Yoga Kitchen – Simple, healthy and vegan
A protein-rich vegetable spread or side dish, with red kidney beans as a star ingredient.
Beans don’t have a sexy image. However, they are highly nutritious, rich in protein and fibre, and low in fat.
They fit well in a healthy and sports diet.
Moreover, they are a cheap source of vegetable protein.
You basically have the option to buy dry beans, or canned beans.
The canned beans are always pre-cooked, the dry beans you have to cook yourself.
A great advantage of dry beans is that you can buy them in bulk, so almost without packaging.
Canned beans give a lot of packaging waste. Moreover, it is a pure waste of metal.
Important!
Always cook beans until tender without adding salt. When you add the salt from the start, the beans will stay hard. Only add the salt after cooking.
What you need for approximately 730 gr of finished spread:
- 120 gr red beans, dry
- 40 gr dried tomatoes
- 150 gr onion
- 3 garlic cloves
- 100 gr carrot
- 2 tablespoons tamari, or sea salt to taste
- 5 cm kombu seaweed (optional)
- 15 gr fresh parsley
- a tablespoon of savory
- black pepper, to taste
This is how you prepare it:
Let the red kidney beans soak all night or even 24 hours. Discard that soaking water and rinse the beans under the tap.
You can also soak the dried tomato in a little water beforehand. But you can add this soaking water to the dish.
Finely chop all the vegetables.
Preferably use a pressure cooker. Because you retain much more of the nutritional value and the cooking process takes much less time and energy.
Cook the ingredients in a pressure cooker, in two stages:
- Boil the beans first, without salt:
Bring them to the boil in plenty of water (4 volumes of water for 1 volume of beans) without lid.
You can remove any foam floating on top with a skimmer.
Add the piece of seaweed and the savory and then close the pressure cooker.
Let the steam pressure build up and leave to boil for 45 minutes. - Open the pressure cooker after 45 minutes.
If there is too much moisture, you can pour some of it away at this stage.
Add the rest of the ingredients, except the fresh parsley.
Let the pressure build up again and cook for another 10 minutes.
Let the mixture cool down a little, add the parsley, put everything in the food processor and mix until you get a smooth puree.
You can store it in glass jars.
Keep them hermetically sealed in the fridge for at least another 10 days.
You could also freeze the bean spread.
Enjoy it !
Cans
I personally think that tin cans are one of the biggest mistakes of modern consumer society. They are used at all times. Especially those beverages in cans are, if you think about it, a colossal skewing on a planetary scale. A gigantic pollution caused by the metal and packaging industry, just to pack a few sips of drink. And what’s more, you see them littered around all over the streets. Pure madness.