Hello foodie pals! I'm going to share with you today my lunch from yesterday: an easy, rich in nutrients family recipe. My mother used to make this all the time with few variations of course because I cook my own way but I love this dish and I try to make it at least once per month or so. It is a red bean soup with spices and salted onion and bacon, accompanied with white rice and carrot, and I made ginger-lemonade as a drink.
Red beans are usually big and very hard if they are dry and not ready. I prefer to buy dry and natural harvested beans instead of ready ones that come in cans, because these come with a lot of sodium and preservatives that have been proven harmful to our health by medicine. In order to cook any kind of bean, I usually let them soak in water during the night or at least 8-10 hours. After that, I remove the water, fill again the pot and start cooking, always covered so the boiling is intense and the steam helps the beans cook faster and get tender and creamy.
It takes around 2-3 hours to make these types of beans soft, so while they were cooking I took out the rest of the ingredients that I used. I mention them next:
2 cups of white rice
3 small onions or you could use 2 big ones
1 small carrot
1 cube of chicken stock flavor (optional, if you want this recipe to be vegan, you can prescind of this)
1 medium-size potato
100 g of bacon (you can choose not to add this if you want to make it vegan way)
1 spoon of butter (again if you want to make it vegan, do not add this and use olive oil instead)
Spices I used:
Cumin
Paprika
Rosemary
Dried garlic and parsley
Black pepper
Once the beans were boiling, I added the spices, stirred it up a little and then put the cover again to let it boil for a couple of hours.
I put 4 cups of water on a pot and placed it on the stove at high flame, and when it was about to boil I added the carrot, grated, a teaspoon of pink himalayan salt and then the two cups of rice.
While both the rice and the beans were getting ready, I started to chop the onions and peel the potato. I cut the onions, julienne's, and the bacon in tiny pieces. On a hot pan I put the spoon of butter and then the onion, to saute it for a while and when the onion is looking ready, then I add the bacon, stir constantly while the bacon gets ready which is very fast and then I retire from the flames. After that, I chopped the potato and added right into the bean soup.
Once the onion was ready, and still the beans and the rice were cooking, I had time to make a super fresh lemonade with ginger, taking two lemons from the fridge and peeling a piece of ginger and adding everything in the blender with a little bit of mint leaves and sweetened with liquid stevia. After blending it all, I strain it and it is ready to serve with ice.
After some time, let's say 3 hours after turning on the stove, the beans were finally ready. I knew it because I tasted just one single bean and it was creamy and soft. Then I added the onion-bacon mix and mixed it up, and then served it with rice on the side.
I always encourage people to eat more beans and grains because I think that those foods should be brought back to fashion since they are not so consumed right now, and beans are not only delicious food but also they are key to a balanced and healthy diet.
I hope you like this recipe and maybe you can try it later! until next time.
César.