Our favorite beans/ Americanized dhal

For our inaugural post, we had to start with the most basic of meals- what we call beans, and what can loosely be called an Americanized version of Indian dhal.  It goes with most any meal, can be served as a side dish or on rice, and varies so largely from recipe to recipe that your dinner guests will never know that it is related to the dish you served last week.  This here is one of our favorite go-to dishes in the guerrilla kitchen.

To begin, you can either simply go to an Indian store and pick up curry sauce or you can make your own at home, stir frying well chopped onion, garlic and ginger- and plenty of it, like a whole onion, half a bulb of garlic, 2 inches or so of fresh peeled ginger.  Stir fry this with a ton of herbs of your choosing.  In a future post, we'll break down into greater detail how we make our curry sauce.

Then grab a pound of dry beans (any that you'd like- whether they be pinto, black, chickpea, kidney, split pea, or any combination thereof) that you should soak in room temperature water for 12-24 hours.  When you're ready to prepare, toss in first the stir fried onion mix, then add the beans, cover with water to about an inch above the beans, a half a jar of tomato (pasta) sauce plus 1-2 chopped tomatoes, then add a bunch of greens like chopped turnip greens, kale, etc.  The beans are great because this is where you can toss in all the other parts of vegetables that you may not use as often- like beet leaves, thin stems, other random greens and veggies that may be about to go bad in your fridge.  Have some leftover cilantro?  Save it until you're about to serve, then toss it in!

You'll cook this all together either all day in the slow cooker, or 13 min if you had a pressure cooker- so that's really up to you and your own kitchen equipment.  We here in the guerrilla kitchen mostly use pressure cooker, and like most New Yorkers, do not have access to a grill, so adjust according to your kitchen.

Hopefully this is the first of many posts to come, and as we get even more adventurous in our own kitchen and the seasons come to pass, we find a way to help you explore what's ripe right now, and encourage you to challenge your self to make a meal out of what you can find on your shelves today.  Keep your eyes peeled for upcoming posts on kabocha squash, daikon, kale, fennel, beets and eggplant!