Week 15 - Beans

We eat a decent amount of beans in this household, and our pantry is stocked with lots of cans of different types of beans, so I wasn't sure what to make for this challenge. I did want to try something new, so I searched online until I found a recipe on BBC Good Food for kidney bean curry. That sounded like it could be a good addition to our beans rotation.

The ingredients for the curry were:

- grapeseed oil ($0.20)
- 1 onion, chopped ($0.79)
- handful of garlic cloves, finely chopped ($0.20)
- 1 tsp ginger paste ($0.20)
- about 1 tsp ground cumin ($0.10)
- about 1 tsp smoked paprika ($0.08)
- about 2 tsp garam masala ($0.10)
- about 1/2 tsp ground ginger ($0.05)
- 1 zucchini, chopped ($0.76)
- 1 can diced tomatoes (undrained) ($0.99)
- 1 can kidney beans (rinsed and drained) ($0.89)
- 3 scallions, chopped ($0.32)
- 1 tbsp chopped cilantro ($0.75)
- 2 cups (uncooked) brown rice ($1.50)

The total cost for this recipe was about $6.93, less than half the cost of a lot of our meals lately. Working with a minimal amount of fresh vegetables and a couple of cans was definitely more affordable than some of our other meals.


The steps for making our version of the curry were:

1. Add oil to pan over medium heat. Add onion and cook for a few minutes until translucent.

2. Add garlic and ginger, and cook for another minute or so.

3. Add the spices and stir well so onion mixture is well-coated with spices.

4. Add zucchini and cook for a few minutes. If the pan starts to get a little dry from the spices, add a little water to deglaze the pan so the spices don't burn.


5. Add canned tomatoes and kidney beans. Stir well, bring to a boil, lower heat and simmer for about 10 minutes.

6. Add scallions and continue simmering for another 5 minutes.

7. Add chopped cilantro and remove from heat. Serve over rice.


This was an easy recipe to make, vegan, healthy, and tasty. I had been a little worried the smoked paprika would be too much heat for B, but he seemed to like it. Overall, we thought it was a pretty good curry/stew, but not especially memorable or different from things we had made before. I had picked it for bean week because it was called kidney bean curry, but it was more like a curry/stew that contained kidney beans. We didn't really feel like kidney beans were more central to the dish than the tomatoes or the single zucchini we added, and they were just a part of the whole thing. We might make this again if we were looking for something hearty and healthy.