Black Bean and Summer Vegetable Salad

Black Bean and Summer Vegetable Salad

My next-door neighbour has been handing me cucumbers all month. One day we also got a dozen ears of corn, and recently cherry tomatoes have started coming over the fence from her too.

We ate this on its own as a light meal – the black beans add protein, and the corn is a starchy vegetable, so it’s almost complete on its own.

Black Bean and Summer Vegetable Salad

1/2 a cucumber
1 cup cherry tomatoes
1 ear corn, cooked (mine was leftover from a batch of barbecued ears)
1/2 can black beans
2 tsp olive oil
2 tsp balsamic vinegar
salt and pepper to taste

1. Chop the cucumber and tomato into quite small pieces.
2. Cut the corn kernels off the cob and add to the other vegetables.
3. Rinse and drain the black beans.
4. Add the olive oil and vinegar, and stir to combine. Add a little salt and pepper if you like.

I’m sure later in the season I’ll start adding herbs and spices to perk up the taste, but right now it tasted so fresh and delightful without that I wasn’t even tempted.

Half the recipe gives you 2 servings of vegetable for only 225 calories, or 4 Weight Watchers points. You’re also getting 7.5g of fibre, a good push towards your daily requirement. You can leave out the oil to bring it down to 185 calories and 3 points, but olive oil is good for you in small amounts like this.

Potato Salad

We’re going to a potluck barbecue tonight, and along with some burgers to throw on the grill, I’m taking a small potato salad to share. I’ve been devouring (metaphorically) the Smitten Kitchen website, reading all the back posts over the past couple of weeks; it’s the site I wish I was writing. Oh well! I’ll just point you to all her veggie recipes and you can see the delicious-looking cakes and cookies yourself if you like; I won’t tempt you here.  She heavily adapted Roseanne Cash’s Potato salad, and I’ve adapted it again, since I hate egg in potato salads.

Potato Salad

1 pound new potatoes
2 dill pickle spears, chopped (about 1/2 cup)
1 stalk celery, chopped (about 1/3 cup)
6 green onions, white & green parts, chopped (about 1/3 cup)
3 tbsp light mayonnaise
2 tsp Dijon mustard
2 tsp apple cider vinegar

1. Quarter and boil the new potatoes until cooked (ideally you cooked double for last night’s dinner). Drain and let cool completely.
2. Add everything else and mix together. Add salt and pepper if it seems to need it.

Eat a quarter of this and you’ve got just 135 calories, or 3 Weight Watchers points.

Fresh Tomato Soup, and other supper goodness

Supper tonight was, I have to admit, all the left-overs from last week’s farmer’s market haul. I had to make room for the new stuff!

The beans were the leftovers from lunch, served cold. New potatoes were simply washed, quartered, and boiled; top them with a little butter, salt and pepper at the table if you like.

The soup pulled it all together and added the bulk of the meal’s protein, thanks to the last of the cheddar cheese curds from the Thornloe cheese factory I picked up during our August long weekend trip there.

Fresh Tomato Soup

2 tsp olive oil
2 gloves garlic
1/2 small onion
8 or 10 fresh Roma tomatoes, chopped (mine worked out to 3.5 cups when chopped)
2 cups chicken stock
1/2 tsp dried basil (by all means substitute 1 tbsp fresh – I didn’t have any)
2 tbsp flour in 1/4 cup cold water
1/4 cup cheese curds

salt and pepper to taste

1. Heat the oil in a largish pot and add the garlic, minced, and the onion, chopped up.
2. Add the stock, tomatoes, and basil, and simmer uncovered for 20 minutes.
3. Use an immersion blender, if you have one, to blend the soup in the pot. Otherwise you can use your blender, but you should let it cool a bit first, and then put it back in the pot to warm back up.
4. Mix the flour into the water until there are no lumps, and add to the soup. Let simmer for five minutes – it should thicken up a little.
5. Divide the cheese curds between two serving bowls. Ladle half the soup into each bowl.

