Beans, Beans, and Beans

I spent a few days looking at the leftover can of coconut milk in my fridge after I used about half for that tasty peanut sauce. I needed to think of a use for the remaining coconut milk. I decided to make some seriously tasty black bean soup from the Horizons cookbook. Horizons is a wonderful fancy-pants vegan restaurant we used to visit in Philadelphia, and I got the cookbook as a gift after we moved away. This was a couple of years ago, before I really started cooking, and at the time was a little overwhelming as it was filled with tasty, but complicated-looking, recipes filled with ingredients I had never bought.

The Horizons black bean soup was one of the least intimidating recipes in the cookbook, so it’s one I made early on and has been a favorite that I’ve made many times.

This soup is made with black beans, vegetable broth, garlic, onion, jalapeno, spices, diced tomatoes, then pureed and finished with coconut milk and topped with cilantro. Another bonus is that it comes together pretty quickly because nothing needs to cook for too long.

Because I was already cooking up some dried black beans, I also made an old favorite that’s super simple, but also super tasty and easy. Every time I make black beans and rice, I can’t get over how good it tastes.

I used brown jasmine rice, black beans cooked from dry beans, the same spice blend I used for the soup, and some frozen corn. This was my first time using Trader Joe’s roasted corn and it was pretty tasty. That's it. Nothing special, nothing complicated.

The rice took the longest to cook out of any part of this dinner, but since it doesn’t require supervision, that still counts as easy in my book.

Confession: I ate black beans and rice for breakfast today. Yum, yum, yum.