Vegan Beans and Brown Rice

Ten years ago near a food stall at a local hippy festival, I had my mind changed about food. A deceptively simple thing: kidney beans and rice. Equally simple garnish — fresh onions, cheese, cilantro — the flavors and simplicity blew me away. Lightbulb moment.

Simple dishes are really tough to get right, to make them “sing.” In peasant/street cooking — Mexican and Italian cooking too — less is way f–ing more. The small touches: browning an onion, roasting a clove of garlic, blistering a pepper or tortilla are everything. Balance is huge, especially as the number of ingredients decreases.

Reproducing that beans and rice dish became a mission; I tried any number of different methods and flavor combinations. I eventually satisficed with a mash up of Rick Bayless’s Spanish rice recipe, mixed with a good amount of kidney beans. Keeping to a mostly vegan diet, it became my daily “maintenance food.” It wasn’t “that” dish, but it worked well. The mission to find that perfect combination continued.

Reading Twitter recently I found this post on the Splendid Table’s feed.  For some reason it clicked — brought me back to that original lightbulb moment in a crowd, holding a paper bowl and plastic spoon. The core of the recipe, adjusted slightly, is below. I don’t care for white rice any more than I do for “white” bread, so it’s adapted for brown rice — cooked using a pressure cooker.

Here it is:

Note: The recipe is specific about *ancho* chili powder and *Mexican* oregano — do not substitute those. (Mexican Oregano, per Rick Bayless, is a plant native to the America’s that the Spaniards mislabeled “oregano.”)

400g brown rice
500g water (salt it or add better-than-bullion’s base)

2  28oz cans Kidney Beans
2 tsp ground cumin,
1 tsp ancho chili powder,
1 tsp Mexican oregano
1 onion, small dice. The variety probably doesn’t really matter — just baseball sized, I used a yellow onion
2 cloves of garlic — CRUSH them with the flat of a chef’s knife and give them a rough chop.
Neutral oil — sunflower is good

Method:

Get the rice going first — combine the water/stock with the rice in the pressure cooker. Cook at the higher setting for 25 minutes. Quick release on that is probably best.

Cover the bottom of a decent sized (4-6qt?) saucepan with the oil — you shouldn’t have to shake the pan much for the oil to cover the bottom. Heat the oil over a “medium” heat and add the chili powder and cumin. Stir this around to make a decent slurry, and heat it for a minute or two. Smell it — it should start to smell great — stir in the onion to coat with the slurry. Gently cook this — if it looks like you’re going to brown the onions, back off the heat. After you stir in the onions, take the Mexican oregano between your hands and grind it over the saucepan, crushing it as best you can. Stir that in. Cook all that for maybe five minutes; stir in the garlic and cook for another minute.

At this point add the beans *with* the liquid in the cans, stir it up thoroughly, increase the heat, and bring all that to a simmer. Cover, lower the heat and let that simmer for roughly five minutes. Turn it off and add salt to taste.

Serve the bean mixture over the rice.

It doesn’t really need it, but you can add any typical garnish: lime, cilantro, cheese, chopped onion, Sriracha, Tabasco.