The beauty of the cheese curds is that they melt into those lovely toothsome strings that you get with proper poutine. You can, of course, just slice up some cheddar and add that instead – mozzarella would probably be good too.

Each serving is 193 calories, or 4 Weight Watchers points. You get an impressive three servings of vegetables for that.

EDIT:  It’s Saturday now, and I just heated up the leftover soup from last night; the two servings were a bit too generous, even for us.  Even though my usual reaction to “stir in a spoonful of plain yogurt” is “ugh, no thanks”, I just did it; and it’s great!  It adds some creaminess and adds a bit of a tang, without adding that overpowering plain-yogurt tang.  I do wish that I’d peeled my tomatoes, though – I hate those little bits of rolled-up skin.

French Beans

French beans are very much like regular green beans, but you can recognize them by their thinness. When you taste them, you’ll notice a difference too.

I haven’t posted any recipes yet, because to be honest, we haven’t had anything I could call a ‘recipe’ without laughing at myself. The first time we ate them, Will and I just washed them, put them in the microwave for 1 minute, then ate them in front of the TV with our fingers while watching the Olympics. You wouldn’t have thought it would substitute well for popcorn, would you?

Today I had them for lunch, with this ridiculously easy cooking method that I also hesitate to call a ‘recipe’.

Sautéed French Beans

2 tsp butter (or olive oil if you like)
1 large clove garlic
1 slice onion (or shallot cut up fine, or green onions chopped)
1 pound french beans

1. Melt the butter in a frying pan and add the garlic, minced, and the onion, cut into quarters and broken apart. Leave it on a fairly low heat so the butter doesn’t burn and the white stuff doesn’t brown.
2. While that’s cooking, prep your beans by washing them and cutting off the stem end.
3. Throw the beans, still wet, into the frying pan. Pop the lid on for about eight minutes. Stir them once or twice.
4. Either eat them hot out of the pan with your fingers, or let them cool and eat as a salad the next day.

Sharing this with someone gives you each 1 Weight Watchers point (for the butter or oil), plus two servings of vegetables.  If you’re counting calories, it’s 118.

P.S.  Artistic note: please cut your onion slices skinnier than I did, so your onion bits don’t end up looking like albino earthworms.

Edamame

I was thrilled to see edamame (young soybeans in the pod) at our farmer’s market on Thursday, so I’m embarrassed to admit that they’ve sat in the fridge for a week now. It doesn’t seem to have hurt them one bit, though.

I won’t bore you with a written-out recipe for edamame; I boiled them for 8 minutes, sprinkled them with salt, and am now gloriously wading through the whole bag for lunch!

The nutritional information I’ve found seems to be for shelled edamame, but when it’s served in a restaurant as an appetizer it’s always still in the pod. I measured a cup of pods, and the beans from that worked out to 1/4 cup.

So, measure out yourself a generous *two* cups of pods, and for 47 calories (1 Weight Watchers point) you get 2g of fibre, 4g of protein, and only 2g of fat. Fat in a vegetable? This one plays in the “meat and alternates” category too, plus I’m sure you’ve heard that women approaching menopause should add more soy to their eating. This is the tastiest way I’ve found.

Grilled Zucchini

Simple and good. This is our favourite way to use up the small baby zucchini you invariably see in the supermarket these days – whatever happened to the big ones our mothers grated up into zucchini loaf? Are they a purely homegrown phenomenon?

Grilled Zucchini

2 baby zucchini (the ones that are 8″ to 12″ long, and about 2″ in diameter)
1 tsp olive oil
salt and freshly ground pepper

Cut the ends off the zucchini and cut lengthwise into quarters (or, if you’re going to put them on a sandwich later, you can cut them in 1/4″ thick lengthwise slices). Drizzle the olive oil over top, and add some salt and pepper. Grill for about five minutes, but not until they’re mushy.

Red Wine Beef Stew

I adapted this recipe from the original Harrowsmith cookbook. I know it seems like a crazy time of year to make stew, but it was cool and rainy today, and I wondered what it would be like with new potatoes and carrots. Their freshly picked taste still came through, even after lengthy simmering!

