A friend got me thinking about black beans, and that in turn got me thinking about how to use them twice if I were to make them, because it’s so easy to make a big batch.
I know I’ve talked before about how hopeless I found bean-making some years ago. I just never seemed to be able to get beans to be tender. I could soak them for two days, I could avoid salt on cooking. I did all the things I was advised to do and I’d still end up with chalky, chunky beans. The Insta-Pot fixed that problem: 40 minutes in it with enough water and the beans are ready for anything.
Stop #1 was refried beans. I would usually use pork lard for this, but a friend was coming who was vegetarian, not vegan, so I used ghee instead to cook the beans down. I added some lime juice and lime zest, some chili powder, and teeny bit of tomato paste. I waited to add salt at the end, a result of my long journey through bean failure, which made me think salt toughened beans, whether that was true or not. Anyway, the refried beans were then in turn destined for a breakfast tostada: refried beans spread on a fried corn tortilla, a little round omelet covered with cheese going on top of the refried beans, fresh vegetables on top of that. Plus I made the pistachio-cardamom rolls from Reem Assil’s Arabiyya, which were as good as last time. (And I served them again today to friends and colleagues.)
For round 2, I had been thinking of doing a classic rice-and-beans mix or maybe a paella. One thing that’s put a bit of a crimp in my cooking recently is that one of my family has a bit of an aversion to food that mixes things together—stews, casseroles, and so on. I haven’t felt that way myself for a long time, but I don’t find it difficult to remember the same visceral sensation, all the way into my early 20s. If I think on it for a while, I can contrast the way I enjoy braised meat or foods that mix textures and ingredients now with the way they tasted to me then. The sense memory of that sense of disgust is very strong if I work to recover it. Sort of the dark mirror of a Proustian madeleine: it catapults me into my childhood, makes me recall all the times I put my poor parents through hell finding a plain hamburger or insisting that things be separated on my plate even when that made for an awkward dinner for someone who was hosting us. I think this is one thing about meals with extended families or family friends in the 1960s and 1970s that has had a lasting impact on the later culture: the transition from a cultural world where children had to just fucking deal with whatever strangers or distant relatives put on the plate in front of them and a world where their desires are solicited and attended to, at least in relative measure. I think on that the present is better than the past by far: I am struck by how inhospitable many dinner tables really were back in that time, in terms of consideration for guests.
I savor those kinds of dishes now because they seem like one of the great provinces of the home cook—it’s really rare to see a genuinely slow-cooked stew or braise on many higher-quality restaurant menus because that’s seen as not elevated enough and because it’s actually hard to match a dish like that with the demand from diners. But dinner isn’t an occasion for food ideology and it’s not just about pleasing oneself. So I tried to think of how to do rice and beans separately and plate them alongside each other. What I came up with was a saffron risotto on the outer ‘crescent’ of the plate with black beans and mole sauce in a circle at the heart of it, both of them relatively ‘dry’ so that they weren’t intermingling too much from the moment of plating.
I put some fresca cheese and roasted pepper with the black beans to exaggerate the spatial boundaries, and some chicken thighs and sausage in the risotto. I think it worked, even for the please-don’t-combine person.
The bones from the deboned chicken thighs I mixed with some chicken broth I had made two weeks ago to make an even deeper bone broth. I added a teeny bit of a baharat spice mix and some lime juice and then served that today for a few colleagues as a kind of mildly trayf version of matzo ball soup with a fried matzo ball. Waste not, want not.