saucy beans.

brothy, burbly, beautiful beans.

Sometimes weekday pots of beans are beautiful, sometimes they look like this.

I love beans. James loves beans. Having been fed them since they were old enough to eat solid food, my kids love beans. One of my children would eat black beans and rice seven nights a week if I served them as often, and sometimes I come close. I’ve written before that I don’t particularly love to write about what I serve my kids for dinner, but because it’s winter, the beaniest season of them all, I thought it might be worth penning a reminder, or perhaps an invitation, to start a pot of beans early and often.

We’re vegetarian, so beans give us lots of protein we’re not getting from meat, but mostly, we eat them because they’re delicious and filling and easy. Sometimes we eat beans in soups with other veggies. Sometimes we toss them with pasta. We eat them in salads and folded into tortillas. Often, and preferably, we eat them all by themselves. You might have heard beans like these ones referred to as brothy beans, which has some nice alliteration, but in our house, they’re called saucy beans, which has some nice cheek. Sometimes the sauce just refers to the stock the beans are cooked in, and sometimes we simmer the beans in milk or cream. Either way, the beans my kids most love are a not-quite-soup of a meal.

To make them, I give dry beans a cursory swish with tap water in a sieve. Next I swirl some olive oil in the bottom of a dutch oven, where I press a halved onion and allow it to sear for a minute while I pop a few whole cloves from a head of garlic. Then, in go the rinsed beans and the garlic and enough water to cover them by a couple of inches. If I have any handy, I add a bay leaf or two, rosemary or thyme, or the last stems of parsley. Often I add a dried chili. I never measure anything and notably, I don’t bother with soaking anything overnight. I bring the whole pot to a boil and then I let the beans simmer away for an hour or two or three depending on the bean and my attentiveness. I typically add salt sometime after that initial boil. Sometimes I add the rind of parmesan (not technically vegetarian, but beloved).

Dried beans cooked like this, in a stock of my own making, are nearly always superior in taste and texture to canned beans, which of course does not stop me from also making canned beans. Sometimes I am not home all day to tend to a pot of beans, and often I am home all day and I forget to get the pot going, and always canned beans are cheap and fast, requiring only minor zhuzhing with various alliums and herbs. If the canned beans I’m cooking are black, I tend not to rinse them, but to simmer them in their own canned sauciness (and have lived to tell the tale). If the canned beans I’m cooking are garbanzo, I tend to rinse them and start fresh with a quick broth of my own making.

In case you’d like some more direction, here a few of our favorite ways to prepare beans:

Simple Chickpea Soup (gift link)

Chickpea Noodle Soup

Creamy Braised White Beans (gift link)

Brothy Beans with Roasted Tomatoes

Miso Butter Brothy Beans with Scallions (and really all beany things in Erin Alderson’s archive)

In case you’d like to read more about why eating more beans is a thing to try,

On beans by

Alicia Kennedy

is an excellent place to start. (Her book, No Meat Required, is a great place to end up.)

In case you’d like to be inspired to eat beans by salivating over someone else’s lunch,

Bettina Makalintal’s account @crispyegg420, never disappoints. (No recipes, but lots of inspo.)

For the curious:

A number of years ago I was given a truly remarkable piece of kitchen equipment as part of a paid social media campaign and I can honestly say that I would never have splurged on such a thing left to my own bank account devices and that I use this fancy thing positively all the time, which is to say several times a week to low-simmer beans without needing to leave the gas stove burning for hours at a time. It also makes perfect rice, every single time.

I’ve recently spotted other social media types using this handsome-enough cooker, which sounds similar if not exactly the same and is far less expensive, but still not free. (I haven’t the foggiest how well it works.)

PS. Both of those are affiliate links, because beans are cheap but rent is not, so if you buy either one I might earn a small commission.

PPS. If you’ve been following my work for awhile, maybe you’ve heard some of this before. Probably, because I love beans. Beans! Go make a pot!