Week 31 - Inspired by Magic

I had no clue what to do for the inspired by magic challenge. Harry Potter came to mind, but I already did that for a previous challenge where I made the only HP-related thing I could think of (or that I wanted to make), so that wasn't going to work. Besides little cakes, I couldn't think of any other food from The Magicians. I was just drawing a complete blank. Once the challenge week started and people started posting things, I saw that someone had done something with beans because of the magic beans from Jack and the Beanstalk. Done. Magic beans, bean salad. Totally doable and something I'd actually want to make for dinner.

We decided to go with a Mexican bean salad recipe I found on Allrecipes, and stuck to it decently closely as far as ingredients with just a few adaptations. The ingredients we used were:

- 1 can black beans ($0.75)

- 1 can kidney beans ($0.75)

- 1 can cannellini beans ($0.79)

- 1 can corn ($0.72)

- 1 red onion, chopped ($0.99)

- 2 green peppers, chopped (would have done one green and one red like in the recipe but no good red peppers at the store) ($1.98)

- 2/3 batch of cilantro, chopped ($1.15)

- 1/2 cup olive oil ($0.75)

- 1/2 cup red wine vinegar ($0.75)

- 1 tbsp lime juice ($0.10)

- juice of 1 lemon ($0.29)

- 2 tbsp sugar ($0.10)

- salt ($0.05)

- spoonful of minced garlic ($0.10)

- cumin ($0.05)

- black pepper ($0.05)

- hot pepper sauce ($0.05)

- chili powder ($0.10)

Considering all the ingredients, this wasn't a super inexpensive salad, coming in around $9.52 (although most amounts up there are estimates). But considering that it filled a really large bowl and lasted for days, and there was far more in it than any salad you could get outside for that price, it felt worth it.

Making the salad was pretty simple. Everything from the cilantro to the end of the list got combined into a dressing, with the hot pepper sauce (we used the new TJ's taco sauce) and chili powder being added to taste after everything else was mixed together. A worked on that while I did prep on the rest of the ingredients.

My part basically involved rinsing and draining all the beans and corn, chopping the onions and green peppers, and then mixing it all together. By doing this together as a team, it got done so much faster.

We paired the salad with some fish sticks (nothing to do with magic that I can think of, but that's fine), and had a really tasty dinner. We liked the salad, and it was quite good with corn chip dippers in the following days too.