Cooking with Grace

Cooking with Grace: Navarrico Bean Pilaf (It’s So Quick and Easy You Can Make It on a Weeknight)


Welcome to Cooking with Grace! This is where Grace Singleton, a managing partner at the Deli, shares her favorite products and delectable home cooking tips with us. This week, she’s using jarred El Navarrico beans to make a comfort dish that’s also easy to make—you can even make it on a weekday!

This is a super easy and satisfying side dish or main. By using the pre-cooked El Navarrico beans (available at Zingerman’s Deli), the preparation time from start to finish is only about 30 minutes. Feel free to substitute other vegetables or spices to suit your tastes or add some of your other favorite flavor components. You can also start with dried beans, and cook them yourself, although that takes a little more pre-preparation time. I will often cook a whole bag of beans, use what I need and then freeze the rest, so I can pull them out and use them at another time. This recipe will work with any type of cooked beans—they each have different flavors and textures—so I encourage you to try this recipe a few times, experimenting few different ones to see which ones you prefer.

Here’s the recipe:
Omed olive oil

1/2-3/4 cup onion diced medium
3/4-1 cup carrot diced medium
1/2 cup diced peppers (sweet or spicy your choice)
Fresh thyme*
1 jar cooked El Navarrico white haricot beans
salt & pepper

Directions:

1. Add olive oil to cover the bottom of a medium thick bottom sauce pan and turn on medium heat.
2. Add onions and a little salt (couple pinches) and sautee the onions until transluscent.
3. Add carrots and peppers to the onions in the pan and the thyme.
4. Sautee all the vegetables on medium heat until al dente.
5. Add the cooked beans and allow the liquid to reduce slightly and heat the beans through.
6. Taste and add slat and pepper to taste.

*For the thyme I like to use kitchen twine to tie together several sprigs of thyme and add them to the veggies.  The flavor of the thyme will be infused into the dish, but you won’t have to take the time to remove the leaves from the stem.