I first made pasta when teaching English to newly arrived refugees at school. I just couldn't teach grammar all week and I knew they needed to eat. So we had cooking every Friday, and ate it at lunch time. Before the end of the year we compiled the recipes, sold booklets around the school and …
Tag: beans
Chicken and Bean Stew with Peppers, John
This recipe was by way of a maiden voyage for the beautiful flame coloured cast iron casserole dish bought for my birthday this year. I did have a ceramic one before but it cracked after only about three outings and I now use it to house my collection of unusual stones and bricks sculpted by …
Cowboy beans, Will
A brief background. My dear friend J, most adventurous of souls, dedicated guardian of the food preservation and enhancement customs of at least three countries, polyglot and all-round good egg, messaged asking after the recipe for a dish I had mentioned in passing, loosely described as Cowboy Beans. Well, Cowboy Beans are more about the feeling than the ingredients. When they lean away from the open range and more towards the urban, they become Boston Baked Beans. But J had on hand a quantity of fresh borlotti - toothsome enough to stand up to the smoke from a buffalo chip fire - and so I adopted an Eastwoodian squint, adjusted my poncho and wrote back...
Simple hummus, Virginia
Our friend Ellen brought hummus to the picnic at Wolf Trap. It was August and there were five of us. Far out in the Virginia countryside, it was still a steaming afternoon. Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie were about to sing. The hummus was cold and lemony, straight out of the cooler. I took to it right away. "How do you fix this?" I asked. "So simple," Ellen said. And it is.
A supper dish
This supper dish cannot be called eggplant/melanzane parmigiana, but both those items figure in the ingredients. There are beans where no beans ought to be, I have cut down on cheese, and there are no defined layers. But it tastes very like it and definitely fits into the general category of cucina povera. It is one of my favourites.
A red beans and rice number, Virginia
“One day Jim Duffy came by my carrel in the Eisenhower Library. Duffy was a Tulane graduate, steeped in southern history and politics. He said “Cynthia’s doing a red beans and rice number. You come along now”. What did I know about red beans? I was English. I knew about baked beans. That night - …
