In Which the Author Realizes that She is a Creature of Habit.

So, over the weekend I tried my third NYR recipe, based on a Budget Bytes email.  I've been receiving these emails for over a year, and largely ignoring them.  That is one of the reasons I decided to make my New Year's Resolution to cook a new recipe every week.  It was starting to make me feel dumb that I was getting all kinds of new recipes sent to me, but I was still cooking the same handful of meals week after week.

I like Budget Bytes because the author really seems to try to present simple recipes.  She also breaks down what she paid for each ingredient, and calculates the cost per serving for her dishes.

So, without further ado...

Recipe 3:  White Beans with Tomato and Sausage

Here is the recipe.  I won't copy it out again here because I actually managed to make this dish without meaningful substitutions!


Wait a second, you are probably saying, what does "meaningful" mean?  Well, I didn't put whole wheat flour where only white belonged, or switch around a bunch of acids, so I consider my changes to be minimal.

The first change I made was to use dried great northern beans (btw, are these from Canada?  I can't think of them as anything other than "Great White Northern" beans) instead of canned.  Beth of Budget Bytes talks about how they are less expensive than cannellini beans, but I still couldn't find any for less than $2.50 a can at my grocery store.  Maybe they have a secret low class name with a cheaper price, or maybe Texans just don't eat them.  In any case, I went with the $.88 a pound dried beans instead.  I bought two 1 pound bags at the grocery store, but thankfully looked here and realized that just one pound dried beans would do the duty for two 15 oz cans.

Now, here we come to the inspiration for the title of this blog post.  I picked this recipe and bought the ingredients on Monday.  I planned to cook it over the weekend.  I thought about it all week.

Did I soak the beans on Friday, or even Saturday night?  Nope.  Apparently if I don't normally do something after dinner, I have to write myself a note backwards on my forehead to actually make sure it gets done.

Thankfully, there was a "quick soak" cooking method listed on the package.  So, now I can pass this mistake off as wanting to provide extra information to my blog readers.  The method they recommended was to rinse the beans, put them in a pot with 2" of water covering them, then boil for two minutes and let sit covered for an hour.  I had to repeat this twice, draining the water in between, to get them to cook, and even then they were a little more firm than I think they should have been.  This was my first time cooking great northern beans, though, so it's possible it is how they are supposed to be.  (They also way more than doubled in volume, creating probably three and a half cups of leftover beans.) In any case, I'm glad I was able to proceed with the recipe, but I'll have to be extra careful the next time I want to do something with dried beans.

Once I had fixed my bean mistake, the recipe went together with relatively little fuss.  I used stewed tomatoes instead of crushed, because that is what I keep in my pantry.  I think this added to the cooking time because I had to chop up the tomatoes after adding them to the pan, and I believe they are packed in a little more liquid than crushed tomatoes are.

Overall, I think the dish came together well, and made a good meal.  There are just two things I am disappointed about with this recipe.  First, there isn't enough meat.  Two sausage links, especially cut into rounds, made it seem like most bites didn't have meat in them.  In the future, I think I'll either cook the sausage without the casing, so that it distributes more evenly, or just put more in.  The second complaint is a bit of a nit-pick.  I went with extra finely chopped frozen spinach, because I couldn't find the big blocks of spinach in the freezer case. The spinach basically dissolved, turning the lovely red sauce into a murky brown. Not a huge problem, but a little annoying.

To wrap this up, I want to apologize for publishing this so late. I started writing it on Monday, but the kiddo has been getting up really early and there has been a lot of housework to do. I also started The Red Queen by Phillippa Gregory, and of course a new book can be a time suck.  I tried my next recipe last night, so I'll try to get another update out tomorrow.