, the leftover half of a red onion I cut into last Sunday to go with our bagels and lox.

Simmered with boneless, skinless chicken thighs (you could use white meat, but I had thighs in the freezer) it all made for a delicious, kind-of-sort-of-Spanish-inspired stew that was really good with saffron rice and the frozen haricots verts I bought one day when I forgot that I really don’t LIKE frozen haricots verts, because they get too mushy when you cook them. With stew and rice on a rainy night, the “mush factor” didn’t bother me quite so much.

Overstocked on peppers yourself?  Here’s a way to use some of them up. And if you don’t have any peppers, but don’t have anything else to make for dinner, either, either, go buy two jars. This was REALLY good. (And even better re-heated the next day.)

Peck of Peppers Stew

¼ Cup olive oil

1 Cup chopped onion (I used red; you could use white or yellow, too)

5 cloves of garlic, minced

1 Tblsp smoked paprika (if you don’t have smoked, use sweet )

2 lbs skinless, boneless chicken, cut into strips

Bit of flour or cornstarch

2 Cups white wine (I used pinot grigio. Anything similar – not too sweet; not too dry or oaky – would be fine.)

Two 12-ounce jars roasted sweet red peppers, drained, rinsed and drained again

1 Cup dried currants (or raisins, black or golden)

3 Tblsp capers, drained

1 Tblsp wine vinegar

Freshly squeezed juice of one orange (fresh really does matter here)

Salt to taste (I needed about ¼ teaspoon)

Handful chopped flat leaf parsley, divided

½ cup slivered almonds, toasted (you could use pine nuts, instead, if that’s what you have)

In a large skillet over medium heat, start cooking the onions and garlic in the olive oil. Add the paprika and continue cooking until onions are soft and the whole thing is paprika-colored and smells great.

Dredge the chicken in the flour or cornstarch and shake off any extra. Raise the heat to high and add the chicken, browning lightly on all sides.

Add the wine, and lower the heat to a simmer.

Add all the other ingredients EXCEPT the almonds and most of the parsley (That is, add a bit of parsley to the pot, but save the rest for later.) Cook over low heat for about 45 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the chicken is cooked through, the sauce is cooked down and everything comes together. It's fine to let it cook longer than that, if the heat is low and you check occasionally to make sure the sauce isn't evaporating too much.

Spoon onto a big platter and top with toasted nuts and chopped parsley. Serve with starchy short-grained rice (I added some saffron to mine) or crusty bread to sop up all of the sauce.

 

The Big Pantry Pare-Down

I'm baaaaaack...

I figured, when I decided not to renew my all-kale-all-the-time CSA two summers ago, that my days of having to use up random foodstuffs before they went bad were over.

I figured wrong.

Like the vast majority of Americans, I (still) waste an appalling amount of the produce I buy. The cucumber I forget in the fridge until it has turned to penicillin; the grapes my kids ask for and then lose interest in; the salad greens I purchase with the best intentions as I start a Monday-morning diet, only to end up at the end of a well-paved road to hell by Wednesday, when a scoop of Ben & Jerry’s for lunch sounds like a fine idea.

And then there’s the leftover cooked food we never get around to eating: The lone chicken leg or the ounce-and-a-half of poached salmon that remains after supper, or the half-portion of spaghetti left in the pot without a college student in sight to snarf it cold from the refrigerator at 3 am.

And somehow (much to my great shame) I have even, occasionally, had to throw out things that should last nearly forever—canned beans or tuna; a vacuum-sealed jar of barbecue sauce. Because while I know that nothing terrible will happen if I eat beans with a January expiration date in February, the can of garbanzos I recently unearthed from before my ten-year-old son was born didn’t leave me feeling entirely comfortable. I mean, I’m willing to ignore a sell-by date. But a sell-by DECADE? Not so much.

So, as we sat around the Thanksgiving table the other night expressing gratitude for all the food we have, I resolved (again) to stop wasting so much of it. To shop for less at a time, and to use up what I have before I bring home anything new. To sort through my pantry and make sure I know what I have on hand, so that I stop buying duplicates that obstruct the view even further, making it more difficult to plan meals efficiently.  Oh, and yeah, to use up the three cans of chipotles in adobo I bought TWO YEARS ago because they were on sale – and never used.

So, here’s what we did (OK, fine, here’s what my husband and son did, while I bossed them around): We emptied the pantry, the fridge and the freezer, created a written inventory, and then put the stuff back in something resembling an organized fashion. We resolved to buy nothing but meat, fish, produce, eggs and dairy (i.e., highly perishables) between now and the end of the year, and to prepare them with only the condiments, grains and other pantry items we have on hand. (In other words, I will not be purchasing another can of chipotles any time soon – nor replacing the walnuts I might use up while I still have 4 bags of pecans on the shelf). AND to keep myself honest -- and because I’m thinking that things could get somewhat entertaining when I’m down to nothing but Japanese rice vinegar, Hungarian walnut conserve and chickpea flour in the cupboard-- I’m going to blog it. 

Because, really, is there anything the world needs MORE than another food blog? ;)     

So, if you have ever wondered what YOU can do with half a head of broccoli or two ounces of roast cod… or if the tinned anchovies in your pantry are older than your mother-in-law and you want a recipe that will help you use them up… or if you just want to see how many chipotles I can eat before landing in the E.R. with a seared esophagus... I hope you’ll follow along.

And feel free to chime in with suggestions. Rice wine-and-chickpea-flour pancakes anyone? No, I didn’t think so. Howzabout let’s put our heads together and come up with something else.