Black bean pizza...

This is my last bean post... promise! And it's a bit of a strange one, so I'm sure only the true bean lovers out there will try it out. But it's good! And it makes me feel better about eating pizza...

This pizza is patterned after California Pizza Kitchen's tostada pizza. Once cooked it can be topped with shredded lettuce, salsa, pico de gallo, or just dipped in ranch dressing. I like it just plain as well. Here is our version of a black bean pizza...

Ingredients
Pizza dough
1 1/2 cups black beans
1 chicken breast grilled and cut into bite sized pieces
8 ounces mozzarella cheese
Parmesan cheese and garlic salt

1- Prepare your choice of pizza dough (I've put my pizza dough recipe at the bottom of the post) on a pizza stone or whatever baking dish you would like.

2- Spread about 1 1/2 cups of black beans onto your dough. Make sure they are drained and rinsed and patted dry. There is no sauce, this is your sauce.

3- Add cooked chicken.

4- Spread shredded cheese on top. I also like to season my pizza, I like to think of it as the "secret pizza ingredient". I shake Parmesan cheese on top as well as some garlic powder to add a little additional flavor.You could do Italian seasoning as well if you would like.

5- Have oven pre-heated to 450 degrees. Cook for about 15 minutes or until cheese is melted and crust is starting to brown.

Again, you can serve it with some mexi toppings on top, or just eat it plain like this! Both ways are great!

Pizza Dough

4 cups flour (I use spelt, it makes a great dough!)

2 tsp yeast

3/4 tsp salt

11 oz hot water

3 TBSP oil

Mix 3 cups flour with the rest of the ingredients. Mix with an electric mixer on high for 3 minutes. Using a wooden spoon stir in as much of the remaining flour as you can. 

Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface. Knead dough until it is smooth and elastic. Divide into to balls and let sit for 10 minutes to rise. Roll out dough or freeze in a freezer bag until ready to use.

Bean and cheese burrito + tacos...

Can't really talk about beans without talking about taco's/burrito's now can we? We eat some form of taco's every single week. We love them! You can stuff them full of super yummy, healthy stuff. And ours almost always contain black beans.

A quick and easy lunch that I've been making lately are bean and cheese burritos. They are really simple and take very little prep.

Ingredients:
corn tortillas
black beans
cheese
1 tomato
 cilantro
lemon/lime juice, pepper, garlic powder to taste
hot sauce (I like Tapatio)

1- Warm up corn tortilla's in a pan or on a griddle with some cooking spray/EVOO (I usually do 3 if it's just me eating them).
2- When your tortillas are slightly brown on both sides and warm, spoon some black beans on them and put some cheese on top. Melt for 30 seconds in the microwave.
3- I like to add some veggies here, so I just make a simple pico de gallo to go with. Dice up one tomato in little pieces. Dice up a few sprigs of cilantro. Mix together with a little lime/lemon juice, garlic powder, and pepper. Put a few spoonfuls on top of your beans and melted cheese. If you like hot sauce or salsa, add that too.
4- That's it! Fold in half and enjoy! Super easy, healthy lunch. When using corn tortillas these are low glycemic and will keep your blood sugar at a steady level.

Here are some other taco recipes that we do that you might want to try...

Quinoa and Black Bean Tacos. These are my all time favorite recipe!!! I'm serious! I love these! They are so yummy, so healthy, and vegetarian because quinoa is a complete protein. I recently shared this recipe with my sister in law and she loved them! If you have been wanting to try out quinoa or use it already give this one a try. (I already blogged this one a while back, find the post here).

GOOP Shrimp Tacos. This is the recipe that really turned me onto taco's way back when. It's from Gwenyth Paldrow's blog and they are so yummy. I like how she makes her beans, warming them up on the stove with a clove of garlic and a few sprigs of cilantro. If you're feeling like shrimp, give this a try.

