Skip to main content

All green Cranberry bean curry


I find Cranberry beans showing at my local grocers around this time of the year, although I have no idea how fresh produce like this turns up during winter (or maybe I do, but my greed for anything so green over rides my concern about the carbon footprint it leaves being transported from  where ever on earth it originally grew), its always a treat to use these gorgeous crunchy little beans in lieu of soaking dried beans and cooking them for hours to an end (or even worse, open up a can). Call it a prelude to spring!



For a change instead of mechanically reaching out for the spices in the pantry, I opted for the all fresh, green ingredient route (all except for the turmeric, used for a bit of color).  Although I could have shopped around for the fresh roots, it was not exactly feasible, given I wanted to have this for lunch in an hours time.

It can be quite exciting to make something with all fresh ingredients even if you are constantly stopping yourself from reaching out for the spices & blends that are taken for granted. The end result is a healthy vibrant tasting dish that is well worth the effort. and the best part, it is ridiculously low in calories. just 2 cups of the fresh cranberry beans yields about 4 generous servings and even with a potato and a generous slpash of olive oil thrown in to fry the green masala paste, it still works out to a healthy 4 points per serving. (~ 250 calories per serving)

All green Cranberry bean curry

you need:
2 cups freshly shelled cranberry beans (10 WW plus points)
1 medium russet potato, diced into cubes. (3 WW points)
1 - 1.5 tablespoons olive oil (4.5 WW plus points)
1/4 teaspoon turmeric powder
Salt to taste
1/2 teaspoon sugar

for the paste:
1 medium white onion
1 clove garlic smashed
2 tablespoons minced ginger root
1 cup Cilantro, stems and leaves
1/4 cup fresh green mango diced (~2 WW plus points, although they assign 0 points to fresh fruits and veggies)
1 - 2 green serrano chiles



 Set the fresh beans to boil in plenty of water. They should have a firm al dente consistency when cooked without the characterist 'green' flavor of fresh beans. The vibrant color will fade and the cooked bean will have more of  a dull white color.

Grind all the ingredients for the masala into a smooth paste. Set aside
In a pan, heat the olive oil and first add the diced potatoes, allow them to develop a golden color and make sure to toss the potatoes around so that all the sides brown well. (the potatoes need not get cooked fully).
Add the green masala to the potatoes, turn down the heat and cook the paste on a low heat until it loses the raw smell of the onions. Add a splash of water if the paste turns dry and starts coating the bottom of the pan. Add turmeric, salt and sugar.

Add the cooked beans along with some water. Cover and cook until the potatoes have turned completely soft, (even mushy). Since these are fresh beans they do not break down and release starch to thicken the sauce. The potatoes are added for that purpose. taste and adjust for seasoning The beans themselves will retain their shape and will show some resistance when bitten into.




Serve hot with Pita bread or roties.

 Bon appetit!

Comments

  1. These beans are very interesting. I have not seen them in our neck of the woods, not in the grocery store at least.

    ReplyDelete
  2. They're pretty seasonal even here, they appear for about a month at my local store.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to hear feedback from you, your thoughts, ideas and suggestions.

Popular posts from this blog

Sputtering back....

I seriously feel like this scene from the movie 3 idiots .. remember this one? The way I kept racking up drafts and eventually stopped doing that as well. Lulled into complacence by the quick high from Instagram posts. Recipe measurements hastily scribbled into a Moleskine notebook faithfully depending upon my moods. The truth is that I keep over thinking the backstories needed to make the post more interesting while in reality the truth is that ideas and inspirations just occur spontaneously (like little itches , sneezes or twitches) whenever the opportunity happens to strike. Some really cool ideas that scare the beejeezus out of me and yet prove to be utterly delightful and simple in the end. Others, that seem so trivial that I feel it wouldn't be worth crowing about -- even if there are enough other recipes in that genre that get so much publicity simply because the author happens to have the right marketing knack. So in the past 4 years that I've been

Product Review: Ninja Mega Kitchen system and a recipe for Masala Dosa

 One of the biggest reasons for attending conferences is the priceless experience of meeting fellow bloggers and get an invaluable exposure to all things  culinary. This includes vendors with new products to savor and get inspiration from. I had no complaints about whatever appliances I had for making traditional Dosa (Traditional South Indian rice & lentil crepes) batter, a sturdy tabletop stone grinder that you could add the Urad dal, turn the timer on , and 30  minutes later, come back to a container full of fluffy, batter with the consistency of whipped egg whites. The The cons of this is the cleaning up, of the various parts, the roller, the grinding bin, the multiple trays on which the rollers need to be placed while transferring the rice & lentil batter, the invariable drips of thick batter on the counter.... you get the point, It takes quite a bit of time. I was pleasantly surprised when the appliance company, Ninja asked me if I'd like to try any of their

Pickling & preserving the Buddha's Hand!

 Got your attention with that sacrilegious sounding title on this post, didn't I? Well, I'm as spiritual as the next person out there, and never in my life will I ever commit that variety of Blasphemy, so nothing to fret about. I still wonder why these curious looking citrus entities (other than the obvious visual reason) were called such. It turns out that these fruits are used as a religious offering to the Buddha. My neighboring Whole Foods Market (which is quite some distance away, in Princeton) had a stock of these weird looking citrus and I must have been the oddball customer who immediately went cuckoo on spotting them. Since I had never seen one before, I immediately went for the biggest fruit with the most tentacles (since they were sold as individual units rather than by weight) The first three 'tentacles' were peeled off for their zest, dried in the oven and went into making a citrus salt for my Food52 Secret Santa .     Making