Grains and Beans a la mode

Throughout the year, but especially in the summer, we usually shop the market without a list.  We find that approach the most fun and relaxing because rather than hunting for something specific, we respond to what looks, smells, and tastes most inviting.  The result is often that we stagger home with the huge hauls we sometimes display here.  How do we manage to use all of this?  For many of our meals, we use grains and beans as a kind of produce platform, topping them with lots of fresh fruit and vegetables from our haul. These dishes are “a la mode” both in terms of the original meaning of that French phrase—according to the latest fashion or responding to what is in vogue or, in our case, in season and therefore time-sensitive—and in the distinctively American sense of “with something extra (usually ice-cream) on top.” No one knows precisely how or when this second meaning emerged, but it appears to have happened in the nineteenth century, when ice cream was gaining attention as a trendy sweet (although it was hardly new) and it was all the rage to pair it with pie.  

You can see the combination of fashion and food, timely and on top, in this image of a fashionable hairdo decorated with the wares from a greengrocer’s stall.  Matthew Darly, The Green Stall (a Hairdo fit for Market Day): London, 1777.  

(From the delightful blog http://b-womeninamericanhistory18.blogspot.com/2010/02/big-hair.html)

Three of our staple dishes allow us to eat lots of produce without being bound to recipes or getting stuck eating the same thing every day.  We make the “produce platforms” in advance and then, when hunger strikes, we throw together and personalize the dish as we like it, by chopping up fresh fruits, vegetables, and herbs.  Here are the three we eat the most.

Toasted Muesli

Muesli differs from granola in that it does not have sweetening or oil added to it. We mix a variety of rolled grains from the Co-op bulk bins, often rye, barley, and kamut.  We avoid oats just for variety but they work well here.   If you want a quick start, you can use the Wheatland multigrain flakes (which are rolled grains rather than processed flakes) at the Co-op rather than blending your own mix.  While the grains in muesli are often raw, we toast the grains on baking sheets in a 350 degree oven for about 15 minutes to enhance their flavor and texture.  You have to keep an eye on them because, like toasting nuts, grains go from palely raw to bitter black very fast.  While the oven is on, we sometimes toast pepitas, sunflower seeds, or large shred coconut  to throw in.  There’s no need to measure here.  Toss in what you have or please.  The most flavorful ingredient is the pre-toasted nuts from the Farmers Market, to which you don’t need to do a thing.  We use Sam Cabral & Family Orchard’s dry roasted almonds and Fiddyment Farms pistachios (not always at the same time).  

 
Once we’ve made a batch, we keep it in a tin to keep the grains and nuts crisp.  (If you’ve made a huge batch, you can freeze some of it to keep it fresh.  We’ve done this very successfully.)  Then, of a morning, we serve a scoop of the muesli a la mode, that is, topped with whatever fruit we’ve got. A typical bowl will be half muesli (grains, nuts, and seeds) and half fruit.  We top it with milk or almond milk.

Another breakfast alternative is Morning Muck

We started with this recipe for “chilled summer oatmeal” (whose origin we have forgotten):

16 oz. plain yogurt  (Greek doesn’t have enough liquid to soften the grains, so use regular)

2 cups rolled oats

1 cup oat bran

3-4 tablespoons flax seed

1 pint blueberries

2-3 cups apricot nectar

Mix together and chill. 

Over the years we have grown to like this less sweet and have abandoned both the nectar and the precision of measuring.  Now we stir together oats, yogurt, oat bran, and flax seed in a covered container until it is soupy. At first, the mixture needs to be fairly wet because it will set up overnight as the grains absorb the liquid.  We tend not to put fruit in the mixture, preferring to put it on top when we serve a muck sundae topped with fruit and perhaps a little homemade jam or honey.

 

Beans and/or grains a la mode

We have developed a similar strategy for lunches.  If you make a bean or grain salad for a week of lunches, you’ll get sick of it mid-week.  Whatever fresh ingredients you’ve included in it will also grow dank and dispiriting.  It works much better, we find,  to prepare the components that keep well and take a little time in advance but then assemble the salad each day, a la mode, rummaging about for what wants eating, suiting our fancy that day, and placing the fresh things on top of the cooked beans and grains.

Beans:  While there are many opinions and theories regarding cooking beans, we prefer to soak beans overnight in cold water because this seems to even out the textures of the beans.  Beans seem to absorb as much liquid as they need, helping to reduce the problem of uneven cooking.  They also take less time and fuel to cook if they’ve been soaked.  Grains can also be soaked and this will likewise reduce cooking time.  But if you soak them too long they can get mushy.  So we tend to soak the beans overnight but not the grains. 

After your beans have soaked, pour off that water—we pour it onto plants, so one can see a history of recent beans we have cooked at the base of our roses—and start with fresh water.  Bring it to a boil and let the pot simmer in a lively way while you are noodling about in the kitchen, perhaps 10 minutes.  Skim off the foam.  Add aromatics—a spring of rosemary, a bay leaf, a crushed clove of garlic, half an onion.  Add salt.  Turn off and cover.  Leave on the burner because residual heat is part of this method.  Walk away.  At lunchtime these should be ready to eat.  If they are a little toothsome for you, bring the pot back to a boil for a few minutes.  They should be close.  We have used this method very successfully--with no additional cooking--with garbanzo beans, white beans, and the black-eyed peas available both at the Farmers Market and at the Coop from Full Belly Farms. 

Grains:  Here again, we let time do a lot of the work for us.  We combine grains and water in a saucepan (usually about 1 cup of grains to 2 cups of water, but this method does not require that you be exact), bring it to a boil, then turn off the heat, cover the pot, and leave it on the burner.  The grains will usually be ready in an hour or so.  Pour off extra liquid, if there is any.  This method works well with hulled barley and semi-pearled faro.  If you are cooking a very tough grain—such as hard red winter wheatberries or rye berries—you might need to let the pot boil a few minutes, as you do with the beans, before turning it off.  Then the trick to grains you want to use for salads is to drain them, toss them with just a little oil, and let them cool spread out on a baking sheet.  This will mean they’ll stay discrete grains in your salads rather than turning into porridge vinaigrette.

We then store the beans and grains separately.  If you have more than you’ll use in the week, freeze them.  Grains freeze best dry, while beans freeze best in their cooking liquid.  Similarly, you might choose to dress the beans you'll be eating in a given week with some vinegar, oil, salt, and pepper, and perhaps a spoonful of tapenade or pesto if you have it, because they'll absorb the flavor.  Grains, on the other hand, will just get mushy if you dress them in advance.

When it’s time for lunch, put a scoop of beans and/or one of grains in a bowl, top it with chopped fruit and veg, and dress the whole thing with a little vinegar and oil.  This time of year, we usually use tomatoes, cucumbers, arugula, onions, and perhaps a little fresh basil or some crumbled feta from Orland Farms.  Radishes, shaved fennel, and grated carrots are also good.  You can also use leftover roasted vegetables, of course.  But what's good about these salads is their balance of soft, chewy, and crunchy, earthy and bright.  So uncooked toppings work the best.  The pleasure of this kind of cooking and eating is that you start thinking about how to combine colors, textures, and flavors to compose a salad that suits your stash and your taste that day.  The bowl ripening on our counter this week, for instance, suggests that yellow, orange, and red tomatoes, big chunks of heirlooms and tiny cherry tomatoes cut in half,  might like to rub skins with white nectarines.  No need to police the fruit/vegetable boundary.  Tomatoes are fruits and cucumbers are melon cousins, anyway.  So mix it up as color and flavor suggest.