Go for the gold: Beans, Beans, Beans!

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Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.

Monday, March 8, 2021

Beans, Beans, Beans!

Sam Sifton

Good morning. I was on a call the other day with a bunch of people who’d made white beans the night before and were planning on having the leftovers for lunch. I realized I’d been shying away from white beans, I think mostly on account of a rocket someone sent to foodeditor@nytimes.com, admonishing me for writing too much about white beans in this space. (Those rockets work, folks!)

White beans are great, though, and I’m bringing them back: creamy and braised (above), braised with greens and topped with Parmesan, made into hummus with tahini and coriander. I get it if you’re sick of legumes, a year into the pandemic, but as those who’ve gotten themselves into the bean club lifestyle can attest, you’ve just got to find new varieties and recipes to keep yourself interested and bean-forward. On which front, Melissa Clark is at your service!

No? You’re still adamant. You recall beans as the menu of last March and April, and this year you’re not going to do that again? Here’s a Thai curry risotto with squash and green beans. Here’s a recipe for huevos rotos. Here’s a fine dinner of salmon bathed in anchovy-garlic butter.

This week, I’d like to make stir-fried tomatoes and eggs, and khoresh karafs, the Persian celery stew with lamb. It would be a joy to take some afternoon time away from the screen to make these key lime pie bars with a vanilla wafer crust, and to arise early one morning to make weekday eggs Benedict just because.

Crisp stuffed chicken cutlets some night soon? Korean fried cauliflower? A vegan cacio e pepe with plenty of nooch?

There are many thousands more recipes to cook this week waiting for you on NYT Cooking, and most of them contain no beans. You should go browse among them and see what you find. You can save the recipes you like (even if they don’t come from NYT Cooking!). You ought to rate the ones you’ve cooked. And you can leave notes on recipes, too, if you want to remember something you tweaked in one, or want to share your findings with your fellow subscribers.

Yes, you do need to be a subscriber to access the full array of NYT Cooking’s offerings. Subscriptions support our work and allow it to continue. If you haven’t taken one out already, I hope that you will subscribe today.

We will as always be standing by to help, should anything go wrong in your cooking or our technology. Just write: cookingcare@nytimes.com. Someone will get back to you, I promise.

Now, it’s nothing to do with coddling eggs or deboning a chicken, but I think you should read Nadia Owusu in The Times, on why she started wearing head wraps.

Also, our Tejal Rao on regaining her sense of smell after she got Covid in December: “I think of the sweet smell of my nephew’s head when he was a baby; of my parents’ home when there’s a lasagna in the oven; of hot, dry sagebrush when my dogs kick up the scent. I think of the smell of French fries mixing with wafts of chlorine on a summer’s day by the pool, and I’m not sure how to remember these tiny, wonderful moments without their smells to anchor me.”

Finally, the great Dust-to-Digital reminded me of the South African keyboard player Cherry Wainer’s birthday last week. (She died in 2014, at 79.) Here she is with Don Storer in 1966, playing the “Peter Gunn” theme, composed by Henry Mancini, and she is the absolute coolest. I’d like to cook like that. See you on Wednesday.