Bring on the Beans

In our household, we enjoy an occasional beef tenderloin or a helping of wild king or coho salmon, but we’ve come to feel that if we don’t have beans of one kind or another sometime during each day, we have not eaten well.

Brown rice and beans complement each other’s proteins to provide all the necessary nutrition of a whole protein. Beans help your cells to replicate themselves when their necessary aptosis (read ‘death’) looms, because beans supply ribonucleic acid. Beside, they taste good, especially when cooked up with seeds and spices. One of our favorite combinations is brown rice with black beans.

This is an easy, fairly quick dish to make if you’ve cooked and refrigerated or frozen extra beans and extra rice. If starting from scratch, allow an extra 40 to 50 minutes for cooking the rice. I like to sprout beans before cooking. That develops their vitamin E and shortens cooking time. In winter, sprouting can take two days or longer. As soon as sprouts appear, the beans need to be cooked, slowly to preserve their Vitamin E.

For when we’re in a hurry, there are always canned beans in our pantry. Canned beans won’t have been cooked our way, so they will cause gas if you let them. To forestall that, I put a teaspoon or so of cumin powder in any dish made using canned beans..

RICE & BLACK BEANS

2 to 3 servings

2 Tablespoons olive oil

½ yellow onion, chopped

1/3 red bell pepper, diced

1 or 2 garlic cloves, minced

2 cups cooked brown rice

1 cup cooked black beans, drained

Optional additions:

2 Tablespoons hijiki, a sea vegetable, soaked in ¼ cup warm water until the water is absorbed, about 10 minutes.

½ cup Trader Joe’s Green Curry Sauce.

Sea vegetables like hijiki supply iodine, an ingredient sorely missing from your diet unless you eat fish frequently. Hijiki does not taste like fish, but supplies sea minerals.

Sauté the first four ingredients. Mix with the rice and beans. Rewarm.

BEVERAGE: A good beverage to go with a meal featuring this Rice and Black Beans is pomegranate juice combined with merlot wine, half and half.

It’s said that if you drink 2 ounces of pomegranate juice daily, in a year’s time your arteries will be cleared out.