Chicken Stew with Vegetables and Grains

This is a recipe I wanted to try out after making a similar ready-made mix. I changed it up a little bit, adding vegetables and changing the cooking process. I imagine, it is also possible to make a vegetarian version of this stew.

2 cups mix of beans, rice and lentils
salt
garlic
rosemary *other spices
1 big onion, chopped
4 carrots, chopped
1 celery, chopped
1 - 2 pound chicken breast
10 cups vegetable or chicken stock

Wash the grains, set aside.
Heat up oil and add onions in a big pot. When onions are cooked add spices and chicken and cook for about 5 minutes. Add vegetables and cook for another 5 minutes. Add stock and grains and cook until grains are done.

Beans with Spinach and Cheese

Since the Christmas beans turned out so yummy, I as eager to try more bean recipes. Christmas beans are a variation of the traditional Lima beans. So I got some traditional Lima beans to try out this recipe with beans, spinach and cheese.

I cooked the beans (with pieces of carrots and celery), used frozen spinach which I fried up with onions, garlic and seasoned it with salt and pepper. I put beans and spinach in a baking dish and topped everything with cheddar and mozzarella (since I don't like feta cheese much).

The result was really yummy, especially with the cheese. When heated up the next day in the microwave the cheese melted though and around all the layers. Mmmh, my kind of dish :)

Christmas Beans Salad

After we bought a bunch of dried Christmas beans (of the family of Lima Beans) for their fun name I started researching how to cook beens and found this wonderful article which consoled me with the idea of continuing to buy dried beans in the future: No need to soak them! Isn't that great?! No need to plan ahead what shall be cooked tomorrow and no need to postpone bean dishes because there isn't enough time for soaking!

Happy about this unexpected good news I fried up some garlic, onions, carrots and celery (later realizing that I didn't need to chop them up into such tiny pieces) and added the mix to a pot of well washed Christmas beans, filled it with water so that the beans were covered by what I judged to be one inch and then cooked them for about an hour or an hour and a half until they had the right consistency.


Then I chopped up some more onion, carrots and celery to make this bean salad.

For the vinaigrette I used:
lemon juice of half a lemon (I didn't have vinegar)
olive oil
a couple of tbsp of the water from beans
chives
dried basil
dried parsley
salt, pepper

The beans taste wonderfully nutty and satisfying. The fresh carrots and celery as well as the lemon juice in the vinaigrette are a fresh complement. Nom nom nom!