Mary's Bean Stew - Take 4 and Take 5

Yes, today is the fourth time I'm making Mary McDougall's Bean Stew in my oval Crockpot, and I can say without a doubt it will be the LAST time I attempt to make this in this appliance.

I wrote all about the first time I made it, how it kept drying out, how I kept adding water, when I added twice the amount of water to beans to start, because it had steamed and dripped all over my counter when I started it in the Instant Pot.

I did not write about the second and third times making it. Each time I used another variety of Rancho Gordo beans. For today's batch, I'm using Rancho Gordo Aluba Blanca small white beans. I usually save this type of bean for when I make baked beans, but what the heck, I figured I'll use these in the stew.

Mary McDougall has said many times she never soaks her beans, that she just tosses beans and water in her slow cooker, and each time I make this recipe that's what I've been doing. Rancho Gordo people have even said their beans are so fresh they really don't need soaking. But darn it, every time I make this recipe, whether I use 4 cups of water to start or the almost 9 cups I used today, I have ALWAYS needed to add more water. Maybe next week I'll try a quick soak first. I don't want to soak these overnight - they're so fresh they'd probably start sprouting.

And definitely next time I'm doing things differently. Instead of making this recipe in the Crockpot, I'm going to cook my beans in the Instant Pot, after soaking first, and follow Jill McKeever's rule of adding enough water to cover at least the first knuckle of your index finger. When done, I'll do a 10 minute natural release, and add the seasoning and sun dried tomatoes, and hit the Keep Warm button for the rest of the cooking time.

Some changes I did make today - I started it off on High, and after an hour had to add more water. After it started to boil again, I lowered it to Low heat for the next 3 hours. At the 4 hour mark I had to add water again, and again let it come to a boil. As soon as it did I again turned it down, and at this time I added the seasoning and sun dried tomatoes. I also added half a pound of frozen mixed greens that I bought in Whole Foods. After an hour on this temp I then turned it down to Keep Warm. Right now, the beans are fully cooked and soft, the tomatoes are rehydrated, the greens are hot - in other words, everything is ready to eat, but it's still a few hours until dinner time. When the time comes, I have some steam-in-bag Yukon Gold potatoes I'll make, then serve it all up.

At least today it's not a dried out, gloppy mess, but a nice stew with lots of flavorful bean broth. Hopefully next week I can just cook it up without having to add another drop and have a meal just as good.

Why am I so determined to get this recipe to work? Well, I did mention I rejoined the Rancho Gordo Bean Club. The other day, the club box plus the other beans I ordered arrived. Yes, I was greeted by yet another bag of runner/lima beans.

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IDN why I never posted the above message when I wrote it out last week. Here's this week's making of Mary's Bean Stew.

Changes:
I used Rancho Gordo's Yellow Indian Woman bean. 

In an attempt to make sure they don't get dried out, I did a soak. Steve Sando, the owner of Rancho Gordo, says his beans are so fresh that if people insist on giving them a pre-soak, do it no more than 6 hours, otherwise they'll sprout. This morning I picked through, cleaned and started to soak the beans before I headed out to a doctor's appointment. By the time I got back from there and a quick grocery store trip, they were not only well soaked but starting to split. All this in only 2 hours! Next week, no soaking.

The next change was where these beans were going to be cooked. Instead of the CrockPot, I tossed them into my Instant Pot with 8 cups of water. According to this chart, soaked Yellow Indian Woman beans take 8 to 10 minutes. I hit Manual, lowered it down to 8 minutes, and let it go. After it hit the Keep Warm stage I let it sit for a while, and after a half hour finally released the last of the steam. It still took 4 minutes before it finished.

The beans looked - and tasted - beautiful! Like miniature pinto beans, so small and pinkish.

At this point I added 2 tablespoons of Mrs. Dash Table Blend and the bag of smoky sun-dried tomatoes and closed the lid, keeping the pot on Keep Warm mode.

A half hour before dinner I popped in an 8 ounce bag of baby spinach and mixed it up. Here's how it looked about 15 minutes later:

By Jove, I think I've got it!

In about 5 minutes I'll be spooning this out over rice for me, cornbread for my husband. I know we're only supposed to have an average of a cup of beans a day on the McDougall program, so I purposely had no beans yesterday and have none planned for tomorrow. I can tell you right now there will not be any leftovers of this stew today.