If you’re making this in winter with regular potatoes and carrots, of course peel them and chop them. I just cut my new potatoes in half, and washed the carrots with the scrub brush to get the little hairy roots off. If you have tomato sauce languishing in the fridge you can use 1/3 cup of that rather than a tomato.

Red Wine Beef Stew

2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 package stewing beef (1 pound, 454g)
1/3 cup chopped onion (half a small one)
1/3 cup chopped celery (one stalk)
1 clove garlic, chopped up
salt and pepper to taste
1/4 tsp dried thyme
1 bay leaf
1 tomato (if fresh, chop up – mine was frozen so I just threw it in)
2/3 cup beef stock (a packet of OXO is fine, I promise)
1/3 cup red wine
about 12 new red-skinned potatoes, washed and cut in half
a bunch of new carrots, washed well and cut in chunks
1 tbsp flour
1/4 cold water

1. Warm up the oil in your big pot and brown the pieces of beef well on all sides. Take them out and put them aside for a minute.
2. Put the onion and celery and saute them until they’re soft, about 10 minutes. Add the beef back in.
3. Add the garlic, some salt and pepper (not too much salt if you’re using prepared stock), thyme, bay leaf, the tomato, beef stock, and wine. Bring to a boil, then turn it down to a low simmer, cover the pot, and leave it alone for at least an hour.
4. Add the potatoes and carrots. Simmer, covered again, for at least another hour. Make sure the beef is tender – cook it a bit longer if you can wait and you’re not sure.
5. Mix the flour and water up until there are no lumps, then pour it into the stew. Cover and simmer one last ten minutes to thicken up the stew.

Serves 4.

Nutritional information per serving; 670 calories, 12g fat, 103g carbohydrate, 37g protein, 15g fibre. 14 Weight Watchers points (ouch!).

If you’re trying to lose weight, don’t just eat half a serving; make the full recipe but with half the amount of oil, beef, and potato. That alone will drop it to 7 points, since it’s those ingredients that bump up the fat and calorie count.

Curried Chickpeas

When writing the farmer’s market list, I forgot the two summer squash and two zucchini that cost a paltry 50 cents each. Tonight the summer squash (which looks just like a yellow zucchini) is slated to star in a curry dish, along with the rest of the green beans.

Curried Chickpeas

1 cup dried chickpeas
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1/2 medium onion, chopped
50g Patak’s medium curry paste
2 tomatoes, chopped
1/2 pound green beans, cut in bite-size pieces
2 summer squash, cut in bite-size pieces (I like to quarter them lengthwise, and then slice the lengths)

1. Soak the chickpeas overnight, or if you’re like me and forget, boil them for three minutes and then let sit for the afternoon.
2. Heat the oil and add the onion. Sauté for about five minutes, until the onion is soft. Add the curry paste and stir for a minute.
3. Add the tomatoes (I put them in a food chopper and whirl them up, since nobody in the family likes chunks of tomatoes). Let them cook down for a bit.  Add the green beans and cook them for two minutes.
4. Add the chickpeas and cook for two minutes, until they’re getting close to warmed through.
5. Add the summer squash and cook for another two minutes; we don’t like our squash too mushy, even in a curry.

Serve over a cup of brown rice, and a nice cold glass of Gewurztraminer on the side if you like.

This recipe serves four, and has 300 calories for the curry, and 200 for the brown rice. Weight Watchers points are 5 and 4 respectively. You’re getting two to three servings of vegetables, depending on the size of your squash, one serving of meat alternate, and two servings of whole grains.

A lot of the points here are in the curry paste, and half of me wants to apologize for using a prepared paste. Realistically, though, there are very few times in my life I’ve had the time and inclination to buy, toast, grind, and store my own Indian spices, so if you’re reading this, you probably don’t either. The Patak’s jar of paste has everything preserved in oil (hence the calories) and gives a great flavour every time. I particularly like it to use with cauliflower, zucchini, or potatoes as well, and it adds an easy way to get the health benefits of onions into your diet.  The jar costs $5.99, but often goes on sale for less, and lasts us for months in the fridge.  So, as a strategy for eating more veggies, I highly recommend it!

