Vegan lunch: White beans soup, rice with vegetables, and fried sweet potato chips.
Hello everybody! I hope that so far you are having a nice week. I’ll share with you today my lunch from yesterday, a tasty bean soup, accompanied by some rice with vegetables and fried sweet potato. All of this was plant-based and therefore vegan, so for all of us lovers of healthy food,
I used some white beans that are very common here in Argentina, but because they are so big, they are easier to cook if you let them in water overnight, so that the next day they have absorbed water and it would take less time to make them soft and tender. So that's what I did, I let them in a jar filled with water the day before.
I was improvising here, so what I made was to put together all the vegetables I had and thought of a way to make them together. First thing was to process all the vegetables separately, grating the carrot, peeling the sweet potato and the garlic, crushing the garlic with a spoon to obtain all its flavor without chopping it, and finally also chopping the onion and the paprika.
The beans were boiling for about 2-3 hours, making sure that the pot always had enough water for them to float and not get dry because they would stick in the bottom of the pot and probably burn. After that time, I took 1 single bean and chewed it to see if it was soft or it needed more cooking, and it was almost done, so I added the chopped paprika, the onion, garlic, and some black pepper, and dry parsley. I let this boil for another hour until seeing that the broth got thicker, and the vegetables were cooked and also the beans looked softer and bigger.
For the rice, I put 2 cups of water on a pot, and when it was about to boil, I added some spices like some vegetable flavor cube and turmeric powder, and then I added the grated carrot and 1 cup of rice, stirring it a little and then letting it to cook for about 20-25 minutes at medium flame.
I chopped the sweet potato into small circles and started to fry them for 3-4 minutes on each side at high flame until the pieces looked ready.
And there it was! my whole lunch, a vegan meal full of fiber and protein from my beans and rice, and lots of other benefits from the other vegetables I used as the carrot and onion. It was delicious and perfect for such a cold day as it was yesterday, and it is great that I could take the time to make this because even though beans take longer to cook usually, a lot of people forget how nutritious and beneficial to our health they are. Almost no one eats beans anymore, and we need to work on consuming more beans and to discover how rich in iron and calcium they are, in comparison with other animal products we eat with the justification of obtaining those nutrients.
I hope that if you like it you can try it, and don’t stop because you do not have the same type of beans, I am sure that you can make a nice bean soup like this with any other red, black bean, or any other that you have available or easy to find where you are.
until next occasion, regards to all!
César.