Maybe I'll get brave next week and try one of those many bags of lima beans I have from the Bean Club over the years. Wish me luck!

30 Ways to Eat Sweet Potatoes

A little while back I wrote a post with a link to Jill McKeever's list in PDF format of 30 Ways to Eat Sweet Potatoes. I just discovered she also did a video and a whole write up of it back in 2014! Now how did I miss that?

Be prepared - Jill is up to her usual shenanigans as she reads off the list, using a different hat, costume or camera filter as she read off each one.

And as always, there are many more recommendations in the comments below the video on YouTube, so be sure to check those out, too.

Jill McKeever and AJ Cook-Along - Slow Cooked Pasta Free Lasagna (aka

Gee, it only took AJ 2 months to post this video. She told us about doing it way back in November and we've been waiting for it ever since.

The recipe is in Jill's book, O M Gee! Good, which is based on the McDougall Pizza Potatoes recipe from various newsletters, the McDougall mobile cookbook app, and more recently in the Starch Solution book. She had previously done a video using the original recipe.

So, here AJ is calling this side-by-side video by the name of her former Foody TV web show, Healthy Living with Chef AJ, but it's nothing but a self-recorded YouTube video and the self-produced show series seems to be dead now.

On with the show:

Soy Curls Noodle Soup

Well, what's Christmas in our house without someone being sick, and this year all 3 of us were. It's this darn bug my son picked up his first week of work in September, and it just gets passed around, over and over again. On Christmas day, it was day 5 of my husband's second go-round, day 1 of my son's 4th bout and day 2 for me and my second battle with it (or is it third?). My husband kept sneezing, my son kept coughing, and I had the sore throat and ear ache. Today I have the runny nose and cough on top of that. Sometimes it hurts to even breathe!

Needless to say, nobody felt like eating, much less cooking, yesterday. Luckily there were plenty of my son's leftovers in the fridge so he helped himself to some of that for his lunch, and he popped a frozen pizza on for his dinner. This isn't the first time he had pizza for Christmas dinner, so it was a good thing to him. He told me weeks ago he wanted pizza, anyway, that's why I had one. My husband insisted on his usual sandwiches for lunch and refused my offer to make him something else. I really needed soup of some kind and found this video by Jill McKeever while roaming the Internet while son fought with his computer and hubby dozed:


This soup is the first one she does in the video, and the written recipe is available for free on her web site in PDF format. You have to go to the store, choose the Winter Soups file, go through the whole paying info page (use a fictitious name and numbers if you want), and then download the file.

Jill's Soy Curls Noodle Soup 

After you make this the first time, you'll want to keep lo mein noodles on hand all the time. For soy curls fans, this soup is perfect for those soy curls crumbs you have waiting in the freezer.

Serves 4 to 6

3 celery stalks, chopped
8 button mushrooms, sliced
1 large carrot, diced
1 1/2 cups dry soy curls, broken into small pieces
8 cups vegetable broth
2 teaspoons soy sauce
2 teaspoons curry
1 teaspoon ground mustard
2 cups fresh spinach
1 package lo mein noodles, broken into fourths

Water sauté celery stalks, mushrooms, and carrot until tender. Add soy curls, vegetable broth, soy sauce, curry, ground mustard, soy sauce. Bring to a boil. Stir in spinach and lo mein noodles Turn off heat; partially cover with lid for 5 minutes. Dinner is on!

Now for my changes. Because I didn't plan on making this soup, especially on a day when all the grocery stores are closed, I didn't have all the listed ingredients, but Jill says in the video even *she* didn't have all the ingredients when she made it and improvised.

Celery and carrots - I always try keep a few containers of mirepoix on hand in the freezer, so even though this soup didn't call for onions, I just tossed the whole frozen lump of veggies in the IPot. My store carries one pint sized containers.

Mushrooms - Tossed in an 8 ounce can of no salt added stems and pieces, complete with the water. This way I didn't have to add any water to saute the veggies.

Veggie broth - in the video she uses only 1 quart of broth, but at the end she plays around and adds some plant milk to make it into a creamy noodle soup. I stuck with the one box.

