Tomato Sandwiches & Canary Beans
Hello, friends and family! Summer produce season is in full swing. I hope you’re doing well and eating all the corn, tomatoes and peaches you can handle. Let’s review a week of dinners!
Sunday 7/30/23
Tomato sandwiches
As a nerdy bookworm child, one of my favorite books was Harriet the Spy. And Harriet’s favorite food, which she brought to school for lunch every single day, was tomato sandwiches. As much as I emulated my hero in other ways—carrying around a top-secret notebook and a useless “spy kit” consisting of a tiny flashlight and a Swiss army knife, assigning great and sinister importance to the ordinary comings and goings of my suburban neighbors—I didn’t like tomatoes as a kid, and so I could not join her in this particular idiosyncrasy.
Until now!
This morning I went to the farmers market and stocked up on these beautiful little cherry tomatoes from Stony Hill Farms, dark red gems streaked with a deep forest green, and a loaf of the excellently dense, nutty whole grain country bread from Hoboken Farms. For dinner tonight, I simply quartered the cherry tomatoes onto slices of bread with a thin layer of mayonnaise, sprinkled with sea salt and freshly torn basil right from my balcony garden. We ate them sitting outside, and they were perfect. Harriet M. Welsh would be proud.
Monday 7/31/23
Chicken sausage and corn salad
Some of my other treasures from yesterday’s farmers market included chicken sausages from Griggstown Farm in Somerset County, and some fresh ears of Jersey corn, also from Stony Hill Farms. So tonight’s dinner was another simple one, a fresh and easy salad of corn, tomato and jalapeño, dressed with lime juice and olive oil, paired with sliced sausage. Summery and delicious.
Tuesday 8/1/23
Cranberry bean and quinoa bowls
While enjoying this meal on the porch, Anne said, “If you just list the ingredients of this meal, it’s not going to do it justice. You’ve learned so much about cooking, and I can taste it in this dish.” Well, wow. I felt like I’d just won Top Chef! So let me walk you through the formation of this seemingly ordinary, but in all honesty utterly astounding dish.
It started, as good things so often do, with minced garlic sizzling in a pan of hot olive oil, followed by chopped dinosaur kale from the farmers market, and red bell pepper. I sautéed the veggies till they were nice and tender, then added the last batch of cooked cranberry beans from the freezer, which I’d thawed in the fridge overnight. At first, I drained the beans (reserving the cooking liquid for future use, of course), but after cooking them with the veggies for a few minutes, I decided to add the cooking liquid to the pan after all, so the kale and peppers could absorb it in a kind of braise. I seasoned the mixture with cumin, chili powder, and salt, and let it all simmer until the veggies were just right.
In a separate pan, I toasted a cup or so of raw pepitas with a touch of olive oil, a generous sprinkle of salt, cumin, chili powder, garlic powder, and smoked paprika.
I used quinoa as the base for the bowls, then added the beans and veggies, then an assortment of fun toppings to add flavor and texture: shredded cheese, Kikiriki’s Special Hot Sauce, homemade curtido, and the toasted pepitas, which were still hot from the pan, and gave a satisfying sizzle as I sprinkled them over the bowls. These super-beany bowls were out of the park, slam dunk, 10/10 would make again.
Wednesday 8/2/23
I didn’t cook dinner tonight because we had a late lunch at a very exclusive local eatery—the IKEA cafeteria in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Look, sometimes you meet up with your in-laws at IKEA on a random weekday to acquire the Duktig play kitchen for your toddler, and while trooping through the soothing maze of neatly organized display rooms, everyone gets hungry for meatballs. It just happens. Did you know that IKEA now serves plant-based meatballs made of pea protein? They’re actually pretty good, and pair just as nicely with lingonberry jam.
We’re going to put together the play kitchen for the baby later this week, and I’m so excited to see if she likes it. She’s watched enough of the Mama Cooking Show from her high chair to have picked up a thing or two.
Thursday 8/3/23
Assorted local delicacies
Thursdays are my long work days, so tonight, Anne took over dinner duties, whimsically assembling this fun hodgepodge of treats from nearby businesses. The tomato and goat cheese quiche was from Yuki’s Bakery in Hoboken; the enormous chicken tamales and guava cookies were from Anthony’s Bakery on Central Ave (Cookies for dinner? Why not?) All of it was delicious. The chimichurri cauliflower rice bowl, center, was leftover from today’s family meal at the cafe. (Family meal, for those unfamiliar with the term, refers to a meal cooked by and for the staff of a restaurant to feed the crew during or before service; here’s a moving essay on the topic by a chef, if you’re in the mood for a longer read). This was a beautiful one-pot meal of finely chopped cauliflower and pasture-raised chicken in a vibrant, flavorful chimichurri. So good.
Chimichurri, I recently learned, originated in Uruguay and Argentina, and is the kind of condiment that gauchos were likely to have out in the field as they tended cattle. Unexpectedly, my Danish great-grandfather spent some time out on the pampas of Argentina in his youth—somewhere between 1905 and 1915, most likely—working as a gaucho. I wonder if he ate chimichurri! I really wish I had more information about this period of his life.
Friday 8/4/23
Stuffed bell peppers with ground beef and quinoa
For these stuffed peppers, I browned some grass-fed beef with garlic, adding black beans and chopped tomatoes. I mixed in the rest of the cooked quinoa from earlier in the week, and a jar of pizza sauce (because I didn’t have any plain tomato sauce) and an ounce or so of homemade hot sauce that came with the tamales from Anthony’s Bakery. It was still too hot to use the oven, but Anne had requested stuffed peppers, and love makes us do crazy things. And it ended up being a delicious meal, worth the sweat.
I paired these peppers with sautéed kale and chickpeas, and more spiced pepitas, brightened up with a big splash of fresh lemon juice.
Saturday 8/5/23
Shrimp fajitas with canary beans
Yes, I made shrimp fajitas, and yes, they were delicious, but what I really want to talk about—surprise, surprise—is the beans. These beans were slammin’. I wish you could have had some.
Last night I cooked a pound of dried canary beans, very simply, using only salt and a strip of kombu (the magical dried kelp, fairy godmother to beans, which I previously wrote about here). Canary beans, also known as Peruvian beans or mayocoba beans, get their name from their bright-yellow color. All beans are nutritional powerhouses, loaded with protein and fiber, and these beans in particular contain crucial micronutrients such as iron, calcium, magnesium, thiamin, phosphorus, copper and zinc. Eat your beans with every meal, indeed.
Canary beans have a very mild taste, making them the perfect canvas to absorb a kaleidoscope of flavors. Tonight, I took about half of the cooked canary beans, and simmered them with olive oil, chopped garlic, spices, and fresh lime juice, until they reached perfection. Tender, creamy, luscious, beany perfection. They absolutely stole the show.
“You’ve become a bean master. It’s like you speak to the beans,” Anne said. “In bean language.” I’m going to add that to my resume: Fluent in Bean.
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Thanks for reading! It’s a gorgeous Sunday morning in Jersey City, and I’m off to enjoy the Peach Pie Contest and Peach Festival in Riverview Park. Have I mentioned that I live in a Richard Scarry book?
Till next week!
XO,
Hannah
Loved the detail description. I can almost taste how delicious it all must of been.