Using What You Have

Mitch Hedberg joked that potatoes take so long to bake, he'll throw them in the oven when he's not hungry - because "by the time they're done, who knows?!"

Beans are my baked potatoes, man. I used to have shelves full of beans daring me to cook them, and I was always one to back down - until I found a recipe for cooking them in the oven. I'm sure it's better to soak them first, but since I'm never going to plan ahead well enough to soak my beans, I'm going to venture a guess that it's still better to have cooked beans on hand than dry ones.

It's a good sign when your One-Bowl Meal is too hearty to finish in one sitting. 

Today's Gluten-Free, Dairy-Free and Mostly Meat-Free One-Bowl Recipe for Busy Stay-At-Home Moms Who Also Intend To Feed This To Their Toddlers is an exercise in using what you have. I had wilted mixed greens and mushy chopped onions and limp celery. So I simmered them, covered, in a heavy-bottomed pot all day.

Sometime that evening I got around to remembering to turn off the stove, and I just left the pot, still covered, to cool overnight. In the morning, I grabbed the salad spinner from the dish drainer and poured the broth and the veggies into the colander part while it rested in the bowl part. To get enough to cook my beans in, I picked up the colander with my left hand, fended The Nug off with my left leg, and squeezed the living daylights out of the greens with my right hand. I poured the liquid back into the heavy-bottomed pot (a Le Creuset enameled cast iron, for those who are wondering), and dropped the colander back into the bowl to await A) the moment I wash a medium saucepan and turn it into pesto, B) the minute someone else needs the salad spinner and tosses my unrecognizable green goo, or C) the more likely event that it turns into a mass of moldy mush. We shall see...

Meanwhile, I preheated the oven to 325, rinsed the beans in their bag and added them to the pot, topped them with a strip of kelp (kombu in Japanese, dashima in Korean), popped them into the oven and took The Dude to work. I ran some errands, came home, sniffed the air, decided the beans were fine, took care of the garden and the baby, came back and turned off the oven. Put brown rice in the cooker, tried to get The Nug to nap (failed), came back and put the relatively cool beans in a glass container to store in the fridge.

The broth, the beans that didn't fit, some of the rice, and a splash of veggie juice comprised my One-Bowl Meal - and there you have it!