Having grown up in the Middle East, eating beans for breakfast always seemed like a bizarre British eccentricity. Here's an alternative, just for the sake of variation. You can play with the idea by adding chorizo or smoky bacon and omitting the smoked paprika. Eggs are another natural addition.

Kidney, black and navy beans make this chili a hearty version of the classic, full of vegetables, savory spices and fresh cilantro, too. Serve with a sprinkling of regular or dairy-free shredded cheese over the top, if you like.

Nachos with chilli beans makes a classic party dish and if you want to swap the kids weekend trip to the take away for a healthier alternative look no further. This cheap and relatively healthy recipe is comfort food at its very best.

A Facebook friend asked me recently if I had a list of my favorite recipes, and I was sorry to say that I didn’t. But what a good idea! Or so I thought, until I started to name all the recipes I considered favorites and found that the list would be so long that it would be useless. So I decided to reshape the question: Which recipes do I make over and over again? I decided to focus on the recipes I actually make week-in and week-out plus a few that I make regularly for holidays or special occasions, such as green bean casserole for Thanksgiving.

After I thought of it like that, my list became both much shorter and much less fancy. It includes the Dirty Little Secret Soup that I make once a week (a little differently each time), the chickpea “tuna” salad I pack in my daughter’s lunch, and at least 4 different kinds of split-pea soup. All have been thoroughly tested and are dishes that we–teenager included–love. You can see the full list of my family’s favorites here (it’s now a regular category in the recipe index).

As I was making the list, I asked my husband to help me think of every meal we eat regularly, and I was a little surprised to discover that several of the dishes in our regular rotation haven’t appeared on the blog. I guess I’ve been so busy trying to feature new recipes that I haven’t bothered with the very simple, stand-by dishes that make up a big part of our diet. So I’ve decided to rectify that. For the next three weeks, I’ll be adding a new “old” recipe each week. I’ll reveal what food we always travel with and tell you how to make the vegetable-rich pasta dish my daughter loves.

My first old favorite reveals another “dirty little secret” of my family’s eating habits: about once a week, we eat burritos for dinner. On really rushed nights, we rely on canned fat-free refried beans (I know, I know–sodium and BPA, but we’re talking emergency meals) and wrap them in whole wheat tortillas along with lettuce, tomatoes, red onions, jalapenos, and my daughter’s specialty, guacamole (there’s another recipe I’ve never posted.) But when I have leftover brown rice, I skip the refried beans and throw together this easy Spanish rice. It makes a great burrito filling or side dish and doesn’t take much longer than heating up a can of beans.

This Black-Eyed Pea Curry from Suvir Saran's Masala Farm is the kind of recipe that'll make you realize you're definitely not eating enough black-eyed peas. This good-luck-in-the-New-Year legume makes an absolutely perfect curry candidate when simmered in a deeply spiced tomato broth.

A little more trouble than opening a can, but much more satisfying.

These easy-to-assemble burgers can be shaped ahead of time and cooked off when you're ready to eat.

Beans and legumes are among the healthiest foods you can eat. A vegetable protein, they contain fewer pesticides than animal products. They’re low in fat, and are versatile enough to absorb flavor from a wide variety of flavors and spices. With so many warnings about chemicals in canned foods, now might be the time to make the switch to home-cooked beans.
Dried beans are usually very cheap, although they take a while to cook from scratch so consider energy usage when making price comparisons.  Make a large quantity and freeze to make the effort worthwhile.  I’ll give a few methods.

Tortilla casserole isn't authentically Mexican, beautiful, or fancy in any way. It's simply a delicious, homey way to put a healthy and inexpensive vegetarian entree on the table. If you have kids, odds are it will be a hit with them too. In my family we like to put something like this together on Sunday night and refrigerate it, then bake and serve it for dinner early in the work week. That guarantees us at least one hot home-cooked meal even if no-one has time to cook.
The most complicated thing it asks you to do is dice an onion.
This recipe is for the basic tortilla casserole. The most complicated thing it asks you to do is dice an onion. You can embellish the basic recipe in any number of ways. For example, add finely diced zucchini or bell pepper, roasted poblano peppers, or corn kernels. You could also replace the refried beans with whole pinto or black beans, or add a tablespoon or so of minced chipotle pepper to the sauce.
If you have time, garnishes of crema (Mexican sour cream), fresh cilantro, and lime slices are nice. This dish provides a great opportunity to break out all of those hot sauces crowding your refrigerator door—everyone can doctor it up to their own preference of chile heat.

I've been talking smack about this recipe for months. Whenever my wife and I can't decide what to make for dinner, she'll lobby hard for this one—and it makes sense. I love black beans and we tend to have the rest of the ingredients around the house. It's a perfect pantry meal. The only problem? I couldn't picture how they'd turn out. I feared they would become chalky and dry like hockey pucks.
But that couldn't be further from the case for this Epicurious recipe. Perhaps stuffing them with loads of veggies and chiles helps them stay moist.
My only criticism? The "spicy" label is a misnomer. Unless you think "medium" packaged salsa is spicy, then you'll need to add some firepower of your own. Hot sauce these guys at will.

