This was not what we were expecting as our first experience with the Cuban staple of rice & beans. While we enjoyed the subtle flavors of the dish, the consistency was similar to a porridge or congee. This certainly demands that we explore other recipes for the same dish as we feel there must be other substantially different variations of the ubiquitous meal. My version was a bit soupy as I never cross-referenced a photo to compare what I was cooking and the recipe was found over a month ago, so I had no recollection of what it was supposed to look like. No matter, the essential flavors were there but while writing this I checked on other preparations of Cuban rice & beans and I was pretty much in line with the first half-dozen recipes I looked at. Some recipes call for a splash of apple cider vinegar, many suggest adding some cilantro but one, in particular, suggested serving this with braised pork with mojo sauce, another Cuban favorite. This was the 10th bean dish in my Beanistan series.

How much beautiful food photography is actually found in the dishes and setting? Every time I take these close-ups of meals I’m making there’s something not exactly appealing about them. Just as I’m writing this I figured it out. When we are traveling and I take extreme close-ups of our faces when we are at some beautiful location, you’ll only see the pores and blemishes of my skin, not the ocean, forest, or mountains around me or Caroline next to me. We gain the context of being at an iconic place when we see the bigger picture. When ingredients are photographed as a bunch of elements of a recipe it is not a dish of food, it must be contextualized with the props that we associate with how we’ll approach the dish when we eat it. This feels so obvious now that I’ve wondered about it for a second but the first photo I took of my porotos Granados looked horrible.

Porotos Granados is a bean dish from Chile. The main ingredients are cranberry beans, butternut squash, fresh corn, tomato, onion, garlic, and marjoram. This is our 9th bean dish since I announced our culinary journey to Beanistan back on June 23rd and with 29 varieties of beans still in our pantry, we are far from completing our travels into the world of beans. I can’t tell you how these turned out as I only scooped a small portion from the crockpot for the sake of taking this photo. They remain simmering until dinner time. Then, before you know it, the late afternoon rolls around and those lamb chops that have been marinating all day in rosemary, garlic, lemon rind, and olive oil are on their way to the grill. Paired with the beans we are once again astonished at our good fortune to be eating so well, staying healthy, and enjoying our time.

Bean verdict? These are brilliant and will certainly be on our menu plan again in the future. Caroline is thinking they’d also be nice with some andouille sausage while I was thinking maybe some Filipino longganisa.

A last-minute change in bean-plan was needed when an emergency use case scenario came up regarding a package of bacon taken from the freezer. Sadly this bean entry cannot just be about beans as extenuating circumstances have intruded into our fantasy travels.

On Thursday, while out shopping at Whole Foods for those scotch bonnet peppers I could not find, I decided I needed something from Costco so I visited our local store. I noticed something strange in that there were no canned veggies available. While that wasn’t out of the ordinary two months ago, things had really started normalizing. Limits on buying meat and eggs had been lifted, toilet paper is always available now, frozen pizza is again on hand, things seemed okay. At first, I didn’t think much of it but then even later in the day, I headed over to another popular grocery store called Fry’s, part of the Kroger chain. Uh oh, the canned veggies and pasta sauce aisles have been ransacked again. I asked a couple of clerks about it and they were curious about what’s triggering hoarding again with one of them wondering out loud why all the Gatorade had been cleaned out.

The best I can tell is that people are talking about another lock-down (not that Caroline and I have left ours yet); I guess others are anticipating food shortages again. This sucks as we were starting to make serious headway into clearing out foodstuffs and making space in our over-packed cabinets. Not anymore, as Thursday into Friday were spent prowling our various suppliers to replenish particular items, starting with our freezer. I removed a hunk of beef to make pot roast, some filets for raclette, and a package of bacon. The bacon by Saturday morning was fully thawed and once it’s opened I want it all used within a week as I feel the flavor starts to weaken at about that time. So instead of our Cuban dish planned for tomorrow, I started a crockpot of black-eyed beans because my recipe calls for bacon.

Back to hoarding. In February and March, I stocked us up well, really well. By the time food runs were happening here in Arizona I was able to act as an observer instead of a competitor. This time I feel I was almost caught off guard so I needed to move fast. At Costco a second time this week, I now picked up a bunch of meat that I could stuff into our very organized freezer. Between two different Fry’s I was able to snag the last 7 bottles of Rao’s Arrabbiata Sauce, some canned corn, and more quinoa and lentil pasta that we just tried for the first time this week and really enjoyed. Silk Soy Milk with the long shelf-life has been gone from our local stores for a couple of months now but I can order it by the case from Walmart. That’s just what I did last night when I ordered another 3 cases for delivery which will bring our stash to a total of 46 quarts, 11.5 gallons, or 44 liters and that should last nearly a year. Through Amazon, I bought more oat groats, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, hemp hearts, and flaxseed to make sure I have enough of those ingredients to compliment the 20 pounds of oatmeal I have atop our cabinets. This is of course for making granola that is eaten for breakfast 5 days a week. I’ll also need to place an order for Walnuts again as we are down to our last four pounds of them, we’re good on almonds with 11 pounds in stock. Good thing I recently bought another 12 pounds of our favorite eucalyptus honey.

Guesstimating to some degree and calculating based on our very accurate inventory of 438 line items I’d say we have a solid 120-day supply of food here at home. When I look into our cabinets there is an element of groaning as it feels like it’ll take forever to go through everything and I dread the idea that any of it should spoil before we use it.

