White beans with bread crumbs and spinach
4 Servings
Ingredients
| Quantity | Ingredient | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | pounds | Small white beans |
| 1 | cup | Soft home-made bread crumbs |
| (see below) | ||
| 4 | Big cloves garlic | |
| 1 | Box frozen spinach | |
| Salt, pepper, and herbs (see | ||
| Below) | ||
Directions
(The night before, I put the frozen spinach in the fridge to thaw.) Soak and cook the beans in your standard manner, adding a bay leaf to flavor them as they cook. This batch took about 1-¾ hours to get real tender after a 2-hour soaking following a 2-minute boiling. When they're done, mostly drain them -- the recipe said to leave them almost covered with their cooking liquid, which I thought was too wet. Your call. I saved the cooking liquid when I drained it so I could add some of it back after adding everything else if it seemed dry, which indeed it did.
I made the bread crumbs by tearing up two thick slices of (previously unsliced) white bread -- next time I will try whole wheat -- and whirling them in the Cuisinart. After a few whirls, I added in the cloves of garlic and pulsed them until the bread was in crumbs. (What a wonderful aroma from the combined bread and garlic!) I put the crumb/garlic mix in a bowl.
I put the spinach in a pan (my new Circulon wok, I love it! thanks to y'all who mentioned it and inspired me to buy it!!) and heated it up uncovered for a couple of minutes -- didn't try to get it "cooked", just "hot". I added salt (about ¾ tsp), white pepper, oregano and thyme, mixed it up, then pureed it in the Cuisinart -- this was the olive-oil substitution so I made it as flavorful as possible.
Finally, I added the crumbs and ⅓ cup of the spinach puree to the beans (in a large bowl), mixed well, added back some of the reserved bean-cooking liquid, and tried not to "taste" too much of it -- it was really tasty. I refrigerated it overnight.
Before serving it I warmed it up gently -- you could serve it cold but I think warming it brings out more of the flavors. It was well received and I will do it again. It also looked real nice with the white beans and the green spinach. And since it was (as usual) the only fatfree item at the lunch, I was glad there was lots of it! Date: Sat, 23 Apr 94 17:27:59 EDT From: muriel kranowski <DOC@...>
Converted to MM format by Dale & Gail Shipp, Columbia Md.
Posted to MM-Recipes Digest V4 #3 by "Rfm" <Robert-Miles@...> on Jan 11, 99