Sunday, December 19, 2010

Beans with Wine!

My pantry challenge is morphing.  I'm not on a total shopping hiatus anymore.  I'm buying fresh foods- veggies, fruit, almond milk, etc.  But I'm trying to cook primarily from the pantry still.  I still have so many dried beans and grains!  Purple barley? I forgot I even bought that!  More millet?  Really?  And those red beans.  I don't even like red beans.  Why did I ever buy them?

I'll be eating them, though.

Here's my new favorite way to cook just about any mix of beans (especially beans with a little barley).  I just toss the soaked beans in the pressure cooker with a chopped onion, a little dried thyme, a couple of cups of red wine and a bouillon cube.  The beans come out amazing!!!  They need a little salt and that's it.  We had beans with biscuits on Saturday and the kids loved this simple meal.  Then I had them again today with toast for a really hearty lunch.

I really enjoyed picking up some veggies this weekend and ate a giant Greek salad with breakfast.  I used up leftover olives, artichoke hearts and the last of the red wine vinegar in the process, so it still sort of helped clean out the pantry.  Mostly it just made me happy, though.


Also on the menu today was hot chocolate.  I found marshmallows in the pantry buried underneath the seaweed!  I'm super loving my new chocolate Fiesta dishes (a little early Christmas present to myself...).


My big accomplishment for this weekend was finishing this puzzle that was pretty difficult only because the pieces all fit to multiple other pieces.  I kept rearranging the end pieces right up until I put the last dozen pieces in.  I wish I could get paid to work jigsaw puzzles and could just do that all day every day.  


Trouble cat likes working puzzles, too.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I am the same way with beans and grains...I have way too many and I don't even know why I bought some of them! Crazy.

Question--what kind of pressure cooker do you have? I kinda want one, but would like some recommendations before I spend the money to buy something. Thanks!

Courtney

Subwayslasher said...

Two things: One, I want your chocolate fiesta! Two, why do I need a pressure cooker in my life?

Liz said...

Courtney: I love my Presto stainless steel 6 qt. cooker. It's small enough for a night's worth of beans, but big enough for a batch of stock. Be sure not to get the aluminum one, though- yuck. I got mine at Sears.

SS: 1. Thanks! I especially like eating chocolate out of my chocolate Fiesta!
2. Soaked beans in 5 minutes. enough said. OK, also risotto and homemade broth in 15 min.

Anonymous said...

Thank you, Liz!

Courtney

Catherine Weber said...

Someday, I'll have enough space to own a pressure cooker! :)

What is purple barley like?