Why am I worried about food scarcity? Our country is failing on a grand scale in managing the COVID-19 pandemic with our very own Governor Doug Ducey indirectly and directly responsible for the death of over 2,000 people in Arizona through his negligence, influenced on some level by being a sycophant of our troubled President. We were the last state to shut down and one of the first to reopen. With 3,000 to 4,000 new cases per day now in Arizona where many survivors will have lifelong breathing and/or mental problems along with the 50-90 a day who are dying combined with the potential social unrest from continuing police killings, a rush to kill teachers and parents by forcing children back to school, and an economy that will at some point have to reckon with the massive unserviceable debts, I become nervous about the chances for violent upheaval. Should we start to see 10,000 new cases a day or more, we could be in a situation where fully half the population of Arizona in the next year will have been infected and at the current mortality rates, we’d see between 73,000 to 140,000 dead just in Arizona. To put this in perspective that’s nearly the equivalent of a 9/11 type event almost every week right here in the state we call home. At that point, I’ll not want to go out for anything at all.

So, the beans. In our ongoing effort to not throw away any of the food we’ve purchased, we pay attention to “use-by” dates and consider the freshness of perishables. To the extent it’s possible, we move around the menu plan and try to see a few weeks out what we’ll be eating. Rice and beans are a simple dish that can be pushed out a few days but the bacon needed to find dishes and so six slices went into the crockpot and three slices became part of lunch as a side to our tomato and avocado salad. Tomorrow morning hopefully the rest of it will be part of our scrambled eggs.

Today’s bean safari takes us into Nigeria for a dish called Ewa Oloyin or Nigerian Bean Porridge. The beans are known as honey beans or oloyin. These alien-toe-looking beans were started soaking last night and took up a lot of water as they rehydrated. This morning, after rinsing them, I couldn’t help but see what looked like silvery metallic toenails on these digit-looking legumes. The recipe for this porridge is incredibly simple except the scotch bonnet peppers it calls for were not found and so I’m substituting habanero for them. Other than that I have the palm oil, Roma tomatoes, red onion, bell pepper, and the god-awful-smelling ground dried shrimp; oh yeah, the shrimp bullion too.

Verdict: I decided to err on the side of caution and only used one of the habaneros. Good thing, as the dish is spicy with only one of them. I also scaled back the amount of dried shrimp to one tablespoon from the two-and-a-half the recipe called for. This worked out well for Caroline and me as we both feel that with the full amount of the above ingredients this would have been a potently spicy and fishy soup. Yes, I called this a soup as it’s not like the consistency of a porridge. If I was supposed to mash the beans prior to serving, the recipe didn’t call for it. The flavor is a kind of spicy bean chowder with a pronounced umami character that probably comes from the dried shrimp and palm oil. I’ll certainly be looking for other recipes that use the oloyin bean but I’d consider making this again. This is not recommended for people who do not like a fishy flavor. I’d like to say that I’m thrilled with our Nigerian lunch and feel fortunate for having this opportunity to try something new. The next stop on our journey will take us to Cuba.

It’s kind of funny that restaurants will feature cuts of meat on display for customers to be drawn into desire, but I’ve never seen beans used in such a way to get people excited about what’s on the menu. At vegetarian and vegan restaurants, I’ve seen the most common of ingredients used for the creation of meals except for those that use fake chicken, fake pork, and fake fish. Why aren’t beans more popular on America’s menus? I think we all know why: the association with farting. Sure we’ll see refried beans on burritos and BBQ beans at our cookout joints, even a couple of beans if an Italian place features minestrone but where else can we find prepared beans in a restaurant? I suppose there is one more option, whole black beans versus refried beans as customers believe the refried beans are not as healthy. Well, let me inform you America, due to your finicky palette most Mexican places that appeal to white people got rid of lard years ago. Anyway, I think these lima del papa beans are particularly beautiful and if I saw them near the door when I walked into a restaurant they’d definitely get my attention. First mentioned in the 16th century, lima del papa beans originally came from Peru, but later became popular in Europe, especially in Italy.

Last night I forgot to start soaking our limas, so this morning I washed them and, before throwing them in the crockpot, I took a photo while they were still shiny and reflective. I didn’t have a specific recipe for how I was going to make these so I improvised with some red onion, garlic, tasso ham that I’ve mentioned before, a spiced, smoked, and cured chunk of pork from Louisiana, and a couple of bay leaves because everything with beans in a pot seems to use these inedible leaves. The beans are said to retain their shape even when over-cooked so I plan on leaving them in the crock until this evening.

Well, after only 6 hours we decided to try these giant beans and to my surprise, they are already done. No matter as they’ll stay on low in the crockpot and just continue to simmer over the rest of the day.

Verdict: While I only used 8 ounces of Tasso it turned out to be too much for only 10 ounces of dried beans. Both Caroline and I felt like the cooked beans were bigger than the Corona’s but maybe they were thicker so they are overall bigger? Lima del Papa’s will definitely hold a position of being a favorite with us as super-large beans have left a seriously positive impression upon our palettes.

On Wednesday I started soaking 5 ounces of beans. Not just any beans either, these were a combination of green lentil, red lentil, French lentil, green pea, mung bean, and adzuki bean from the Sprout House, though I ordered them on Amazon. It’s been years since we sprouted beans, but we still have our sprouting kit and it was a good thing I was thinking about our meal plan as I needed 3-5 days for the beans to sprout. As far as I can tell, sprouted beans started in Asia so tonight’s bean dish we’ll attribute to Japan as mung beans are originally from Japan.

This recipe was going to feature kidney beans but the garbanzos I made for yesterday’s dinner weren’t used due to a change in plans, so we threw half of them in today’s sprouted bean salad. A bit of red and green onion, mint, garlic, and cherry tomatoes along with olive oil and lemon rounded it out. Regarding the amount, starting with 5 ounces of dried beans was enough for four solid portions so I should consider using only half next time. Caroline has suggested that next weekend I try adding bean sprouts to our breakfast scramble, sounds good to me.