Easy Black Bean Tostadas

from Luz's DeColonial Cooking Club

OK! Let's build on the success of the chili beans and do another bean dish.

Black Bean Tostadas

2 cups dried black beans
1 onion finely diced
3 cloves garlic, diced

Spices
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp coriander powder
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. allspice
1/2 tsp. dark chocolate powder (I used dagoba brand, it is fancy and organic, you can use another kind if you can't find dagoba...they sell it at upscale markets and some fancy health food stores like whole foods)

Tostada shells (Guerrero or Los Pericos some other legit. Mexican brand, not taco bell!)

Toppings
2 cups finely sliced romaine lettuce (more nutritious than iceberg)
1 cup grated queso cotija (or other cheese)
1 tomato diced
2 avocados, sliced
Salsa (buy a good pre-made salsa from the store)
Organic sour cream (optional)

Luz's Healthy Three-Bean Chili

from Luz's DeColonial Cooking Club

1 onion
3 cloves garlic

Spice Mix (make it yourself)
1 TBSP Paprika
1 TSP Ground Cumin
1 TSP Dried Oregano
1 TSP Ground Coriander
2 whole chipotle peppers (dried)
1/2 TSP Cinnamon

1 cup dried pinto beans
1 cup dried small red beans
1 cup dried black beans

Organic Vegetable Broth (or just water)
I large can chopped tomatoes

Toppings: Cheddar cheese, cilantro, avocado

Luz's DeColonial Cooking Club

My students want to learn how to cook easy, healthy meals for themselves and their friends. To help them out, I will post at least one recipe a week.

pumpkin posole recipe

New Year's Day Pumpkin Posole

Ingredients
8 tomatillos
2 onions
4 cloves garlic
1/3 cup pumpkin seeds
5 Roasted Green NM Chiles
Cumin
Oregano
Nutmeg
1 pumpkin
1 package of dried posole

Turn of the Year

I am out in the backyard with the chickens and the neighbzie's cat. It's been a partly cloudy day so far. I came out here first thing even before my coffee. The ostensible reason was that one of the hens (little sister?) ate one of her eggs yesterday, so we want to make sure we take them out of the coop after they lay. (Of course, we also increased her calcium with some oyster shells.) But the other part was just that once I got myself out of the house, it looks like a very good day indeed.

sick soup

When we are sick our old go-to is called Sick Soup. It's a basic vegetable broth with celery, carrots, and rice. Usually lots of rice, so that it's almost a porridge, congee, or jook. It's easy on the tummy, doesn't irritate mucus membranes, and can sit on the stove all day. You can add potatoes, too, unless rice and potatoes doesn't seem kosher to you.

Well, Malucho has been on fire in the cooking department lately. Black bean chile, Lentil soup with portabella mushrooms. Black bean and sweet potato burritos.

We've both been "coming down with something" for a week now, and today it is full-fledged, with coughing, sniffling, wheezing, fatigue, and dehydration. No fever, though, which seems weird.

So I was thinking a batch of sick soup was in order. Now mind you, it was a beautiful day in Oakland today. And Malucho is a pretty active little guy who hates to be sick. So sie kept escaping to the back yard, where I would find hir raking the soil under the chicken tractor or weeding something.

When sie started thinking about tonight's dinner, sie did a little prep work so that the broth would be nice and rich. onions, carrots, celery, garlic, as usual. Fresh zapotec tomatoes from the garden. vegetable broth. Oregano from the herb spiral.

So I was thinking, it's going to have more color than our usual sick soup, but sie's just gonna throw in two cups of rice and that'll be it.

Well, that is not what happened. What happened was that Malucho reaped some of the bounty of November garden in northern Calfornia. Squash blossoms. Verdolagas. A blender was employed. Tortilla strips were fried. Another ziplock bag was taken from the stash of New Mexican green chile (2009).

Aside: this green chile has been been appearing in quite a few meals, lately. Usually never enough to make the dish picoso, but it adds a lot of character to different dishes.

The final soup was beautifully golden, as if it were mostly butternut or carrot, and richly flavored. I can only imagine the wonderful nutrients it brings to our tired bodies. It was flavorful, delightful, heady stuff. I am truly blessed. I think the tortilla strips, place it in the Sopa Azteca category. I'm calling it Bronze Warrior Soup. It was garnished with sliced avocado.

I can't show you a picture because we ate it all, every last drop. Used a rubber spatula to scrape the pot clean.

Bartered: One Cow

This is not really a post about a cow. We haven't gone all Novella Carpenter on you and leapt into large livestock. No, this is really a post about beans. In our garden, and in our pot.



Now, we love our beans. Malucho cooks the most delicious beans. And we have recently discovered those yummy heritage beans like Scarlet Runner beans, Appaloosa Beans, Anasazi Beans, Yellow Indian Woman Beans, Snow-Capped Beans, and so forth. Some of these are sold by Rancho Gordo, and others are available at a local market in Rockridge.

The really interesting thing is that a lot of them cook up a lot like pintos, but also a teeny bit different.

These bean experiences have us ruminating upon the hegemony of the pinto. Aurora Levins Morales writes of the potato,

Tuber of three thousand forms, you remind us that there are always more choices, more unexplored paths, is always more potential than we can imagine from the present moment.

Her argument is that while the modern "potato" is a brown-skinned white fleshed tuber, the people of the Andes brought forth a profusion of "varieties perfected for [each] combination of sun and soil and water…come in white and yellow, purple and red, orange and brown." Levins Morales suggest that the Irish Potato Famine was a result the European farming methods which prefer uniformity over diversity. While our very expensive farmer's market sell blue potatoes whose color goes all the way through, the white-fleshed potato rules the marketplace.

And so the humble bean. We grew up thinking that the pinto was "the" Mexican bean, little realizing that there were once hundreds of beans available, each suited to its combination of sun and soil, altitude and water. That while they may look similar, each one is a little different, has its own knack and flair.

Malucho's dad used to tell us about his tía-cousins, Connie, Cuca, and Concha, who had many different ways of cooking beans and different names for them al, not just de olla and refritos. Chinitos was one. (Does your family have these? Tell us here so we can recover them!) Distinctions that we have lost or forgotten.

Ruben Cobos, in his dictionary of New Mexican Spanish lists candelilla, as the word for the way the sun sparkles on the snow.

We need to re-learn some of the different words for bean.

I'm reminded of Essex Hemphill's poem on black beans, which concludes:

Let the beans burn all night long.
Our chipped water glasses are filled
with wine from our loving.
And the burnt black beans--
caviar.

These are Scarlet Runner Beans from Malucho's garden. They have passed the green-bean crunching stage and are ready to be dried for the bean pot. They are truly magic beans, worth trading any number of cows.