Tag Archives: white beans

Roasted tomato & white bean soup with wild rice and tarragon

Posted on by
Reply

Tarragon soup

My husband said that this soup tastes like a wintery memory of summer. I concocted a soup that tastes like a memory! I can’t tell you how happy I felt, hearing that. There is something about tarragon (and there’s an unapologetic 2 tablespoonfuls of fresh tarragon in this soup!) that tastes like a sensation from a memory or a dream. It’s hard to describe or place, but in some part of your mind it makes perfect sense to you.

I have to tell you, I made this soup in such a roundabout fashion I’m not sure I can make the recipe make sense for anybody else! I don’t have a lot of experience cooking beans from scratch. When canned beans are so good and so cheap, and so easy…well, I tend to rely on them! I also don’t have a lot of experience with slow cooker crock pots. I got one for Christmas (thanks, Ellie!) and I’m still trying to figure out how it works. So here’s what happened…I combined all the ingredients for this soup in a big sauce pan, I brought them to a boil, and then I poured it into a slow-cooker, on high. I left it there for a couple of hours, as I gadded about the neighborhood.

When I returned, I checked the soup, and the beans were still rock hard. So, being an extremely impatient person, I poured the soup back into a big pot, brought it to a boil again, cooked it for another hour, and it was perfect. The truth is, if I made this soup again, I think I’d use canned small white beans, or maybe pre-cook the beans and save the broth to make the soup. The wild rice will still take about 45 minutes to cook, so all the flavors will still simmer nicely together. That’s the recipe I’m going to write down. Someday I’ll try it and let you know how it goes.

Here’s Jimi Hendrix’s sweet Remember. One of my favorite songs ever!
Continue reading →

Spinach, white bean, pecan bisque

Posted on by
Reply

Spinach White bean pecan bisque

This soup is like green velvet. Greener than velvet is this soup. Ahem. This soup is made with a base of pecan tarator sauce. That’s what makes it smoooooth, and that’s what gives it a wonderful depth of flavor. I used butter to make this, but if you used olive oil instead it would be vegan, and yet so mysteriously creamy! I made croutons from the same whole grain bread that’s in the tarator sauce. I cut it into rough cubes, fried them for a few minutes in olive oil, and dusted them with basil and black pepper.

Here’s Bobby Vinton’s Blue Velvet because it’s stuck in my head now!
Continue reading →

Fennel, white beans, walnuts …

Posted on by
Reply

… tomatoes, olives, capers, white wine, rosemary…
We’ve decided to have a lot of saucy soups and stews this week. Not sure why, it just seems like a good second-week-of-January menu. This particular saucy stewy dish is the kind of meal that is quick and healthy, but that you would make even if it wasn’t, because it tastes so good. Everybody in my family ate it in a slightly different fashion. I had it as a kind of warm salad, over red leaf lettuce and arugula, topped with gorgonzola, which got a little wilty and was really nice with the walnuts and fennel. My littlest son had it with pasta. Which is to say he ate a bowl of pasta and butter. My older son had the white bean … ragu, shall we call it? over gemelli pasta, and my husband had a mixture of pasta and arugula with his ragu. My favorite part of this meal was the walnuts. A nice unexpected crunch, a lovely toasty flavor. This would also be good with rice, or just a nice loaf of crusty bread.

Here’s King Curtis’ wonderful Memphis Soul Stew. I love this kind of song, I really do.
Continue reading →

Happy Thanksgiving!

Posted on by
2

ginormous mushroom pie

Happy thanksgiving, everybody! However it began, it’s become a holiday to celebrate being with people we love, and to celebrate having good food to eat and the opportunity to cook it together. Of course I love that idea! It’s a day to think about what it means to be grateful, and to concentrate on all of the things we have to be thankful for, which is something I wish I did more often. It seems like one of the least commercializable holidays – no toys or candies or cards. The things they’re pushing at you in the stores are ingredients for food that we can make together – bags of walnuts, cans of pumpkin purée, yams and turnips. Yeah.

So what am I making, you ask? I’m making a ginormous deep mushroom pie, that will be just as satisfying and delicious as turkey, I feel sure, for the vegetarians among us. And I’m making a herbed walnut “gravy.” I’ll let you know how that goes later on. And I’m making a stuffing of chestnuts, white beans, apples, shallots and sage. Recipe after the … jump!

Here’s a small playlist of songs of thanks and gratitude. Have a wonderful day, everybody!
Continue reading →

White bean & tarragon pie

Posted on by
6

White bean tarragon pie

It’s handsome and delicious! This pie has a filling of white beans, mushrooms and tarragon, and an oatmeal-pecan crust. You’ll have to forgive my enthusiasm, because I wasn’t sure how it would work out, but it was really really tasty. A number of strong flavors combined perfectly, so that nothing seemed out of place or in your face. Tarragon is a bit of a prima donna herb – it can be a little too prominent. But its lovely hint-of-anise/hint-of-lemon flavor shined perfectly in this pie. The dough, with pecans and toasted oats, is not as hard to work with as it might sound, but it does lend itself to this simple & forgiving form. You just roll it out and then fold it up like an envelope. And it makes wonderful crackers!

Here’s Les McCann’s Oatmeal.
Continue reading →