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books2024-04-28 11:14 pm
ysabetwordsmith) wrote in books2024-04-28 11:14 pm
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Review: The Complete Beans and Grains Cookbook
The Complete Beans and Grains Cookbook: A Comprehensive Guide with 450+ Recipes
Paperback – February 6, 2024
by America's Test Kitchen
This cookbook covers a wide range of vegan, vegetarian, and omnivore recipes from around the world. They run the gamut from very simple to fairly complex. Most recipes have a photo of the dish; complicated ones often have step-by-step photos. There are also sidebar recipes for condiments, spice blends, and such. The Introduction includes Welcome to the World of Beans and Grains, About Beans, About Canned Beans, About Lentils, About Other Legumes, About Grains, About Rice, and Useful Equipment. That right there is over 30 pages of education about cooking high-protein, high-fiber dishes based on these seed foods. Back matter is similarly generous with Nutritional Information for our Recipes, Conversions and Equivalents, and an Index that lists both ingredients and recipe titles.
Chapter header pages include a list of recipes with color-coded dots for Fast (45 minutes or less) and Vegan recipes. The chapters are Snacks and Appetizers; Toasts, Patties, Tacos, and More; Soups, Stews, Meal Salads, Bean Dinners, Grain Dinners, Bean Sides, Grain Sides, Under Pressure, and Cook It Slow. We marked a ton of recipes here, more in some chapters than others. Seriously, I used up almost two whole index cards making bookmarks. These include Sweet Potato Hummus, Black Bean Burgers, Wild Rice and Mushroom Soup, Chicken and Rye Dumplings, Sprouted Grain Salad, Jamaican Oxtail, Chicken Fried Rice with Sausage and Dried Shrimp, Cranberry Beans with Warm Spices, Brown Rice Pliaf with Rice and Pistachios, Pressure Cooker Sweet Potato Chili, and Slow Cooker Boston Baked Beans.
If you like grains and legumes at all, you should love this cookbook. It's lovely to look at with lots of interesting options. We really enjoyed going through it together. It's also a great choice if you need to feed lots of people affordably without spending all day in the kitchen. I was mildly disappointed by the lack of a sweet / dessert chapter (no kitchen sink cookies? no rice pudding? no red bean paste?) but it's a minor quibble in a cookbook that offers so much to love. Highly recommended.
Paperback – February 6, 2024
by America's Test Kitchen
This cookbook covers a wide range of vegan, vegetarian, and omnivore recipes from around the world. They run the gamut from very simple to fairly complex. Most recipes have a photo of the dish; complicated ones often have step-by-step photos. There are also sidebar recipes for condiments, spice blends, and such. The Introduction includes Welcome to the World of Beans and Grains, About Beans, About Canned Beans, About Lentils, About Other Legumes, About Grains, About Rice, and Useful Equipment. That right there is over 30 pages of education about cooking high-protein, high-fiber dishes based on these seed foods. Back matter is similarly generous with Nutritional Information for our Recipes, Conversions and Equivalents, and an Index that lists both ingredients and recipe titles.
Chapter header pages include a list of recipes with color-coded dots for Fast (45 minutes or less) and Vegan recipes. The chapters are Snacks and Appetizers; Toasts, Patties, Tacos, and More; Soups, Stews, Meal Salads, Bean Dinners, Grain Dinners, Bean Sides, Grain Sides, Under Pressure, and Cook It Slow. We marked a ton of recipes here, more in some chapters than others. Seriously, I used up almost two whole index cards making bookmarks. These include Sweet Potato Hummus, Black Bean Burgers, Wild Rice and Mushroom Soup, Chicken and Rye Dumplings, Sprouted Grain Salad, Jamaican Oxtail, Chicken Fried Rice with Sausage and Dried Shrimp, Cranberry Beans with Warm Spices, Brown Rice Pliaf with Rice and Pistachios, Pressure Cooker Sweet Potato Chili, and Slow Cooker Boston Baked Beans.
If you like grains and legumes at all, you should love this cookbook. It's lovely to look at with lots of interesting options. We really enjoyed going through it together. It's also a great choice if you need to feed lots of people affordably without spending all day in the kitchen. I was mildly disappointed by the lack of a sweet / dessert chapter (no kitchen sink cookies? no rice pudding? no red bean paste?) but it's a minor quibble in a cookbook that offers so much to love. Highly recommended.
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You're welcome!
Beans make an excellent staple food. Combined with any grain -- things like rice and wheat, or bread, are pretty cheap -- they make a complete protein. This is a good cookbook for cheap eating.
The really cool thing is that beans will take on other flavors readily. So if you buy spices, you can make the beans taste totally different. World spice blends are especially good; watch for them in bargain bins or at a bargain store. Other relatively cheap ingredients like onions or tomatoes also work well. You can even make use of certain kitchen scraps -- bacon grease, a ham bone or slab of ham skin all work great to flavor beans; or schmaltz from trimming chicken skin/fat off of pieces. If I make a ham or a hamsteak, I usually figure on ham'n'beans later. We use dried shrimp that we found in an African store for making honeybeans. My partner likes hummus, which has hundreds of flavors.
Re: You're welcome!
My favorite thing to do is to make a crockpot soup with beans and other veggies. These are all really great suggestions though and I want to start using them in different ways so yes, you are a big help! :D
Re: You're welcome!
Cool.
>> Lentils, from what the internet keeps telling me, can also be mashed and added with meat to make more or to even replace meat totally. I don't know how true that is - I haven't tried it yet - but everyone keeps saying that. <<
It's true. Lentils are also among the best ingredients for veggie burgers. It took hippies decades to figure out how to make veggie burgers that both taste delicious and hold together while cooking, but they did it.
One of my hobbies is devising different meatloaves. There are many possible fillers, including crackers, cornmeal, oatmeal, and legumes. Plus vegetables.
However, there's another approach to stretching ground meat for something like taco filling or hamburger that actually makes it better than plain meat. Add diced onion or diced mushrooms (half and half) or both (by thirds). This makes it more moist, tender, and delicious.
>> My favorite thing to do is to make a crockpot soup with beans and other veggies. <<
That works very well. You can also make curries in a crockpot. One of my favorites is Xawaash Chicken which uses butter beans.
>> These are all really great suggestions though and I want to start using them in different ways so yes, you are a big help! :D
You might like my Recipe tag.