Salade Nicoise

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that green beans and new potatoes are available at the same time at the farmer’s market; Salade Niçoise must have come about for that very reason.

To keep picky eaters happy, when serving or packing this for a picnic, we pack each ingredient in its own little container. It makes for a dizzying array of little yogurt containers alongside the bigger potato bowl, but it’s fun for everybody to assemble their own salad. This is a nice light-tasting lunch that still keeps you full for the afternoon, thanks to the added protein and carbohydrate.

If you have kids you won’t eat tuna or eggs, you might want to give them some cheese to round out the meal. If you have lettuce you’re trying to get rid of, you can add it to the salad, or if you’re serving it to company at home, it does look nice to lay everything out on a bed of lettuce leaves.

Salade Niçoise

2 pounds potatoes
1 pound green beans
4 tomatoes
small chunk of red onion
4 oz black olives
2 cans chunk tuna, packed in water
4 eggs, hard boiled
3 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp red wine vinegar
1 clove garlic, pressed
1/2 tsp Dijon mustard
salt and pepper to taste

1. Prep the potatoes; if they’re new, wash and cut them in quarters; if not, peel them and cut into largish bite-size chunks. Prep the beans; cut off the tops and cut them into roughly bite-size chunks too. (You’ll sense a bite-size theme here, soon, if you hadn’t already).
2. I can’t stand to use three pots for a lunch, so if you have a pretty good idea of how long you want your potatoes and beans to cook, try what I do: put the potatoes on to boil, then once the beans are prepped, but them on top. They should be mostly out of the water, and steaming rather than boiling. I haven’t tried boiling the eggs along with the potatoes yet, but I think that would work too.
3. Cut up the tomatoes into smallish pieces and the red onion into very small pieces. Peel the eggs and quarter them.
4. Mix the olive oil, vinegar, garlic, mustard (a baby-food jar is good if you’re to picnic). Add salt and pepper to taste, or let everyone season their own salad. Mix enough dressing in with the cooked, drained potatoes to moisten them.

When it’s picnic time, give everyone a bowl and a fork. Open and drain the tuna, and open all your various containers. Pour dressing on the individual bowls once the salads are assembled to everyone’s liking.

This serves 4, and can easily be cut in half or scaled up for the number of people you’re feeding. For each serving, you’ve earned 2 “real” vegetable servings and 2 starchy vegetables, for 400 calories. As written it’s about 8 Weight Watchers points, which is a lot for lunch; cut that down to 6 by measuring yourself just 6 ounces of potato and skipping the hard-boiled egg. If you hate olives, save yourself 1 point by omitting them too.

Smashed Potatoes

Smashed Potatoes and Roasted Green Beans

You really didn’t need a recipe for this, did you? No, I didn’t think so. Here it is anyway, so nobody forgets the most basic way to enjoy potatoes.

Smashed Potatoes

12 small new potatoes, preferably red-skinned
1 or 2 cloves garlic, peeled but left whole
2 tsp butter
1/4 cup milk (or so)

Wash the potatoes and cut them each into 2 or 3 pieces, so the pieces are all roughly the same size. Throw them in a pot with the garlic and cover with cold water. Bring to a boil and cook for 10 to 15 minutes; they’re done when a fork goes into them easily. Drain them, then put them back in the pot over low heat for a minute while you add the butter and milk. Mash roughly. You do know you can get a plastic potato masher to avoid scratching your non-stick pots, right?

Serves 2 for about 110 calories and 3 Weight Watchers points.  To be more accurate, since your potatoes  might be bigger or smaller than mine, measure out the final product (each 1/4 cup is 1 point) and then add a point for the butter.

When using full-size winter potatoes, and serving company, I often add cheese to the mashed potatoes; some sharp old cheddar, goat cheese, or grated parmesan all go well.  I discovered the secret to restaurant mashed potatoes when I took a cooking course once; it’s fat.  In the case of the ones we made, rendered marrow and heavy cream.  I’m not likely to do that at home!