Fish Tacos. Sorry, no pic for this one. My husband likes to fish and so we use the trout that he catches for fish tacos a lot of the time. Or you could just grill up whatever fish you have on hand. We do grilled fish, shredded cabbage, black beans, pico de gallo, some feta cheese, and hot sauce. And they are so YUMMY!!! Okay... can you tell I'm obsessed with tacos.

One fun tip when making tacos. Put a griddle right on the kitchen table if you have the room, and warm up your tortillas right there when you are making them. It's fun, you always have a warm, fresh tortilla, and it adds to the ambiance of the meal.

** Also, you might notice that I don't add onions to any of this stuff. If you like onions, by all means onion them up! I just think they are disgusting and refuse to put onions in anything that I make. My poor husband... he loves them. But I can't even kiss him if he's had onions... and I can always tell ;).

What kind of taco's do you love?

White bean chili...

 I love this soup! And I am not a soup person. This is a keeper for sure. I got this recipe from my friend Emily while we lived in Las Vegas. One day we were taking about recipes and I said something along the lines of, "You know it will be a good recipe when it starts with: put olive oil in the pan... then add garlic." Her eyes got big and she said, "Ohhh... I have a recipe you need to try. You're going to love this!" And she was right! I do love it! We make this one a lot. I've taken this to family parties, church parties, and I always have people asking me for the recipe. This one has been a life saver to me lately because it's a low GI meal, no grains to battle with here. It is good though with some crusty bread... not going to lie. 

Ingredients:

1-2 chicken breasts shredded

1 medium onion chopped (or not…I hate onions so I omit this step)

1 2/3 tsp. garlic powder

1 Tbsp. olive oil

3 cans Great Northern Beans – drained and rinsed (or if using precooked I do 4 cups)

1 14.5 oz can chicken broth

1 small can diced green chilies

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. dried oregano

½ tsp. black pepper

¼ tsp. cayenne pepper (I use half this amount)

1 tsp. ground cumin

-          Cook chicken in pan with onion, garlic powder, and olive oil. Then shred chicken, put it back in the pan.

-          Add drained and rinsed beans and the remainder of the ingredients. Bring to a boil if cooking on stove and boil for 5 minutes.

-          Reduce to simmer for 30 minutes while covered.

-          If cooking in a crock pot just put all ingredients in and cook for 4 hours

-          Just before serving add 1/2 cup (or a few scoops) sour cream or cream. Stir well and serve immediately.

-          Double recipe for 8-10 people.

** These are also good as left overs. Something I like to do is eat it the next day as lettuce wraps. Easy on the "juice" but spoon the bean mixture into lettuce leafs and enjoy!

 

Black and white enchiladas...

This is one of my favorite meals! They are a healthy-ish enchilada (depends on how much cheese you put on top I guess)... not full of cream of whatever. Just beans, chicken, and chili's.

Ingredients:
1 cup cooked black beans (if using canned, drain and rinse well)
1 cup cooked white great northern beans
1-2 chicken breasts cooked and cut into bite sized pieces
1 can diced green chili's with the juice
dash of salt, pepper, and garlic powder
corn or white tortillas
1 can green or red enchilada sauce (I like the green with this one)
shredded cheese for the top

1- Once your chicken is cooked, add beans, chicken and chili's to a pan. Season with pepper, salt, and garlic powder (just a little of each). Cook for about 5 minutes on medium heat to combine all the ingredients together.

2- Prepare a 9 x 13 baking dish with cooking spray. Grab yourself a tortilla and fill the center with a few spoonful's of filling as shown in picture below. Now, if you are using corn tortillas warm them in the microwave or on a pan before using. I prefer this meal with flour tortillas, but have been using corn lately because it's a low GI grain and fits my diet. So if you use corn, prepare them before filling them.Once tortillas are filled, roll them and place them in the baking dish.

3- Continue filling tortillas until your pan is full or you are out of tortilla's and filling. I usually fill one large pan using about 10 flour tortillas (I made a little extra with this). Corn are much smaller and you can make a lot more.

4- Cover tortillas with enchilada sauce and cheese.

