Heirloom Yellow Indian Woman Beans with Tomatoes and Roasted Corn Recipe

Heirloom Yellow Indian Woman Beans with Tomatoes and Roasted Corn

heirloom beans Yellow Indian Woman Beans with tomaotes and roasted corn

Beans gone gourmet! Here's a bean dish you can serve to your most upscale foodie friends with your head held high. You can also use it to intrigue the nine-year-olds in your life with tales of food history (see below).

Serve a bowl of Yellow Indian Woman Beans topped with chopped ripe tomatoes, garlicky fresh corn, and cilantro as a colorful dish with — or instead of — the usual grilled offerings of summer. The picture shows them being served with homemade cheese crackers, but tortillas work well too. The recipe works well with other beans, too, so feel free to substitute black beans, pintos, or other heirloom beans.

According to Local Harvest, Yellow Indian Woman Beans , a Swedish family first brought these beans to Montana. I got mine as part of a big birthday-check splurge at the epicenter of heirloom-beandom: Rancho Gordo. Rancho Gordo has this to say about Yellow Indian Woman Beans:

At the farmers markets, this is the bean that seems to attract more people than any other. Whether it's the name, the beautiful gold color or small, bullet size, who can say? The good news is that the bean is as delicious as it looks. It's incredibly creamy and the flavor is somewhere between a Pinto and a Black bean.

The simple recipe below lets these tasty immigrant beans shine, but tops them with two New World foods: chopped ripe tomato and fresh corn. Add the international touch by browning the fresh corn kernels in olive oil (from the Mediterranean) and garlic (from Asia). Then top with that ancient and internationally popular herb: cilantro. According to food scholar Harold McGee, cilantro may be the most widely eaten green herb in the world and cilantro seeds were found in Bronze Age settlements and King Tut's tomb!

Active time: 25 minutes. Total time: 3 hours. Makes 10 servings. Cost: 91 cents a serving regular and $1.33 green, using June 2009 prices.

Ingredients

1 pound Yellow Indian Woman Beans
1 yellow onion, chopped
6 cups water
2 teaspoons salt

2 cloves garlic, minced
kernels from 5 ears of corn
1 tablespoon olive oil

5 ripe tomatoes, chopped
1 cup fresh chopped cilantro leaves
1 lemon or 2 tablespoons lemon juice

Method

Pick over beans, removing any non-bean objects. Rinse well and put in slow cooker. Chop onion and add to slow cooker along with water and salt. Stir to mix, then cover slow cooker and turn on high. Add more hot water if needed to keep beans covered. Turn down slow cooker if needed to keep beans at a very low boil.
About 2 1/2 hours later, mince garlic. Shuck corn, rinse, and cut kernels off cobs. Bite a few beans to see if they are done. When the beans are creamy but still holding their shape, heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and stir once or twice, until garlic is fragrant. Add corn kernels and cook until parts of the corn starts to brown, stirring occasionally so corn doesn't stick to the skillet or burn.
Meanwhile, chop tomatoes and cilantro. Slice lemon into 10 moon-shaped pieces if you have fresh lemon. Otherwise, stir lemon juice into the beans.
To serve, put beans in a bowl. Top with tomatoes, corn, and cilantro. Put a lemon piece to the side to be squeezed onto the beans as desired. To store, refrigerate or freeze beans. Refrigerate any extra toppings.

Tips and notes

If possible, just prepare as much of the tomatoes, corn, and cilantro as will be used right away.
To serve buffet style, just leave beans in slow cooker to retain heat. Let guests ladle up some beans and add toppings themselves.
Use black beans instead of Yellow Indian Woman Beans if you want. Black beans may need to cook longer, depending on the age of the beans.
The costs shown do not include the shipping charges if you mail-order the beans from Ranch Gordo. But even if you ordered just one pound of beans so the flat $8 shipping charge fell only on these beans, the cost per serving would be only $1.71 regular and $2.13 green, hardly extravagant when eating like Napa Valley connoisseurs or King Tut.