Maybe Sriracha sauce Isn't All That Bad, and More Beans, Mr. Taggert

Over on the Engine 2 Seven Day Recipe Rescue Facebook group there's a gentleman named Joseph Alexander who frequently shares all sorts of recipes he's developed. The other day he posted a sort of batch cooking guide for his lunches for work for the week, and included in this pictorial was his recipe for maple mustard dressing. Here's what he wrote under the photo of this sauce:

This sauce is loosely based on the Forks Over Knives Maple-Mustard Dressing, and I do mean loosely. This batch has
- a can of cannellini beans with the liquid
-1/2 cup nooch
-2 Tablespoons maple syrup
-3 Tablespoons stone-ground, no-salt-added mustard
-2 teaspoons powdered garlic
-2 teaspoons onion powder
- fresh-ground black pepper
-1/3 cup balsamic vinegar
-2 Tablespoons sriracha
all blended in my Vitamix.

Alrighty. Let's see - the base is cannelini beans. I've seen and done a number of dressings that start with this, so no problem.

Nooch? Natch! Ditto the rest of the ingredients. So far sounds like a number of other recipes.

Sriracha sauce. 2 TABLESPOONS??? Is he crazy??? One drop leaves my tongue sweating for an hour!

But my husband loves it, and it's him I'm making this for, so I go and add 2 tablespoons of the devil's tear drops to the blender.

This made close to 3 cups of dressing, so I had to split it up between 2 jars. It's also an ugly dark beige, but a lot of Chef AJ's recipes look unappetizing yet taste good, so I didn't let that throw me.

As I'm pouring it from the Ninja to the 2 jars my husband walks into the kitchen and says "Whatcha doing?" Annoyed, I reply that I'm turning doggie crap into gold, what does it LOOK like I'm doing?!?! After 42 1/2 years of marriage I can say what I want to him, right?

Anyway, I offer him a taste and his eyes light up. "This is great! Even you would like it!" I tell him there are 2 tablespoons of sriracha and he says you can't even taste it, for me to give it a shot. I take about a quarter of a teaspoon of it.

He was right - it's not a throat-burner and actually tastes pretty good!

So, we now have another liquid to pour over our rice and veggies. Since more of our meals lately have been that simple - rice and veg, rice and beans, potatoes and veg, pasta with veg - it's nice to have a variety of sauces to make them seem a little less plain.

Over the weekend I started flipping through some of the McDougall books, copying down a few other dressing/sauce recipes, so I hope to post a few more in the future.

Another thing I did this weekend was order some more beans from Rancho Gordo. I used to belong to their Bean Club (3 or 4 times) but when they kept sending the same beans, the last time I got 2 bags of the same bean in the same shipment, I kept cancelling it and started buying single bags of beans we liked most, instead.

At the beginning of the covid crisis I wanted to load up on beans, but they were sold out of just about everything, so I ordered other beans from Amazon, because store shelves around here were pretty bare, too. Even though I ordered organic, the price was still better for those big bulk bags than Rancho Gordo's beans, but they're just not as tasty. In fact, the cannelini beans are nearly tasteless, no matter how I cooked them, so that bag will be buried in the back and saved for desperate times. I've been able to buy other beans locally lately and now have a stash of Goya beans on hand for adding to soups and stews, but for plain bean and rice meals we both decided it's worth the price to get Rancho Gordo again.

So I'll have a half dozen each of cranberry and yellow eye coming within the next few weeks, and after that I'll order 6 bags each of a few others they offer. 

Why not order them all at once?

Well, because these boxes have to be carried by us up 3 flights of stairs after they're delivered.  Carrying up 12 pounds is bad enough, but who wants to carry 25 or more pounds in one big box? I made the mistake of making an order even heavier than that a few months ago and we wound up opening the box down in the foyer and transferring things to tote bags so we can make multiple trips up the stairs. Now I pay attention to the total weight of an order. And the size, too. We once had a Harmony House order of dehydrated foods that wasn't particularly heavy, but the volume was so much that it was all delivered in a box big enough to fit a small chest freezer! It wouldn't even fit through the front door! The landlord got a laugh watching us unload the box from the front porch into the foyer, then bagging everything to carry upstairs from there. At least we didn't have to worry about getting rid of the giant box - he asked if he could have it because it was the perfect size to store some of his bulky stuff out in the garage. I wouldn't be surprised if I find out he put his grill in it for the winter, it's that big!

In past years I made sure I had at least a 2 week supply of foods handy in case we lose power from a hurricane during the summer, blizzard during winters. With covid-19, I want at least a 2 month supply on hand! Our local stores still aren't totally restocked, and it appears many items are never coming back. I haven't seen a bar of soap since early March, nor single boxes or rolls of tissues. Many brands and varieties of canned and frozen vegetables are gone. The rice and bean aisles are still half empty. It's crazy! At least we have enough rice and pasta on hand, although the rice in those 20 pound bags are the white variety and a few precious 2 pound bags of brown are in the pantry, and much of the pasta is whole wheat instead of Tinkyada brown rice.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. You've seen me complain about this way too often. I'm just grateful for what stores do have in stock, and what items I can get via mail order. As the Rolling Stones sang decades ago: