Beans and fresh tomatoes

Recipes: Fresh tomato sauce, Beans in fresh tomato sauce

Here's another delicious way to use an abundance of fresh, beautiful heirloom tomatoes, Yesterday I found myself faced with a growing pile of ripe ones, and a few nearly over-ripe, with more about to come in from the front yard. What a huge harvest, and what a shame it would be to let even a few go to waste! First thing in the morning, I separated out the fruit that needed to be used right away - red, red-green, orange, yellow - and put together a simple sauce that would simmer over a low burner until it thickened.

Fresh Tomato Sauce 

Choose a medium to large Dutch oven with a cover. Turn the heat on under it at medium and add 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil. When the oil is hot, but not smoking, add two cloves of garlic, sliced, and turn off the burner. Let it sit to cool down while you chop the tomatoes.

Chop a lot of tomatoes into roughly one-inch pieces. I used about fifteen large tomatoes. Put all the chopped tomatoes into the pot and turn the heat to medium. Add 1 teaspoon sea salt and 1 teaspoon dried oregano (or 1 tablespoon chopped fresh oregano). If you like, chop up one small moderately hot pepper - I used a red padron - and add it to the pot. Stir everything well. Once it starts to simmer, turn the heat down to low and set the cover on askew. Let it simmer for at least one hour (I simmered mine for two hours *see note), stirring all the way to the bottom now and then.

Note: My tomatoes are particularly juicy, so there's a lot of liquid when I chop and cook them. The goal in simmering the sauce for a long time is to concentrate the liquid so the sauce thickens and has a very deep and complex tomato flavor. If your tomatoes don't produce a lot of juice, you should cook them about one hour before proceeding with the next step. It took two hours for mine to begin to thicken.

When the sauce starts to thicken, add 1/4 cup dry white wine, like a Sauvignon Blanc. Stir it in and simmer uncovered for a few minutes while the alcohol burns off. Then partially cover the pot again and simmer for another 30 minutes to one hour, or whenever the sauce reached the consistency you want.

This sauce can be successfully frozen in freezer bags or a freezer container for about two months. Or, you can use some of it right away and freeze the rest, which is what I did. It makes a delicious sauce for pasta too!

So then I had this sauce, which I let sit covered and cooling on the stove until I decided what to make for dinner. The smell was gorgeous! A couple of hours before dinner, beans with tomato sauce came to mind. Lucky thought!

Beans with Fresh Tomato Sauce

Here are a few things I've learned about dried beans:

• Buy the freshest you can get. It seems funny to think of dried beans being fresh, but there's a world of difference between a bean that's been sitting on a shelf for years and one that was grown and dried recently. Old beans take much longer to cook. Sometimes they never get tender. Fresh beans have a more delicious flavor and they're easier to digest. While some supermarket beans are fine, you never really know how long they've been around. I buy most of my dried beans from Rancho Gordo. Here's their website http://www.ranchogordo.com/  They also have a store in the Ferry Building in San Francisco, if you're in the neighborhood. Here's what one of their packages looks like - gotta love the label!
• You don't have to soak dried beans. If you soak, you must pour off the soaking water and you lose some valuable nutrition. It works just fine to rinse off the dried beans and then cover them by about two inches with fresh water. Simmer until they're tender.
• Some beans cook faster than others. Lima beans, which I used for this recipe, cook in about an hour or a little more. So do black-eyed peas. Other beans take maybe an hour and a half or two hours, IF they are fresh dried beans.
• Never add salt to beans until they are almost done. Salt keeps them from getting tender.
• Add some leftover bacon drippings or a little lard to the beans while you cook them. I save my bacon drippings every time I make bacon (BLTs this time of year!) and keep them in a covered jar in the fridge.
• It's worth it to grow an epizote bush outside your kitchen door - in a pot or in the ground. Epizote is a plant that grows wild in Mexico and is easy to grow here in northern California. It is perennial and comes back every spring. Many bean-eating cultures put a big sprig of epizote in their beans while cooking, and they say it helps with digestion. In my opinion, it's true.

Ingredients for the beans:

• 1/2 pound dried beans (I used large Lima beans)
• bacon drippings, if you have it
• epizote, if you have it
• the fresh tomato sauce you just made (yum!)
• cut up sausage, like chorizo, optional
• sea salt (add last)

In a medium large Dutch oven with a cover, put 1/2 pound rinsed dried Lima beans and cover them with water so that the water is about 2 inches above the beans. Turn the heat on medium and bring the water to a boil. Add a tablespoon of bacon drippings and a big sprig of epizote. Turn the heat down to low and let simmer, covered but with the cover ajar, for 30 minutes.

Add a half cup of the fresh tomato sauce to the beans, and a half cup of cut up sausage, if you wish. The beans will be equally delicious without sausage. Stir to combine. Continue to simmer until the beans are almost tender (you have to taste them at this point). While the beans are simmering, watch the liquid, and add a little more water if the beans absorb it all. There should be 'gravy' with the beans at the end.

When the beans are almost tender, add 1/2 teaspoon sea salt, stir, and continue cooking until beans are very tender. Serve in bowls with a little topping of fresh chopped tomato if you have tons, like I do.

Buon appetito!