Conquering the Kidney Bean

The kids and I are back home now from our wet Christmas and New Years in Auckland.  And I have begun in earnest my attempts to reshape our thinking around food.  I dug out some dusty tins of red kidney beans, which I bought many moons ago and decided that was dinner for the night.  It had to be - I hadn’t pulled anything out of the freezer, I am choosing not to grab food at the last minute from the supermarket when we have stocks in the cupboard, and takeaways are out.  I googled kidney bean recipes and tossed around kidney bean salad, kidney bean pasta, or kidney bean salsa before deciding on kidney bean dip with nachos.  Miss 14 rolled her eyes and declared kidney beans her mortal enemy and flounced out of the kitchen with a toss of her indignant self and her hair.  My chief helper Miss 10 got busy dicing onions and chopping garlic and sauteing these in some butter and oil.

Kidney beans.  I don’t know why I buy them.  The few times I have ever cooked them and mixed them with mince my kids have just eaten around them, left them on their plates and they were wasted.  Waste of energy cooking them, waste of money buying them.  And yet I still buy and cook them.  All those cooking magazines that talk of how nutritious they are and how fibrous and good for you they are?  Pah.  We need cooking magazines whose target audiences are kids.  An editorial team made up of kids would be all over those articles with their kid stomach filters going yuck, yuck, and double pukey yuck.  The problem with beans is they look like beans.  That was Miss 14’s rationale for dissing them.  Oh and they are red “that’s just wrong”, she announced. 

So I’m cooking thinking on my feet and various Treasures magazines tips about introducing new foods from back in the babyhood days (I knew collecting all those points off nappy packs and getting free magazines would eventually be worth it) are penetrating and ‘simple’ and ‘fun’ come across as common themes.  My recipe called for lime juice and individual spices, cumin, turmeric and something else.  I’m also supposed to use other vegetables too like capsicum and celery, and fresh tomatoes.  That’s not very simple.  I improvised and used garam masala, chicken stock and tinned tomatoes.  Things I already had in the cupboard.   Introducing other vegetables like capsicum and celery together with kidney beans was not happening, mainly because I didn’t have any and also because I think those vegetables, cooked, may be classed as an enemy too.  All good parents know to serve new foods, especially vegetables, you need to be strategic and only ever serve one at a time.  I am treading carefully.  My kids will eat capsicum raw in a salad and celery raw with peanut butter, but they wont eat either if they’re  cooked.  Go figure.  Their cooked time will come though.

The original menu was adjusted (see below) to include a red kidney bean dip with nachos and a whole red kidney bean sauce with nachos.  Two options.  And the kids get to vote on which option they like the best and which subsequently we get to include as one of our new dinners for 2012.  Hah!  That’s the fun part nailed in my strategy.  Genius.  Now whoever it was that discovered the sauteing of onion and garlic together as a base for most meals deserves a medal.  Those aromas wafting through the kitchen had my kids mad keen for whatever was cooking.  The kidney beans were added and Miss 14 couldn’t resist sneaking one from the pan.  I think I like them whole she declares.  I’m still trying to decide if that is because I specifically said I wanted to blend them into a dip and so conversely she naturally preferred them whole, or if she actually just liked them.  Half and half then.

The chief and I served dinner with a flourish.  Nachos, with the option of kidney bean dip, or kidney bean sauce.  Lots of grated cheese and sour cream.  Okay on the fat option – I usually offer the kids cheese or sour cream but not both.  Tonight I needed both.  And the winner is?  The kidney bean sauce.  By default.  It emerged triumphantly as a winner because Miss 14 rallied her two younger sisters to her cause,  ganged up on my option and my dip was relegated to the “umm...no” department.  But one other theme I forgot was ‘involve your kids’.  The girls were won over because they helped get ingredients, they opened tins, they hung around while the chief and I were cooking and we chatted together about my thinking around the humble red kidney bean.  They fell for the whole option and voting angle too.  My son, who hadn’t been involved was not won over so easily.  He raises an eyebrow, peers suspiciously at both options and says simply “where’s the meat?”.  Bugger.  I’m lining him up to be chief cook for the next phase.  Lentils.  Let the fun begin.