Getting more for my money

I eat a lot, and an important part of my cooking is finding inexpensive sources of good quality protein. As much as I would love to eat steak all the time, I simply can’t afford it. Also, if we look at the traditional diets of people around the world, meat is a luxury item that shows up perhaps only on Sunday nights. My usual source of cheap, quality protein is the egg, but after making omelettes, frittate, tortillas, over-easy, Benedict, and scrambled one hundred times apiece, I grew tired of the egg. Going back to looking at traditional cuisines (especially in Italy where people were often dirt poor) I found beans. Beans are a great source of protein, are filling, and are so cheap, they’re almost free. The problem is that they’re bland. However, they can be surrounded by flavorful ingredients; from hummus where garlic, lemon, olive oil, and tahini mask the blandness of chickpeas to the barbecue sauce and pork flavored versions I’ve eaten at countless cookouts, cuisine has a way of squeezing the beans into our diet to make the meat last longer. Tonight I made something between fagioli all’uccelletto and cassoulet with my own twists to boot.

Baked Beans and Chicken with Tomato Sauce

You may be thinking, “Hey, he said this was about cheap alternative protein sources, but there’s chicken in this!” You’re right. There is chicken in this, but the beans make the it go much further. This one thigh was enough for me tonight, and I am usually barely satisfied by an entire leg. So, step one, of course, was soaking the beans. There are many people who use the standard overnight method, but I actually prefer the quick-soak method for two reasons: first, it is faster and better suited to my spur-of-the-moment dinner decisions, and second, it does a better job of leaching out the difficult-to-digest carbohydrates that are behind the musical properties of beans.

I covered these guys with water and brought it to a boil. Then I put the cover on them and went to teach children. When I got home five hours later, the beans were doubled in size and the water was a sickly yellow color. I drained them and put them in fresh water to cook. While they simmered, I chopped everything and got the bacon started.

I got the bacon nice and brown. By now the beans had simmered for about an hour, and while the bacon cooked, I had drained them and set them aside in a bowl. I tossed the cooked bacon in with the beans; the two of them seem to go together well. Next I dried and seasoned the chicken thighs and put them in the hot pan of rendered bacon fat. They soon turned a lovely brown.

Once the thighs were a deep brown, I put them aside, drained all but a couple tablespoons of the fat, and threw some diced onions and carrots into the pan. I sautéed them for about 10 minutes. Excepting the carrot, this recipe was looking a lot like some I had found on the internet. However, there are problems with those recipes that I wanted to avoid; first, most of them use canned beans and tomatoes. Those are fine in principle, but when I can avoid the salt and processing and extra cost of canned things, I do. I used dried beans and my own jarred tomatoes to avoid this. Second, and more important, most of those recipes are bland. They suggest that a tiny pinch of sage or some bacon is enough to make the beans and chicken burst with flavor. This is exactly what I am trying to avoid! So, just as the onions and carrots were at a stage of being nicely cooked, I added some stronger flavor.

I think the garlic, crushed red pepper, rosemary, and thyme added an aromatic touch that blended well with the bacon, chicken, and tomatoes to give the beans some kick. After the flavors had melded and before the garlic could burn, I dumped in a jar of my home-canned tomatoes and let the mixture simmer for about 10 minutes until the tomatoes had begun to render their juices. Then I mixed in the beans and bacon and made a bed for the chicken thighs.

This went into a moderate oven for about 20 minutes and came out piping hot. The flavors had melded well, and most importantly, the beans had absorbed the mixture of aromatic herbs, meat, and tomatoes into their own, bean-y, taste. The 70 cents worth of beans made the dish very filling which meant I was satisfied with $1 worth (1 thigh) of chicken. Now I have a very rare thing in my kitchen: leftovers.