By: @ECHO22
The past five months have been hard. They’ve also made us smarter, more creative, less wasteful home cooks.
The first thing we did was shop. At the start of quarantine in mid March, we, like so many of you, bought lots of beans, pounds of rice, and all the toilet paper. As a staff suddenly working from home, we enjoyed the opportunity to cook to skip the salad line and make something delicious in our own kitchens before plodding back to makeshift workstations. But then we realized: Three meals a day every single day is a lot of cooking! There were So. Many. Dishes. And why do sandwiches taste so much better when someone else makes them? As days turned into weeks and then months, something changed: We became different kinds of home cooks.
Of course, quarantine has had impacts far greater than dirty dishes and chickpea fatigue. There has been immense hardship and devastation; we are grateful for our health and our livelihoods. And we are grateful to have found bright spots in our kitchens. We got more creative as cooks. More efficient. We learned to cut down on food waste, and on time spent chopping. We ate the tastiest beans (and we didn’t even soak them). We, people who write recipes for a living, embraced the fact that recipes are merely suggestions. We drank extremely potent cocktails with our parents.
There’s much about quarantine cooking we’re eager to leave behind: the stress of a grocery run, not being able to share food with a table full of friends and family. But what follows are strategies and recipes we picked up along the way lessons we hope stay with us after that 20-pound bag of rice is finally gone.
I don’t soak beans. Ever. Why? Think about it: Dried beans are very absorbent, and when you let them puff up in a bowl of water overnight, what they’re absorbing is just that plain water. To me, the hour or two that process shaves off your cook time simply isn’t worth a plain water flavored bean. Instead, I do like most Mexican households and toss my beans straight into a flexible five ingredient blend of water, salt, herbs, garlic, and some kind of allium. After a few hours of simmering (fresher beans cook faster, but any will work), every last bean is suffused with rich, savory flavor. And yeah, this is also very good news for people who don’t plan ahead.
____@ECHO22______
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Yammy tammy // Thank you so much for such a delicious!! " recipe I made it yesterday. I'm a new subscriber now..💚💚