Ask Mess Hall: A Different Bean

Our first mailbag edition, on a topic dear to my heart (with TWO recipes!)

Welcome to the first installment of Ask Mess Hall, where I answer your cooking questions—the existential, the pragmatic, and the finicky. Submit your questions here and I will try to answer them in an upcoming edition! Our first question is—somewhat unsurprisingly, if you know me—about beans.

I want to try to eat more beans, but the problem is, I don't like soup or soupy beans very much, and many bean recipes fall into those categories. What can I do with beans that could be called dry, but flavorful?

I am grateful for this question, because it shines a light a bit of favoritism: I adore beans, I love cooking them, but when I talk about cooking beans, I am almost always talking about a big pot of brothy beans bubbling away on the stove, something I can tend to distractedly while I go about a morning or afternoon or evening at home. I have been relying on them particularly these past weeks upon returning from my residency in North Carolina, pulling frosty pint containers full of beans from the freezer and letting my past selves feed me. But! A soupy bean is not the only bean—and it is not the only bean I love.

When I first got into cooking, I was living in Charlotte, NC, and eating a vegetarian and, eventually, vegan diet. I was miserable in a classic way: just out of college, working a job I didn’t care a lick about, rudderless and restless. I funneled that restlessness into my meals, coming home every night and furiously cooking myself piles of vegetables, quinoa, bean-y things. I used a lot of coconut oil and nutritional yeast. One of the simplest pleasures I discovered at the time was a fresh-cooked chickpea. I’d buy bags of them dried at the store and boil them, plain, in salted water, never saving any broth but loving the earthy sweetness they had when just out of a hot bath. I roasted them, I fried them in coconut oil, I tossed them in salads, you get the point. They were the first bean that I loved! And I think they’re one of the most versatile, generous staples to keep in your kitchen, whether dried or canned.