Lima Bean Stew

I decided to make something different for today, and with some of Dr, McDougall's recent webinars focused on heart health, I decided to pull out The McDougall Program for A Healthy Heart and look around. The book is currently out of print, but you can get used copies of it from many on-line book stores, and Dr. McDougall is also selling a PDF version of it on his web site. The 20% off all digital books sale is still going on so you can grab this for only $8.

Lima Bean Stew looked good, but before I started a new post here about it I searched and saw I did a quickie post about it back in 2008. Unfortunately, the link to the recipe itself died along with Geocities, so I guess I better share it again:

Lima Bean Stew
Serving Size: 8     
Preparation Time 15 minutes
Cooking Time: 1 hour

  1             medium  onion -- chopped
  1             medium  green pepper -- or red, chopped
  2             stalks  celery -- sliced
  2             medium  carrots -- sliced
  8               cups  water
  3               cups  frozen lima beans
  16            ounces  tomato sauce -- canned
     3/4           cup  barley -- uncooked
     3/4           cup  brown rice -- uncooked
  2        tablespoons  soy sauce, low sodium
  1         tablespoon  parsley, freeze-dried
  1           teaspoon  dried basil
     1/2      teaspoon  paprika
     1/2      teaspoon  dried oregano
                        fresh ground black pepper -- to taste

Combine all ingredients in a large soup pot. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 60 minutes.

The McDougall Program for A Healthy Heart (page 350)
McDougall Quick and Easy Cookbook (page 90)
John McDougall, MD and Mary McDougall

NOTES : This may also be made in a slow cooker. Add all ingredients at once and cook on low for 4 to 6 hours. We have let this cook as long as 8 hours with no adverse results except for softer vegetables.

Instead of chopping up a bunch of fresh veggies, I used a container of mirepoix - a carrot, onion, and celery pre-chopped mix from the grocery store - and added some frozen onions, because we love onions in this house.

The tomato sauce is Hunt's no-salt added version. I was so happy when I saw our grocery store decided to stock not only the small 8 ounce size cans of this but also the 15 ounce and 28 ounce cans. It makes it so easy now to make home made, no salt added pasta sauces.

Since the ingredients read green or red pepper, I opened a small jar of sliced pimientos and used that. No pepper skins glueing themselves to my upper palate to worry about.

The lima beans. I had belonged to the Rancho Gordo Bean Club for a year and a half. I didn't immediately renew after the first year and missed one shipment while on the waiting list, then renewed for another quarter and dropped it again. Why? First off, the beans are delicious and definitely fresher than you would ever find in grocery stores. I quit twice because of lima beans. I'm not that big a fan of them, but in the 5 shipments from Rancho Gordo I had gotten 6 bags of lima beans. There aren't the cute little baby limas, either, but honking, gigantic creamy white ones, with skin so thick you can use them to make shoes out of. OK, slight exaggeration. I still had 4 bags of lima beans left in my pantry and figured I better start eating them before they become as old and hard as grocery store beans, so last night I set a bag of Royal Coronas out to soak overnight, and this morning cooked them up in the Instant Pot. It made up 6 cups of beans, so 3 were set aside for this recipe, the others I split in half, put into freezer bags, and when cool, put into the freezer for the next time I need lima beans for anything. If I plan on making more recipies from this book, they'll get used, because Mary does seem to like using lima beans in her older recipes.

Everything got popped back into the cleaned Instant Pot and put on Low for 6 hours. I can never remember if the vent stays open or closed when slow-cooking in this thing. When I used the 6-quart as my primary pot I didn't have any problem - I had purchased the accessories package had had the glass lid that I used. But the 8-quart doesn't have a glass lid, and none of my other pot lids really fit it, so I'm stuck with the regular lid. Even with the valve closed, the house smells great. I can't wait until dinner time!

Here's a photo at the 4 hour point, fluffed up so you can see the ingredients and not just tomato sauce:

I apologize for the fuzziness of the photo. My son said the steam kept clouding his iPod lens.

I really should use these older books more. Some of these recipes are fantastic!