Blue Cayenne

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.

As the old Southern New Year’s saying goes, “Peas for pennies, greens for dollars, cornbread for gold.” In other words, these foods, when eaten on New Year’s Day, promise prosperity. 

My mother was in the black-eyed-pea school of Southern New Year’s cooks. I always wondered who made up that rule. Here’s the answer:  According to the Real Simple site: “One theory anchors the tradition in the Civil War, when Union soldiers raided the Confederate army’s food supply, leaving behind only this bean. Another theory is anchored in African American history, where newly-freed enslaved people celebrated the January 1863 Emancipation Proclamation with dishes made of black-eyed peas—one of the few foods available to enslaved people. But other theories date the legume’s lucky reputation back to Ancient Egypt, suggesting that eating the pea—a vegetable readily available to even the poorest enslaved people—was a way to show humility to the gods.”

We Americans aren’t alone in celebrating New Year’s food traditions. There are all sorts of interesting New Year food traditions practiced across the world.

The Japanese, for example, eat soba noodles– equating the length of the noodle with the promise of a long life. (Heaven help the unlucky eater who chews or breaks the noodles, though! Bad luck for him.)

In Spain, the New Year’s food tradition is to consume a grape as the clock strikes each hour at midnight. Any bitter grapes portend bad luck during the corresponding month on the calendar. Yikes!

Leave it to the Greeks to have the most colorful (literally!) New Year’s Day tradition– smashing a pomegranate against the door at midnight. The number of seeds that fall out of the juicy red fruit indicates the amount of good luck ahead in the new year. (I’m going to try that one the next time I find myself standing on my Greek friend’s front porch. Look out, Michelle; things could get messy.)

This recipe is for a layered Black-Eyed Pea salad. It is versatile because you can pretty much use what you have in your refrigerator to build the salad. It’s beautiful on your table, too–definitely one of those “eat the rainbow” dishes. I used a simple balsamic salad dressing and then adjusted the sweetness of the salad by adding additional sugar to my taste. 

Happy New Year from those of us here at Blue Cayenne. Best wishes for lots of good luck and good food in the new year.