Buzzfeed is hardly known for its food writing, but of course neither is dKos, yet here we are.
In January I spotted Bodega Beans Are The Best Thing To Eat When You’re Broke, I’ve eaten it several times since then, and want to share it.
In some ways it’s more interesting as sociology than cooking: the cuisine of downwardly mobile millennials who did NOT grow up eating beans. As I noted in a previous bean WFD, beans have always been poor people’s food, and in more than one country, achieving a certain level of prosperity meant “no more beans”.
It’s for sure not interesting as cooking, but I hadn’t had the idea before of tarting up canned beans, except by making them part of a more complex dish like chili. The idea here is to add enough fresh ingredients to make it interesting, but still only take a few minutes. It’s a worthy addition to cheap and easy weeknight cooking, for those of us who might otherwise eat ramen or eggs or mac + cheese from a box.
Rice and beans is a joke of cheap eating, but it’s also the gospel. And the way I learned to love the humble legume, in my own carefully budgeted cooking, was through bodega beans.
The recipe happened to be published on my 25th birthday, a preemptive gift. It wasn’t even the brainchild of the author of the post — first-wave food blogger Adam Roberts, aka the Amateur Gourmet — but a friend he ran into on the subway one night, food writer Rachel Wharton. Roberts was headed home late and hungry, when his grocery store would be closed but New York City’s bodegas, as always, would be open.
“Rachel,” I said, “I want to make a quick, easy dinner with something I can get from my corner bodega.”
“Beans,” she answered.
“Beans?”
Wharton’s recipe was hardly a recipe at all: Sauté onion and garlic, add a can of white beans (or any other kind), drizzle with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and sprinkle with cheese if you like. Serve it on rice or toast. That’s it. In his write-up, Roberts doctors his with bacon, carrots, celery, and red chile flakes, but anything other than oil, onions, and beans is really a bonus.
There aren’t any “bodegas” in my neighborhood, but the regular supermarkets are mostly open until midnight.
Beans are enough protein that I don’t bother adding meat to this. Canned beans are unlikely to need much added salt. I nearly always have onion, garlic, and celery available to add, and besides chile I recommend oregano. Fresh cilantro is a great addition.
Serving with toast is the minimum effort; depending on your ancestry you might be used to rice with your beans; I prefer the Italian version, pasta e fagioli — macaroni and beans, or in American slang, pastafazool!
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That’s probably not what’s for dinner tonight.
What’s for dinner at your place? Maybe you could write it up for WFD sometime? Message ninkasi23 about that.