5- Bake at 350 degrees for about 20 minutes or until cheese is melted and the edges of the tortillas are starting to get brown and crunchy. Let sit for 5 minutes before serving to cool off a bit.

These are really yummy as left overs too so I usually make more than we can eat in a sitting and save them for lunches. This recipe is easy to adjust for a larger group. Instead of one cup of each bean do 1 1/2 or 2. I'm not really exact on my measurements of everything. I prefer to cook without measuring things if I can get away with it. This is one recipe that it's easy to do that.

This recipe is also very versatile. I like using just black beans with red enchilada sauce, or I will mix the black and white like this for variety. Serve with a side salad for a healthy dinner!

Beans...

 Let's talk about beans shall we? I don't post recipes up here very often, but a few people have been asking me about my bean recipes lately so I figured this would be a good way to share those. So for today I want to share how I cook my beans at home, and then the rest of the week (and probably into next week) I will share a different bean recipe that we love.

We eat a lot of beans around here. Beans are so good for you, and super tasty. There are lots of things you can do with beans. They are inexpensive and easy to make. We mostly eat black beans and white great northern beans... so those are what my recipes call for. One thing that beans are known for and good for is their fiber content. For example, one cup of black beans has 19 grams of fiber in it! That's huge! So unless you are munching on fruits and veggies all day long to get your fiber, you really should be eating beans when you can.

**Little disclaimer time here... I feel silly even saying this, but I think I need to address the whole "you eat beans you get gas" issue here. I just have to say that I have not noticed that we are a super gassy family or anything. I really don't think that eating beans causes you to have more of that going on. That is unless your body is not used to eating them and then you might have an adjustment period.We eat beans a few times a week usually, and we don't have problems with it... at least anymore than I already have living with two boys mind you. Anyway... if you stay away from beans because you are worried about this I say... you just need to eat more beans. Regularly... okay, on with our bean topic. 

I used to buy beans in the cans at the store but soon found that it was much easier and less expensive in the long run to cook hard beans at home. I usually will do a batch of beans on a Sunday night when we are running low and don't have anything else going on. I don't soak my beans over night, it only takes me about 1 hour 40 minutes start to finish to cook a whole batch of beans. I can't remember where I first read about this bean cooking method from, but here is what I do.

1- Get a big pot. Fill it half full of beans (or however many cups you want to do... and bag of hard beans, doesn't have to be exact measurements here). I usually fill my pot halfway because they will double in size and you need to put lots of water in there too.

2- Fill pot with water, covering beans by about 1-2 inches.

3- Put on stove on high and bring beans to a boil. Boil for 15 minutes.

4- Once 15 minutes is up, drain your beans and rinse with water (I've heard this helps with the gassiness factor too by the way).

5- Put beans back in pot and cover with water again, covering beans by 1-2 inches of water.

6- Bring beans to a boil and once boiling, cook for 1 hour and 15 minutes on medium/low (I still like mine to have a little boil going on, but you don't need it to be on high still). KEEP AN EYE ON YOUR BEANS... meaning don't let the water run out and burn your beans. If the water starts to get low add more water. Also, I've noticed that while cooking white beans they don't need this long, so check them after 1 hour.

7- When the time is up, check beans to make sure they are firm but soft... not soggy and mushy. Drain about half of the water, leaving water in the bottom section of your beans (I hope that makes sense).

8- Now I like to season my beans. I add 1 TBSP of cumin, garlic powder, and chili powder to the beans. Stir in and let sit until beans cool down and can soak in the seasoning (I usually leave them 30 mins to 1 hour).

9- When beans are cooled, put them in freezer safe Tupperware containers and put them in the freezer or refrigerator for future use. I only put the beans we will use in the next few days in the fridge, and freeze the rest.

Pretty simple I think! If I need to use beans for a meal I will just move a container into the fridge and let it thaw out in there. I like that cooking them this way doesn't take too much time, and I'm able to control the salt content in our beans which is important for health reasons. And they really are super tasty with the seasonings.

Tomorrow... my favorite black and white enchiladas. Yum!