Bean and Legume

You’ll be amazed at how much two ingredients can transform green beans. Blending olives with olive oil creates a chunky sauce with enough flavor to carry the day. We also love this with Italian-Style Pork Chops (page 23) and Braised Chicken with Peppers and Mushrooms (page 129).

When we were kids, we would go on camping trips and eat beanie-wienies out of the pull-top can and pretend to be cowboys. We thought that was just the best thing in the world to eat. When your kids try these, they will, too. Nowadays it’s easy to find healthier versions of traditional hot dogs (nitrate-free or turkey, chicken, or soy dogs) and lower-sodium baked beans in most supermarkets. Try a few different varieties and see which ones your kids like most.

Growing up in the South, we were surrounded by three-bean salads, which are something of an aquired taste. We ate up Mama’s beans and ham hocks, but give us kids a cold bean salad and we’d be out the backdoor. Well, now we’ve seen the error of our ways—plus canned beans seem to be better these days, less mushy and more flavorful. Here we toss them with spicy cheese and leftover ham for a main-course salad that’s delicious served with cornbread.

Mama’s main squeeze Michael Groover’s famous pinto beans inspired this simple, savory recipe. We use a few dashes of Worcestershire sauce to create a real rich broth around the soft, silky beans.

One of Bobby’s favorite soups on the menu at The Lady & Sons is Confederate bean soup, a rich mix of baked beans, sausage, and cream. We skip the cream here to make a lighter version with just as much flavor as the original. It’s a hearty meal in a bowl and a dream come true for anyone who loves franks and beans.

Serve this hearty chili over rice for a simple meal, or do it up Deen style over a bowl of Fritos corn chips with cheese, fresh onions, and sour cream. It sure tastes good with Moist-and-Easy Corn Bread (page 45).

Mama is friends with a couple from Indiana named the Moyers, who we like to refer to as Yankees. They taught her how to turn a handful of affordable, simple ingredients into these fried-patty sandwiches that will rock your world.

One of our favorite things about pasta is that you can get creative with your sauce. Bell peppers, black-eyed peas, and Tabasco give this baked pasta a racy Southern taste. Jamie and his family eat so much pasta at their house that we like to joke that if they weren’t from the South, they’d be from southern Italy.

Any recipe that includes the words creamy, spicy, and sausage is going to get our attention. For this number we just add peas for a little sweetness and color, then serve it over rigatoni. Not only is this dish satisfying and elegant, but you can have it on the table in the time it takes to cook the pasta.

Can you guess how many turkey-bean burgers we ate when we were growing up? Zero! We’re big beef burger fans and we could eat a burger every few nights if we let ourselves. So every now and then, we lighten things up with turkey and black beans in this Mexican-inspired twist on a traditional burger. It’s about as healthy a burger as you could ask for, and it’s a real crowd-pleaser, too—even little Jack likes it! And since we usually serve this burger without the bun, we like to make our corn bread to go with it.

We try to eat a healthy, balanced diet, but you know Paula Deen’s boys have a taste for rich, creamy sauces. One of our favorite foods in a jar is Alfredo sauce, and it’s the perfect base for the world’s fastest chicken and pasta casserole. We throw in peas for a little green color, and add a nice tomato salad to get our veggies in.

I always try to make any food taste good by preparing it as simply as possible. This comes from the original idea of how barbecue was started and why it has become so popular: It’s a way to cheaply and efficiently feed a lot of people some tasty food. My beans recipe is no different. I keep it simple and focus on enhancing the flavors that people have come to love and expect in baked beans. I’m not trying to fool anybody here: baked beans are a barbecue staple. And some people just don’t like them at all because they tend to be sweet. In other words, I’m not trying to convert anybody with this recipe; I’m preaching to the converted. This is my take on how classic baked beans always ought to taste. Note that you have to soak your beans overnight to get them tender; some people say you don’t, but I believe it’s the only way to really make sure they’re going to taste right. If time is an issue, you can substitute canned baked beans in this recipe; personally, I think they taste great, too.

It may seem crazy even to think of making a cassoulet for oneself, although this one may be large enough to share with a friend. But if you have all the different elements, it’s not much more than an assembly job. You just have to think ahead. So, when you have that Small Roast Pork Tenderloin (page 42), set aside three or four little chunks of the flavorful cooked meat (they can be frozen and labeled “for future cassoulet”). Then plan on having Braised Shoulder Lamb Chops (page 48), which is always more than I can eat in one sitting, and use that extra braised chop (it can also be frozen), along with a lot of the good juices, to be the mainstay of your cassoulet. One can usually get a good pork sausage these days; even if you have to mail-order it, it’s a staple item worth keeping in the freezer. So there you are: start your beans the night before, and put this heavenly bean dish together on a wintry day off, letting it fill your kitchen with its tantalizing aromas. You won’t regret it. When I suggested to Julia Child that she include a recipe for this great dish in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, there really weren’t any good fresh garlic sausages available to buy, so Julia agreed that she had better work out a formula for making them at home. Several days later, I went up to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the Childs lived, to work on the book with her, and I found that one wall of the kitchen was covered in notes on the work she had done to develop a formula for the authentic garlic sausage for cassoulet. Her research had taken her back to early French charcuterie books, and she’d made notes on each of her testings, ending up with her own carefully worked-out recipe. I gasped at her meticulous research, and then asked tentatively if maybe this might not be beyond the reach of the American home cook, but she reassured me. “No, not at all,” she said. “It’s really as easy as making hamburgers.”

I prefer using French lentils here, but any kind will do. You can use leftover cooked lentils, but if they are refrigerator-cold, heat them and let them absorb the flavors. I like to eat this salad slightly warm, or at least at room temperature.

Unlike other legumes, lentils do not need to be soaked, so they are convenient when you are putting together a relatively quick meal

This dish evolved when I had a good-sized holiday turkey left in the refrigerator. Somehow no one ever wants the wings. They’re too big to gnaw on politely at the table, and the meat is hard to carve delicately into slices for sandwiches later. So they sit in the fridge, getting drier each day. But don’t let that happen, because they make very good eating for one or two when they are properly reconstituted. And I found that well-flavored dried beans did the trick.

This dish has much of the flavor of a cassoulet but is considerably simpler, because it uses ready-cooked duck-leg confit, which is obtainable today in most good markets and can also be ordered online.