Blue Cayenne

It’s the end of the month. It’s cold. 

What better time for a hot spicy bowl of chili?

If you’ve been curious about some of those meat substitutes that have come on the market, here is a chance to try them out. Or, not.  This is a very good recipe however you prepare it.  I used the Trader Joe Meatless Ground but Impossible Burger would be good, too. 

This recipe is adapted from one (Spicy Pork and Black Bean Chili) that appears in Melissa Clark’s Dinner: Changing The Game. It’s a wonderful cookbook and is available at your local bookstore or on Amazon here.

Here is the chili recipe as I prepared it in my kitchen using the ingredients pictured above.. This recipe tastes best, I think, on day two after the flavors have had overnight to marry. 

You want raisins with your spaghetti?

Turns out that you definitely do.

This Spaghetti With Spinach, Pine Nuts and Raisins is a knock-it-out-of-the-park variation on traditional spaghetti recipes. There is the silky smoothness of the noodles, the crunch of the pine nuts, the healthfulness of fresh spinach barely cooked, and the pungent edgy sweet/sour vibe of raisins soaked in a red-wine vinegar solution. 

This recipe is adapted from one that appears in Joshua McFadden’s Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables. This three hundred plus page cookbook is a compendium of excellent recipes. Alice Waters (of Chez Panisse) said of this book: “Joshua McFadden has the soul of a farmer, and his recipes are beautifully in tune with the seasons and the land.” Who doesn’t want to be “beautifully in tune with the seasons and the land?” I know I do and this cookbook has a special place in my burgeoning cookbook collection. You can buy the cookbook at your local bookstore or on Amazon here.

Here is the recipe as I cooked it in my kitchen. 

“When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios.”     

—-Henry David Thoreau

Are you a bean lover?

I am.

Like Thoreau, I think beans are beautiful and a culinary wonder. Truth be told, my pantry overflows with dried beans.

Today’s featured bean is the unusual (and delicious!) Royal Corona. They’re huge! Twice the size of your average lima bean.  Thoreau, I think, would have loved these.

Royal Coronas are kind of hard to come by, but they are worth the search. You can find these beans at Rancho Gordo Beans here.

Rancho Gordo’s Royal Coronas are pricey at $7.50 a pound but a definite cut above other similar beans like  grocery store limas or butter beans.

Rancho Gordo’s Royal Corona beans are hand-harvested large white runner beans.  They’re creamy, meaty and tender and make a “WOW” of a presentation in this recipe or in other bean stew recipes you might create.

Here is a recipe for Coconutty Beans With Spinach as I prepared it in my kitchen. I particularly enjoyed the gingery onion-tomato sauce that flavors this bean recipe. And, while this recipe was great on “the day of,” it was absolutely delightful on the second day when the flavors had time to marry.  The original recipe is from the February 2023 issue of Bon Appetit Magazine.  You can find the original recipe here.