Finding a solid everyday cookbook is no easy task. Throw in the "healthy" factor, and it becomes harder than getting "Party in the USA" out of your head after your fiancé listens to it six times on repeat. Don't ask me how I know that.
Cook's Illustrated Best 30-Minute Recipe is my personal favorite, and I'm slowly, finally getting into How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. Betty Crocker will always have a place on the bookshelf, and if you halve the oil in all of Ina Garten's recipes, her tomes suddenly become super useful for weeknights.
Now, thanks to the Brooklyn Public Library (R.I.P.?), I think we might have a new contender. Simple Suppers was released by the Moosewood collective back in 2005. The recipes are largely vegetarian, with a chapter of fish dishes thrown in for glorious, protein-y variety. So far, its offerings are three for three in my kitchen, and none have taken advanced skills or inordinately long amounts of time.
White Bean and Mushroom Ragout is the latest experiment, and it's a huge win. Made almost entirely out of pantry ingredients, the dish is the perfect antidote for those evenings when you're thiiiiis close to ordering takeout. It's filling and surprisingly complex flavor-wise, too, and you can spoon it over egg noodles, orzo, or polenta, as seen here.
If these first few forays are any indication, you can expect to see more from Simple Suppers in this column over the next few weeks. In the meantime, enjoy your Monday supper.

As the name states, the shape of the bean makes its name as kidney bean. It's a highly nutritious bean and can be consumed easily when made delicious. Red kidney bean curry is a traditional north Indian dish served with plain rice and salad. The bean is cooked in tomato gravy along with other spices. This serves as a satisfying rich curry for the winter!

Anjum Anand’s curry is smooth, sweet and coconutty. It makes a great inclusion in a south Indian feast or can simply be served as a vegetarian main course

Kidney beans make an excellent nutritous basis for a vegetarian dish - and this is a popular Indian method for cooking them. Called "Rajma" - the kidnet beans are cooked either on their own - or in this Punjabi variation - with potatoes.

I am very happy to eat this as it is, but it also makes a cheap and warming accompaniment to grilled bacon or sausages and especially to a boiled bacon joint. Serves 4 as a main dish.

I try to use ripe beefsteak tomatoes for this recipe, when they are available.

There is no fresh veg and the fridge is bare. But with lentils and cans of beans, Nigel Slater conjures up a magical feast

This recipe is great because it doesn’t require any ingredients you can’t get at a regular grocery store. Even meat eaters like this one, and it’s very hearty.

Cook the pasta. Saute the onions and garlic until soft. Add the carrots & parsnips and saute about 5 minutes, add the rest of the vegetable (you can vary these to what you like or have on hand). Cook for 5 minutes. Add tomatoes & juice, broth, paprika, soy sauce, herbs, beans and cooked pasta. Cook until veggies are tender (about 10-15 minutes.) Take a bit of the sauce from the stew and mix with cornstarch. Add this mixture back to the stew and cook for a few more minutes until the sauce thickens.

This is pretty hearty and easier to make than the long list of ingredients implies.

Spray large skillet with cooking spray. Saute onion, mushrooms, garlic, and rosemary until tender, about 5 to 8 minutes.

Add spinach and broth to skillet; heat to boiling. Reduce heat and simmer, covered, until spinach is wilted, 5 to 8 minutes

Stir in beans and cook until broth is evaporated, 3 to 4 minutes. Stir bean mixture into pasta. Add half of cheese (if desired), and the pine nuts/almonds. Season to taste with salt. Sprinkle remaining cheese on top.

Add guacamole and chips to this hearty vegetarian dish for an easy Mexican meal.

This is wonderful reheatedf the next day so feel free to make it in advance and keep it in the fridge.

I've used an aged chedder here because it has a nice balance of cheesey flavour and good melting qualities but you could use your favourite melting cheese. Or even some parmesan would do the trick.

Serve with a green salad.

I spied this recipe over on VegWeb.com a month or so ago and knew that I had to make it. It had everything I’d ever want in a meal: beans, onions, cheesy goodness, corn tortillas, etc. I’m glad I read through most of the comments left for this recipe since they pointed out quite a few things that needed to be changed in this recipe.

***Instead of 3 cans of beans a lot of people recommended using only 2 cans, which is what I did.

***2 medium onions is just too much for this dish 1 will do you fine and speaking of fine make sure you chop the onion as fine as possible because it isn’t pre-sauteed so it cooks in the oven with everything else. The first time I made it I left the onions bigger then I should and they were as raw as could be after baking for 40 min or so. The second time I chopped them as finely as possible and they still came out pretty raw tasting. I don’t mind that but if you don’t like that taste then take an extra step and saute them before adding them to the bean mixture.
I myself added some small diced zucchini and some shredded carrots to the bean mixture as an attempt to get my 3 year old to eat more veggies. It worked out great!

