White Beans With Bread Crumbs And Spinach

(The night before, I put the frozen spinach in the fridge to thaw.)

Soak and cook the beans in your standard manner, adding a bay leaf to
flavor them as they cook. This batch took about 1-3/4 hours to get real
tender after a 2-hour soaking following a 2-minute boiling. When they’re
done, mostly drain them — the recipe said to leave them almost covered
with their cooking liquid, which I thought was too wet. Your call. I saved
the cooking liquid when I drained it so I could add some of it back after
adding everything else if it seemed dry, which indeed it did.

I made the bread crumbs by tearing up two thick slices of (previously
unsliced) white bread — next time I will try whole wheat — and whirling
them in the Cuisinart. After a few whirls, I added in the cloves of garlic
and pulsed them until the bread was in crumbs. (What a wonderful aroma from
the combined bread and garlic!) I put the crumb/garlic mix in a bowl.

I put the spinach in a pan (my new Circulon wok, I love it! thanks to
y’all who mentioned it and inspired me to buy it!!) and heated it up
uncovered for a couple of minutes — didn’t try to get it “cooked”, just
“hot”. I added salt (about 3/4 tsp), white pepper, oregano and thyme,
mixed it up, then pureed it in the Cuisinart — this was the olive-oil
substitution so I made it as flavorful as possible.

Finally, I added the crumbs and 1/3 cup of the spinach puree to the beans
(in a large bowl), mixed well, added back some of the reserved bean-cooking
liquid, and tried not to “taste” too much of it — it was really tasty. I
refrigerated it overnight.

Before serving it I warmed it up gently — you could serve it cold but I
think warming it brings out more of the flavors. It was well received and
I will do it again. It also looked real nice with the white beans and the
green spinach. And since it was (as usual) the only fatfree item at the
lunch, I was glad there was lots of it!