Soy curls - Even though they're allowed in small quantities on the McDougall program, I keep forgetting I have some in the fridge. When I dug down and crawled to the back of the bottom shelf where I still had a bag and a half of them I saw they were both dated 11/2015. Oops. No Soy Curls for the soup. That's okay. With this throat, they probably would have hurt going down, anyway.

Noodles - Ever since I read Dr. McD advising those with auto-immune diseases, especially RA, to go gluten free, I've been avoiding wheat, so no lo mein noodles for me. Luckily, a few weeks ago we made a trip to Target and I found these rice ramen noodles. So I tossed the "flavor pack", broke up the noodles in the bag, and used these. Not perfect, but better than opening up a pound bag of Tinkyada spaghetti. Our local Stop and Shop is phasing out Tinyada products (NO!!!!!!!!!!) so only has 3 or 4 different shapes, and fettuccine isn't one of them. That would have been perfect.

Spinach - Frozen, of course.

I'm sorry, no picture. I ate all but about a cup of it, and that's packed away in a container in the fridge. Jill's video has better graphics than my soup in a container.

It tasted delicious! The curry was what my sinuses needed and it may have even relieved the ear ache for a while. By the time I got down to that last little bit, my throat was saying "Enough!" and my tummy reluctantly agreed. I'll probably finish it off as a mid-morning snack today. It's not even enough to pour over some rice and call it lunch.

Will I make it again? Definitely! I already tossed some Soy Curls in my cart in Amazon so I can have them on hand again. I just have to remember I have them and use them. As written, this would make a nice, filling soup for dinner for the 2 of us and I look forward to having it again. 

Now to find a nice soothing soup for today's lunch. I had already planned last week to have Mary McDougall's Curried Split Pea Soup (subbing turnips for the taters) for tonight's dinner. Maybe the blended up Quick Black Bean Soup? Oh, wait. I already planned on Potatohead's Black Bean and Sweet Potato Soup for Wednesday. Maybe Jeff Novick's grand-cousin's Pinto Bean Soup but without the rice and veggies. It's hard to find something spur-of-the-moment to make when avoiding gluten and nightshades! In the past, I would have just made some mashed potatoes and be done with it! I'll figure something out between now and noon. Maybe I'll even make this soup again. :)

30 Ways to Eat Sweet Potatoes, Revisited

Jill McKeever has updated her free booklet, 30 Ways to Eat Sweet Potatoes:

New to the Instant Pot?

I know many people bought their first Instant Pot last weekend at the Amazon Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales, and many of those people never had a pressure cooker before in their lives and are deathly afraid to USE these new pots.

Well, Jill Nussinow, author of a number of cookbooks, including 2 pressure cooker books, to the rescue! With the help of some other ladies, Jill started a FaceBook community called Instant Pot Beginners Veg Support.

Even if you've been using a pressure cooker for a while, it won't hurt to join this community for all the support and information. It's just a few days old, so not a lot in the Photos, Links or Files sections yet, but there's already over 1200 members, so things are sure to pick up. Jill knows everything there is to know about pressure cookers, especially the Instant Pot, and will answer all your questions, help you solve any problem you have with your new toy.

Changes to the Newer Instant Pots

New Features Instant Pot Duo Version 2

The link above goes to a pressure cooker blog, and they explain the minor changes to the latest version of the Instant Pot Duo. It proves I wasn't going crazy or had a broken pot when my Manual button would give me the last set time instead of the default 30 minutes, why some people were talking about detachable cords, and now people CAN turn off the beep.

Here's a handy dandy chart from that site explaining all the changes:

New Contest by Jill McKeever

Still don't have an Instant Pot or a copy of Jill's book, OMGee Good! Instant Pot Meals?

Lucky for you, Jill McKeever is currently running a contest with these items as the prizes in honor of hitting 17,000 subscribers.

Limited to residents of the USA and Canada only, she says, due to shipping costs.

It's a nice trivia contest and all the answers are in her previous YouTube videos. She even tells you which videos the answers are in, so it's super simple. She didn't say how many winners there will be, though. Winners will be announced Saturday July 30th.

Good luck, everyone.

And, "Woot! Woot!"

Instant Pot IP-Duo60 Under $100 - Today Only on Amazon

If you need an Instant Pot and have Amazon Prime, today's the day to grab it - it's one of their Prime Day specials!

