Hey y’all!
I mentioned a few days ago that I was going to embark into the world of beans. Beans have so many health benefits. To read more about them, I have a post about them here. I am most concerned about my lysine intake (which is in beans; read post for more), and I need to be eating 1-2 cups of beans everyday. I’ve incorporated a lot of beans into my diet, but I still don’t eat enough.
Something pretty easy that I do sometimes is to make Adzuki Bean Paste and add my homemade Cream of Rice to it. I’m a crazy-frugal person, so I soak my own beans and make all my food from scratch. I found that soaking beans all the time and meal-planning weren’t my strong suits, so now I soak pounds of beans at a time, cook them, and then freeze my beans in quart jars. I was originally planning to pressure can them, but I tried, and it didn’t work out.
I also meal-prep my cream of rice. It’s not available in my area, but even if it were, it’s about 5x cheaper to make. And it’s so easy! I just put brown/white rice in my blender, blend it until it’s a powder, and I dump it into a big jar. I wait to add sweetener until I cook my cream of rice because sometimes I want it savory, but a dry sweetener can always be added at this point.
Now that my beans and cream of rice are made (and canned beans and boxed cream of rice can always be used), making this breakfast is pretty simple. Ideally, adzuki beans are used, but I’ve used pintos, soy, chickpeas, and any bean I have on hand. I’ve even used a mix of beans if I need to use up leftovers. This recipe serves 2.
You’ll need:
-2 cups beans
-1 cup (or to taste) sweetener of choice
-1/2 cup cream of rice
-1 1/2 cup water
-1 tsp salt
-1 tsp oil (or not, whatever)
-any other spices you want (cinnamon is pretty good in this)
To Make:
Blend/mash up your beans so they become smooth. Add the oil to a pan over medium heat, and add beans and sweetener. You want this to be just slightly sweeter than you’d like it at the end.
Add cream of rice, water, and salt. Mix well and stir occasionally until this becomes the consistency you want.
Turn off heat (or turn to low if you want this to stay piping hot), and add any other spices. You could not add anything and have this plain, or you could add pumpkin pie spice, vanilla, mint, cocoa powder, nut butter, or anything you want. Or, you could turn this recipe savory. Just leave out the sweetener and add herbs and/or cheese. I don’t do dairy, so I like to add nutritional yeast.
So there you go! That’s a pretty easy (and yummy) way to get a cup of beans in right at the start of your day. Of course, it you like bean paste by itself, just don’t add the cream of rice. You’ll have to cook you beans down to the correct consistency, but you just needs beans, oil, and sweetener for that. Yay beans!
Frugal Treehugger 