Red Beans in a Slow Cooker
A meatless dish that's very high in protein. The beauty of this recipe is how easily you can tweak it, adding your favorite spices and herbs — so the flavor is a little different every time. Go for it!
Cooking method
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Step 1:
Rinse the red beans and soak them in cold water for at least three hours — overnight is even better.
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Step 2:
As they soak, the beans swell up and their skins wrinkle and may even split. Drain off the discolored water and put the beans in the slow cooker. Pour in 50 ml (about 3 tablespoons) of water. Set the cooker to the "Cook/Boil" program for thirty minutes.
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Step 3:
When that's done, peel the onion and cut it into quarter-rounds. Wash, peel, and grate the carrot on the coarse side of a grater. Add both to the beans.
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Step 4:
Wash the ripe tomato and cut it into dice. Add it to the slow cooker. If the water has cooked off, add a little more; if there's enough already, no need.
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Step 5:
Finally, add dried parsley and season with salt and pepper to taste. You can add fresh chili pepper, too. Let the beans simmer for another hour on the "Stew" or "Simmer" setting.
- It's handy to soak the beans in the evening and cook them in the morning, or soak them in the morning and have them ready by dinner. If your slow cooker has a pressure-cooker function (that is, it can cook under high pressure), I don't think you need to soak red beans overnight — two or three hours will do, and the pressure cooker handles the rest. Fresh herbs are of course welcome here, and even preferable, but if you don't have any on hand, dried herbs are delicious too. You can round the dish out with spices like dill, cilantro, basil, or oregano. For extra aroma, add a finely grated garlic clove and a bay leaf, a few allspice berries, or a couple of cloves. You can even squeeze in the juice of a quarter lemon. If you like, sauté the carrot and onion in sunflower oil before adding them to the cooker — it deepens the flavor, though it does bump up the calorie count. I served the beans on their own; to my mind, meat alongside them would be a bit heavy to digest, since the beans are already a protein powerhouse.
Caloric content of the products possible in the composition of the dish
- Onion - 41 kcal/100g
- Tomatoes - 23 kcal/100g
- Carrots - 33 kcal/100g
- Dried carrots - 275 kcal/100g
- Boiled carrots - 25 kcal/100g
- Parsley greens - 45 kcal/100g
- Salt - 0 kcal/100g
- Water - 0 kcal/100g
- Ground hot pepper - 21 kcal/100g
- Red beans - 93 kcal/100g
