For various reasons I have been eating out a lot this week. Various reasons include (1) Long John Silver’s was sort of on my way home from work, (2) Lean Cuisine frozen pizza was too hard to cook on a weeknight, (3) Sago is a good way to celebrate Tuesday.

I love to eat out, but when I do, I miss cooking and spending time at home in the kitchen.  Plus, it’s rough on the pocketbook.  Today I decided to get reacquainted with the kitchen by cooking salmon, bean salad, and corn on the cob for dinner.  I stopped by Central Market (also rough on the pocketbook) this afternoon and got all the goodies I would need to make dinner. Besides seeing my friend Amy P. behind the fish counter, I found delicious fresh corn on the cob and hatch chillies in the produce section there.

Here’s the bean salad recipe. It makes a ton, so there is plenty left over for lunches this week.

1 big white onion
1 enormous red tomato
1 big hatch green chile. I used mild because I’m a wimp.
1 bunch cilantro
1 clove garlic, minced. I used 1 tbs. of garlic from a jar because I’m a wimp.
1/4 cup lemon juice
1 can black beans
1 can garbanzo beans
1 can black eyed peas
salt and pepper to taste

First, open all the cans of beans and pour them into a collander.  Rinse well. While the beans drain, cut the pepper in half longwise and use a spoon to scrape the seeds into the trash. Chop the pepper very finely and put it in a big bowl.  Next, peel the onion and chop it so that the pieces are about the same size as the black beans.  Then chop the tomato so that the pieces are about the same size as the black beans.  Put the onions and tomatoes in the bowl along with the pepper.  Make sure to scrape all the tomato juice off the cutting board into the bowl.

If you are a very patient person, you should remove the cilantro leaves from the stem before chopping. I am not a patient person, so I just hack off the bottom third of the bunch of cilantro and mince the rest, stems and all. Add the minced cilantro, along with the garlic and lemon juice to the other wet ingredients and mix well.  Finally, add the drained beans to the big bowl and use a spatula to mix them gently.  I prefer a spatula to a metal/wooden spoon because it is easier to mix the salad without crushing the beans.

Enjoy the salad! All the protein from the beans make it a perfectly acceptable vegetarian entree, and it keeps for several days in the fridge.