While I’m far from a gourmet chef I’m fairly handy in the kitchen and occasionally like to experiment with new recipes and ingredients. Recently I’ve undertaken the mission to learn how to cook beans in a way that I like. No easy task, seeing as I grew up eating Van de Camps Pork and Beans and most homemade bean recipes I eat just don’t fit my tastes very well.
Nevertheless at my last supermarket trip I stocked up on some 1 lb. bags of various types of beans and determined that I would find at least one recipe that worked for me. After a partially successful attempt with navy beans that involved the addition of flour to create a way too thick gravy for my seasoned beans I decided to ask for a bit of assistance.
My father, being wise in the way of beans, advised that to create a nice gravy for beans you really didn’t need to add any starch, just mash a few of the beans themselves. Cue the duh moment for me here.
Armed with this new knowledge I attempted another bean recipe…a bean recipe of which we shall not speak. It is the Voldemort of bean recipes. The Recipe Which Shall Not Be Recounted. Or perhaps its more like the Beans of the Covenant; gaze upon it and your taste buds will be destroyed in an otherworldly blaze. Don’t open the bean Ark!
Having exhausted the navy beans I decided to tackle black beans next. Never having eaten black beans before myself I pondered for a good long while what to do with them. Then I remembered the commercials for the black bean burger that Wendy’s restaurants have been serving and thought the concept was interesting enough to try for myself. After doing the customary soaking etc. I chopped up onion and green and red pepper and added them to reduce down with my beans. I then went to read on the couch in the living room.
Waking up sometime later I found myself wondering what that odd burning smell was. Was there a wildfire somewhere? Its been so wet lately how could that be? Was one of my neighbors having a cookout? But if they were, why was I smelling it inside the house? That didn’t make any sense.
When my brain caught up to my nose I dashed into the kitchen only to find that, as I do not live in a deluxe apartment in the sky, my beans are perfectly capable of burning on the grill.
The second attempt at the black bean patties went much smoother. This time I wisely boiled them down in a ton of water, mashed them while still in said water, then poured some of the water out before reducing down. I also did not fall asleep on the couch, which I found to be of tremendous advantage to making the recipe turn out right.
After mashing my black bean and pepper paste into a burger patty shape and frying it up in a pan on the stove I finally came out with something edible and quite tasty. While no one would mistake it for a meat hamburger, I think with all the fixings most people would find it quite yummy.
Kitchen adventures can certainly keep on your toes, but they usually result in something delicious in the end. You can insert your own sufficiently poignant cliche about eggs and breaking to wrap things up for this one.
