Rob's Mother f**king Bean Salad

My buddy Rob is in Philly this summer and has absolutely no time to post this fabulous recipe on our blog, so I'm doing it for him.

Rob, during our brief foray as roommates, survived on a simple diet of this bean salad and cornbread. He claims that when the black beans are combined with cornmeal, it makes a perfect protein. Sounds like a bunch of pseudoscience bullsh*t to me, but Rob's a smart guy, so I trust him.

I'll make Rob post the cornbread recipe when he gets back.

Anyway, I've made this recipe about twenty times this summer and I never get tired of it. Try it. You'll like it.

If you don't like it, please don't post stupid comments saying you don't like it because you probably just f**ed up the recipe and you should probably just blame yourself for f**ing up such an easy recipe.

Ingredients

15 oz black beans
2 ears of corn (boiled or roasted, kernels cut off the cob)
2 avocados
2 whole diced tomatoes (or 15-20 cherry/grape/sungold tomatoes)
2/3 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
2/3 cup red onions
Feta cheese (optional)

Dressing

1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1 tsp dijon mustard
2 cloves garlic, chopped
salt to taste
1 tbsp ground cumin


Combine ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Whisk together the dressing separately and pour in. I like mixing it so that the avocado blends to become part of the dressing, but if you like the avocado pieces whole, just toss the salad together lightly instead of mashing everything.

This salad is so freaking tasty. I serve it with toasted bread that comes from the bakery next to my house, Canto 6, but you can serve it with rice, quinoa, couscous, or any other kind of grain. Makes a great main course, but certainly could be a side-dish for a BBQ.

Best part, if you refrigerate it, the herbs/spices have more time to soak in and it makes the salad even tastier.

Enjoy that sheezy!

Motherf**king Black bean Brownies

I got the idea for this recipe this weekend after I visited Plato's Harvest Farms where our intern Sasha and her husband David own and operate an organic farm. We got there at 10am, planted potatoes, spring onions, and leeks and enjoyed a delicious pot-luck lunch, the crowning feature of which was one of the farm hands' incredible black bean brownies. I immediately asked her what she put in them, she gave me the basic run-down and when I came home I did some research into recipes.

I took a recipe off of 101 Cookbooks.com and modified it to include all that tasty shit that the farm hand said was in hers. This is the result:

Amazing Black Bean Brownie Recipe

4 ounces semisweet chocolate
1 cup unsalted butter (I put in a vegan butter subsitute)
1 can of black beans, well drained
1 cup walnuts, chopped
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
¼ cup ground coffee or espresso
¼ teaspoon sea salt
4 large eggs
1 cup maple syrup

Preheat the oven to 325°F. Line a 9x9 inch greased pan.

Melt the chocolate and butter in a glass bowl in the microwave for 1 1/2 to 2 minutes on high. Stir with a spoon to melt the chocolate completely. Place the beans, 1/2 cup of the walnuts, the vanilla extract, and a couple of spoonfuls of the melted chocolate mixture into the bowl of a food processor. Blend about 2 minutes, or until smooth. The batter should be thick and the beans smooth. Set aside.

In a large bowl, mix together the remaining 1/2 cup walnuts, remaining melted chocolate mixture, coffee substitute, and salt. Mix well and set aside.

In a separate bowl, with an electric mixer beat the eggs until light and creamy, about 1 minute. Add the agave nectar and beat well. Set aside.

Add the bean/chocolate mixture to the coffee/chocolate mixture. Stir until blended well.

Add the egg mixture, reserving about 1/2 cup. Mix well. Pour the batter into the prepared pan. Using an electric mixer, beat the remaining 1/2 cup egg mixture until light and fluffy. Drizzle over the brownie batter. Use a wooden toothpick to pull the egg mixture through the batter, creating a marbled effect. Bake for 40-50 minutes, until the brownies are set. Let cool in the pan completely before cutting into squares. (They will be soft until refrigerated.)

Makes 45 (2-inch) brownies.

