Roasted chicken, Anasazi beans, iceberg lettuce with bleu cheese dressing

Why bleu cheese and not blue cheese? Why not fromage bleu? Why not vinaigrette au fromage bleu? Huh? 

Cabbage, tofu, Anasazi beans

Anasazi beans, red Swiss chard

Not shown: one roughly diced medium onion, one smashed and diced garlic clove, peppercorns, bay leaves. 

The beans soak up more than double their bulk of water readily within just a few hours. This suggests how fast they will cook. Much faster than ordinary beans. Everything cooked the same time, a little over an hour. 

They tasted excellent somewhat sweet but weakly one dimensional. The broth too watery.

Additions to punch out the profile without going overboard: salt, a few pinches dry oregano, chile flakes, rice vinegar, additional grinds of pepper, and butter for additional body. 

That did it, and Boy, did that do it.  I could not keep off this stuff even after I was full. I refilled my bowl and went back and filled it a third time. There is hardly any left worth saving, but there is no way the remainder will waste. I can not wait to hit this again and I never do that, eat beyond being sated, much less beyond being full. I'm just not that kind of pig, but tonight with this stuff I am. 

I am trying to convey as a meal it is quite good, and not just as a side.

Maybe I should cook the stems too.

Anasazi beans and fried eggs breakfast

Adjusted color to try to get the purple in the beans. These are not the same as pinto beans. 

Beans ground to dust in coffee mill.

Ingredients cooked in 2.5 X water to beans. Three minutes in microwave stirring between 30 second to 45 second pulses until boiling then finished. 

Tomatoes not cooked. Why? Because tomatoes are better raw.

Every time I do this I ask myself, why don't I do this everyday? It is easy as making toast.

Gift Anasazi beans

Gift for four ladies. I have no idea how this will go down. It might very well become a point of ceaseless ridicule. 

I do wish the true color would show. They are an impressive purple. Related to Pinto, Anasazi beans are sweeter, cook faster, lack the ugly side effect of beans. They require less time soaking, they cook pink and they make delicious dips, stews, salads and sides. 

Anasazi beans, fried eggs,

In Sam Arnold's book, The Fort Cookbook: New Foods of the Old West from the Famous Denver Restaurant, available on Amazon for 1¢, he writes that one of his cooks back in the day told him that black beans are the Cadillac of the bean world. Either black beans or Anasazi beans, I forget which. 

Sam also said Anasazi beans, the spotted heirloom species with markings like pintos but much brighter and dramatic, have only 25% of the type carbohydrates* that cause flatulence.

* Oligosaccharide, usually 3-9 simple sugars, molecules too large for the small intestine so they pass onto the large intestine where they are digested by bacteria, to the extent they can be digested. 

1) Raffinose, a trisaccharide, fructose, galactose, glucose

2) Stashyose, a tetrasaccharide with the same elements as Raffinose. 

The beans turn pink and lose their bright markings as they cook. 

Aw, bless. 

I was thinking about what makes those hamburgers next door so good and I concluded a big part of it is nice crispy lettuce. Good as this is, the whole thing would be much less without a wide slice of fresh crispy iceberg. You usually do not see iceberg served like a disc but it sure is good in every bite. When the lettuce ran out then what remained became worse.

After a full summer of amazing garden tomatoes, and finally heirloom tomatoes, and finally-finally my own terrace tomatoes, these hothouse tomatoes right here with no flavor at all came as a bit of a shock. Man, I sure hope Tony's or Whole Foods still has some summer tomatoes or I'll be really bummed having to do without them. Peaches I can live without for awhile, I guess, but not tomatoes.