A few weeks ago I wrote post about beans being a great super food you can find that post here. I wanted to share a few of the ways my family fixes beans.
If you need to know how to prepare your beans first to make your meals even more frugal you can check out this post here.
Our family uses beans in place of meat regularly, in fact we rarely ever eat meat, and when we do it is usually a side dish rather than the main course. So of course we substitute beans for the meat, not just because of nutrition, there are plenty of of other foods out there that will supply your protein. We also like to eat beans because they are cheap, filling and a wonderful comfort food.
There are a number of different ways to eat beans, from chili and soup, where you would traditionally think of them, to salads and sandwich fillings.
I posted a number of bean recipes to the website, and for convenience I linked them from the front page.
If you do not care for beans in Mexican foods or soups, you can add cooked beans to any of your salads, you can make a 5 bean salad or you can use them as a topping to your regular green salad.
One of our favorite ways to eat Garbanzo beans is what is called a mock tuna salad. I really do not know if it tastes like tuna, but it is very good in its own right.
Mock Tuna
- 1(15 oz.) can chick-peas, drained (or 1.5 c. cooked)
- 1/4 cup mayonnaise
- 1/3 cup minced celery
- 2.5 T. minced dill pickle(or dill relish works just fine)
- 1/2 T. nutritional yeast
- 1/4 cup minced sweet onion
- 1/2 t. garlic powder
- 1 t. soy sauce
- pepper, to taste
DIRECTIONS
Put chick peas in a food processor ( you can mash these too but I think they are better if you used a blender or food processor) blend till either slightly chunky or till smooth( this is a preference thing).
Add all your ingredients into a bowl and mix. That’s it! Put you filling in your favorite type of sandwich or even on top of a green salad and enjoy!
Beans do not have to be boring or taste bland. There are so many good websites and so many great flavors that you could eat beans every day for a year and never get tired of them.