Hummus you will kill for...literally

Alright, so we're all feeling the sharp sting of the recession, but hey, let's look at the bright side, ok?...OK!?

Great. So this is a time when a plethora of opportunities to start anew arise. For example, you can:

1. Intern at a non-profit until you decide what to do with your life (CAI internships available here)!
2. Travel to Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe or many other 3rd world countries to "find yourself" by doing "development" projects. Those stupid underdeveloped people will gladly help find you...
3. Go back to grad school and get that masters in social anthropology with a focus on gender studies concentrating on ecological imperialism so that you can emerge two years later with a greater understanding of the problems you already knew about!
4. Cook things for yourself by buying (shudder) ingredients and (shiver) putting them together into a (gasp) recipe.

Here's an excellent hummus recipe for those of you who wish to avoid throwing away thousands of dollars at Trader Joe's for their expensive (though delicious) hummus.

You'll need:

A food processor (or strong forearms)
2 tbsp tahini (it's like peanut butter except with sesame seeds. Look it up)
2 tbsp olive oil
2 cloves mashed/chopped garlic
2 tbsp lemon juice
1 8 oz. can garbanzo beans
Sprinkle of paprika or parsley as a garnish
salt and pepper to taste

Cool. This is possibly the easiest recipe of all time.

Put everything except for the garbanzo beans into the food processor. Open the can of garbanzo beans and empty all but 1/4 of that yummy bean juice. Now dump the beans and remaining juice into the food processor. Process, and voila! Hummus!

Note: the consistency of the hummus is going to depend on the combination of oil, tahini, and water, so for a thick hummus, add more oil and tahini, and for a thinner hummus, add more bean juice.

As for the garnish, some experiments we've done to spice this recipe up are:

1. Adding cumin and honey for a sweet and spicy hummus
2. Adding tomato paste and/or sundried tomato spread
3. Adding rando herbage like Italian Herbs, basil, parsley, or rosemary

All are tasty. Enjoy the hummus and that delicious sense of accomplishment!

Black Bean and Sweet Potato Tacos

Alright, I promised I would put this recipe out by internet means. Here we go.

The basic idea here is that you want to make a paste that tastes good, put it in a tortilla with some cheese, and then eat it. I'm pretty sure this is a fundamental human desire.

Ingredients:

• Two sweet potatoes.
• One yellow onion or sweet onion. Either works.
• One of the big cans of black beans. Not the sixteen ounce ones, the jumbo cheap goya ones.
• 3 or so cloves of garlic.
• A substantial amount of olive oil.
• Salt, cumin, maybe some chili powder, figure it out yourself why don't you?

Also:

• Cheddar cheese
• Tortillas

So this is real easy. In fact, you can probably tell what's going to happen just by looking at the ingredients list.

1. Chop everything up. Mince the garlic, chop the onion into strips, sweet potatoes into little cubes (centimeter and a half?). Fryable size.
2. Fry it in olive oil. Garlic first, till brown, then add the onions, till soft. Then the sweet potatoes, till they get tender but not mushy. Keep adding olive oil throughout, preferably an excessive amount.
3. Pour in the black beans, juice and all. Bring it to a simmer. Heat down, just enough to keep it simmering.
4. Go grate some cheese. Come back and stir the bean thing with a spatula occasionally. You want to hit the point where the beans start breaking open and letting their goop out. It'll turn into a nice blobby mass, which if you've put in enough olive oil will basically not stick to the walls of the pan at all. Like I said, a lot of olive oil.
5. Somewhere during that last step, spice it. Add cumin. Add salt. Add whatever else you're into.
6. You thought that was enough cumin and salt, but you were wrong. Add more.
7. Have I mentioned that cumin has been scientifically proven to cure depression, gonorrhea, and amputation? More.
8. Take it off, let it cool. Eat it in a tortilla with cheese.
9. Put the rest in the fridge, clean up.
10. Wait twelve hours.
11. Fart copiously and joyously.

You're welcome.