The Many Faces of Rice 'n' Beans

CHEAP, HEALTHY, AND FILLING is an important food category, one I like to serve up quite frequently. Typically that means a dish that's either vegetarian or has very little flesh in it, containing instead a lot of vegetables, especially bulky, high-fiber ingredients such as rice, beans, or pasta. Most (all?) cultures have versions of this dish, whether it's the rice and beans of Mexico or the pasta and beans of Italy.

The other night was one of my CH&F nights, and I was planning to make black beans with turkey and rice from Jane Brody's Good Food Gourmet cookbook. When I was about a third of the way into it, however, I realized that I was out of chile, which meant that I couldn't make the Mexican-inspired dish Brody had in mind. So I made some quick substitutions and ended up, instead, with a Thai-inspired curry.

Later it struck me that there is probably a universal formula for rice and beans, which you can easily customize to use ingredients you have on hand. The basic formula is something like this:

1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1/2 pound meat or tofu
1 cup chopped onion
At least 1 cup chopped vegetables
At least 1 teaspoon chopped garlic, ginger, or a combination of the two
Seasoning (chile, curry, ...)
Salt in some form (can be a very salty ingredient such as soy sauce or Parmesan cheese)
1 cup tasty liquid (tomato sauce, coconut milk, stock, ...)
2-3 cups cooked beans
3 cups cooked rice

Heat the oil, then cook the meat or brown the tofu. Add the onion, garlic/ginger, and vegetables and sautee them until they're soft. Add the tasty liquid and the beans, stir it all up, and simmer it for 20 minutes. Serve over rice.

Jane Brody's version of this recipe calls for:

• Meat portion: ground turkey
• Vegetable portion: sweet green pepper
• Garlic/ginger: garlic only
• Spices: 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice, 1 tablespoon Dijon-style mustard, 1 teaspoon chile powder
• Salt: reduced-sodium soy sauce
• Tasty liquid: tomato sauce
• Beans: black beans

However, a vegetarian, Thai-inspired version of the same recipe could be as follows:

• Meat portion: tofu
• Vegetable portion: frozen "Thai vegetable" mix
• Garlic/ginger: ginger only or a combination of garlic and ginger
• Spices: curry, turmeric, chile, and lemongrass or lemon juice
• Salt: regular salt
• Tasty liquid: coconut milk
• Beans: chickpeas

If you keep pre-made Thai cooking sauces in the pantry, as I do, you could replace the spices, salt, and tasty liquid with a pre-made sauce. This makes the dish more expensive to make but is handy in an emergency. For instance, when I realized that I didn't have the chile called for in Brody's recipe, I had already cooked the turkey, green pepper, onion, and garlic. However, I replaced her spices and tomato sauce with a couple of cans of Thai curry sauce. Then, instead of the black beans called for in the original recipe, I used canned chickpeas, which I also keep on hand for emergencies. It turns out that chickpeas simmered in coconut milk are delicious!