At the EA dinner last night more people showed up than had RSVP'd, and we ran out of vegan protein. Julia was still running the intro Q&A, so I made more beans. Someone asked for the recipe, which in this case is optimized for being fast while still being pretty tasty:

  • 1 can black beans (15.5oz)
  • ~1/4 C cooking wine or other acid
  • ~1/4 C olive oil or other fat
  • Salt, pepper, garlic powder, and smoked paprika, or other spices

This is about two people's worth of beans, so multiply quantities up accordingly.

Put a skillet on the stove on high, and put the wine into it. The goal is to give it a chance to reduce slightly while you're doing everything else, though since we're going to be making this very quickly it's not going to get to do much.

Open the can(s) of beans and drain them. Normally I wouldn't drain the beans and instead let them reduce, but we're trying to be fast. Microwave the beans, since that will get them tolerably hot faster than putting them right in the pan.

Once the beans are good and hot, put them in the pan with the wine. Stir. It will thicken slightly, but we don't have time to let it thicken fully. Add the oil and spices to taste. Without enough oil and salt it is edible but not tasty, so it's more common for people to use too little than too much.

While it would benefit from a bit more time to cook together and combine flavors it's still very good at this point and something I was happy to serve.

(The combination of skillet and microwave is also what I do with two-minute quesadillas. More cooking thoughts here.)

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7 comments, sorted by Click to highlight new comments since: Today at 7:14 PM

Frozen peas and carrots add significantly to this and I do this a lot.

I'm not normally so pressed for time, so I'd usually let everything cook down a lot longer. And add onions (cooked first separately, then together)

Although at that point you're basically just making Peter Special :P

The combination of microwaving and skillet gives you a better taste, but still with the same low overall time.

[-]cwh5y30

https://www.lesswrong.com/p/how-i-cook Broken link. "More cooking thoughts here."

Fixed, thanks! I'm using the LessWrong RSS importer and it doesn't handle relative urls yet: https://github.com/LessWrong2/Lesswrong2/issues/2434