New Episodes of Healthy Living On-Line

The newest episodes of Foody TV's Healthy Living Series are on-line. For some reason there is no #7, not on Foody itself or their YouTube channel. Maybe it'll appear in the future?

The recipes for the original 6 episodes can be found at the Foody web site, and hopefully the recipes for these 4 new ones will join them soon.


Lesson 8 with Wendy - Look and Feel Your Best
Butternut Squash and Quinoa Chili, Oven Ratatouille



Lesson 9 with Hans Diehl and Shayda - Medical Institute
Millet Pudding, Fennel Salad




Lesson 10 with Lindsey (Happy Herbivore) - Bar Food Twist
Cauliflower Buffalo Wings, Peanutless Peanut Sauce




Lesson 11 with  Dr. Joel Kahn - Heart Health
Broccoli Bisque, Zucchini Pasta with Quick Sun-Dried Marinara Sauce

Farmer Fred Does Fresh Broccoli in the Instant Pot

I'm one of those people who constantly over-cooks vegetables. Just this morning I put one of those giant bags of Bird's Eye California Mix into the IP at 3 minutes and it still came out like mush. The first time I tried I did it for 10 minutes - not a pretty sight!

Farmer Fred mentions how he also had problems getting the timing right for his produce. In this video, he lops off a head of broccoli right from his garden and shows how to make perfect steamed broccoli. Maybe I'll try this next time instead of liquefying yet another bag of frozen.

Klunker's Mushrooms, Revisited

I mentioned these mushrooms a few months ago in this post. I've made them in the slow-cooker a number of times since, and they're a favorite of my husband.

Sunday afternoon the three of us settled in to watch a Harry Potter movie with the RiffTrax commentary riffing, and before we knew it, it was almost dinner time. Yikes! I forgot to put the mushrooms in the slow-cooker hours ago!!

Luckily, I had made a note on the recipe when someone on the McDougall Friends Facebook community made them in their Instant Pot and decided to go ahead and try them this way. So instead of slow cooking for 3 to 5 hours, this needs only 9 minutes of pressure cooking. I figured while these were cooling and thickening I would make my potatoes in the Instant Pot with the second liner I had purchased.

First off, 9 minutes of IP time sometimes means 30 or more minutes in real time, by the time the pot first gets to pressure, *then* it cooks for 9 minutes, and then give it another 10 before releasing the pressure.

The potatoes' cooking time was only 4 minutes in the pot, using this recipe by Jill Nussinow. This one took a long time, almost 20 minutes, to get to pressure because there were a lot of potatoes and not much liquid.

The potatoes were perfect, the mushrooms not so much. I used sliced cremini mushrooms, like I always do, but this time they were rubbery and undercooked. They really needed a lot more cooking time to get to be as we like them.

Next time, if I forget to put them on in time to make them in the slow-cooker, I'll make something different. This is one dish that really needs that long, slow cooking time.

If You Love the Simple Daily Recipes Site . . .

Jill McKeever, of Simple Daily Recipes blog and YouTube Channel, has another cookbook out!

O M Gee Good! Instant Pot® Recipes, Plant-Based and Oil-free

This mouthwatering cookbook was written solely for Instant Pot® owners. Inside you'll find over 30 plant-based and oil-free meals your family will ask for again, and again. The cooking directions are written so even the newest Instant Pot® owner can whip up a delicious meal with ease.  Each recipe comes with a color photo and is formatted to be easy to read and easy to print.

I just downloaded it, and it's 84 pages with loads of full page, full color pictures of Jill's delicious, easy recipes! I have a feeling I'm taking this to Staples to be printed and bound, because as much as I like my computer and Kindle, I love the feel of paper in my hands, especially when it comes to cookbooks. LOL

The recipes are all McDougall/Starch Solution safe and many are UWL-safe, too.

Mashed Potatoes in the Instant Pot - by Jill

I gotta get me one of those Breville immersion blenders! The dial instead of a button! 6 Cup food processor container! A potato ricer attachment!!

Oh, and thanks to the Instant Pot, mashed potatoes in less than 10 minutes start to finish, counting the time it takes to peel. Heaven!

Thanks, Jill, for another great video!