I omitted the olives because EWW…I hate black olives.

I also made mine in more of a layered casserole instead of enchiladas. I find enchiladas very difficult to make. No matter what I do to the corn tortillas they always rip or fall apart so I don’t even attempt it anymore. Plus there wasn’t enough reserved enchilada sauce that you are suppose to dip your tortilla in to soften it up a bit. What I did was spread the reserved enchilada sauce on the bottom of a large casserole pan and layered the corn tortillas like one would do when making lasagna, then scooped on the bean mixture, added another layer of tortillas and repeated a few times. Then I dumped the rest of the reserved enchilada sauce and cheese sauce on top and baked.

The first time I made it I had my parents over for dinner and they really liked it. The second time I kept it all for the 3 of us and it fed us for 2 days straight. I even ate it for second dinner one night around 10pm. I was so hungry and it was so good I couldn’t stop myself. This recipe is definitely going to be added into my go to easy to put together recipes for after this baby is born file. I can’t wait to make it for the third, fourth, fifth time…..and so on.

I spied this recipe over on VegWeb.com a month or so ago and knew that I had to make it. It had everything I’d ever want in a meal: beans, onions, cheesy goodness, corn tortillas, etc. I’m glad I read through most of the comments left for this recipe since they pointed out quite a few things that needed to be changed in this recipe.

Since I’ve been getting into eating Slow Carb, there has definitely been a lot more beans on the menu.

While I am loving exploring the different members of the legume family, I have been tending to stick to the convenience of canned beans. At times I’ve felt a little guilty. Not because I find canned beans to be inferior, it’s more because I know they use a lot more packaging. And they aren’t as economical as cooking beans from scratch.

So today I thought I’d share one of my favourite dried bean recipes.

It’s super simple. Just pop everything in a pot, cover and cook overnight. While you sleep, the house gets filled with the most amazing smell and your little dried beans are transformed into a thing of beauty.

Perfect for a long leisurely Sunday brunch with friends when you want to maximise your sleep in and still be a wonderful host.

This simple mixture of tofu, spices, garlic and black beans makes a robust filling for tacos. Pack leftovers to assemble tacos for lunch.

My consumption of baked beans is usually limited to barbecue joints but I was dying to see how dried beans would fare in the pressure cooker. This recipe for Boston "Baked" Beans from Cooking Under Pressure by Lorna Sass seemed like the perfect way to test the pressure cooker's dried beans chops.
Unless you are opening a can and reheating it, stove top baked beans are a serious time commitment. Overnight soaking, boiling the beans, and then simmering them for hours with molasses and various other sweet and savory components seems like a whole lot of work for something that is usually accompanies hot dogs.

I happened to have all of the ingredients for this dish conveniently sitting in my pantry and the active cooking time for this recipe clocks in at just under half an hour. Baked beans at home? Under normal circumstances, probably not, but in this case, yes please. The beans are pressure cooked for 15 minutes to soften them and then the rest of the ingredients are sautéed together and added to the drained beans. Then the pressure is brought back up for another 10 minutes.

When I unlocked the pressure cooker to check on my beans I found that they weren't quite finished—they were a little crunchy to the bite. Sass addresses this in recipe and says the beans can be simmered on the stove top until the beans reach your desired doneness.

I decided to add a little last minute molasses and a smoked ham hock to beef up the flavor a bit during the final simmering, and the beans turned out pretty damn good. The cloves and cinnamon really packed an aromatic punch, and the texture was thick and rich. Another win for the pressure cooker for making baked beans that don't come from a can or a styrofoam container.

This classic Chilean dish composed of beans, corn, pumpkin, peppers, and tomatoes, all New World ingredients, flaunts its pre-Columbian roots. Traditionally made with the ubiquitous "aji" pepper of Chile, a fiery hot yellow pepper that spices up many Chilean specialties, I have substituted jalapeños for those of us who can't get the genuine article.

Homemade beans on toast are packed with flavour and taste quite different to the canned variety. They're a wonderful treat for lunch or a light supper.

Lard is used extensively in Mexican cuisine, and is the fat of choice when frying most foods. I have specified it in this recipe for authenticity's sake, but you can substitute corn or vegetable oil with excellent results.

Ranch Style Beans are a Texan staple and they’ve been satisfying people since 1872 with their take on classic chuck-wagon fare. It’s a distinctive flavor—the beans aren’t fiery but they do have a depth and brightness that can be very addictive. When I lived in Texas, we ate them often—either topped with cheese and rice, as a base to bean salad, alongside enchiladas or even in my mom’s King Ranch casserole.