Clarissa's Blog

These days, I constantly start new projects to keep myself as busy as possible. My most recent project is to become a vegetarian for a week. In order for me to be able to forego meat, my vegetarian dishes should be very flavorful. This means that I need to work for a long time on each dish to build a bouquet of flavors.

Here is how my 7-Bean Casserole came out:

See the cooking process under the fold.

First, I took some of each type of dry beans I have at home. I have all kinds because they look beautiful in glass jars. And they are good for people with all kinds of health problems, from diabetes to high cholesterol (restoring my health is another one of my projects). Of course, you don’t need 7 kinds of bean. Use the ones you have as long as they don’t come from a can. Here are my beans:

I put them in a deep pan, filled it with water, got it to a boil, lowered the heat, and started building the flavor profile by adding spices and herbs. This has to be done slowly and patiently, tasting the liquid often to see what should be added to the casserole. Water needs to be added if it evaporates too much, and this means the flavor bouquet needs to be adjusted.

Since I don’t eat cooked onions, I added a whole onion and discarded it after the dish was ready. I also threw in some carrots, a cinnamon stick, allspice berries, bay leaf, dried ginger, and black peppercorns. These are my favorite basic spices that I use a lot and then add other stuff to them as the ingredients require. After a while, I added fresh marjoram and fresh sorrel. I had a beautiful fresh bunch of alfalfa sprouts, so I put some in the casserole. They really went well with the dish.

The dish was turning out less colorful than I wanted, so I added a handful of snap peas and some great fresh turmeric I had.

About an hour into the cooking, I noticed that one of the beans I was using had a slightly bitter taste and was overwhelming the dish. I added some maple syrup to correct the taste. The same result can be achieved with some brown sugar, too.

To add some acidity, I used grated orange peel and half a dozen cherry tomatoes. I just put them whole into the casserole.

Of course, I would betray every aspect of my identity if I didn’t use potatoes, so I quartered several small red potatoes, and added them to the dish.

When the dish had about a half an hour more to cook, I added some fresh parsley.

It’s important to let this dish take its time. The flavors need time to come together and form a consistent bouquet.

The result is so good that N (who greeted my idea of a vegetarian week with a tragic face) now says he is happy to give up meat for good if he can have this dish instead.

P.S. The store I linked to in this post is really cool because it offers little boxes of real Portuguese sardines. And they have escabeche that, to me as a non-expert in escabeche, tastes really great. Their maple syrup, however, is not amazing at all. Actually, it kind of sucks.