Barbecued Beans, Sweet Potatoes with Ginger and Greens

Barbecued kidney beans, mashed sweet potato, and spinach and arugula sauteed with onions

Sometimes you just have to look in your fridge and cabinets and figure out what you have to make dinner, you know? I’m in the bad habit of not really planning ahead for meals, so I often have to improvise. There’s something to be said about that, but it would be nice if I could think ahead, too. 🙂

I had a quickly wilting bunch of parsley, some nice looking scallions, containers of baby spinach and arugula, a tired looking knob of ginger, and sweet potatoes… but what to have them with? I had a number of cans of beans, and they’re not difficult to use, so they seemed an easy choice. How to have them? Well, I had a bottle of barbecue sauce!

And thus, a recipe was born.

Barbecued Beans, Sweet Potatoes with Ginger and Greens

• 1 15-ounce can kidney beans, rinsed and drained
• 1/4 cup vegan barbecue sauce of choice
• 1 large sweet potato
• splash of almond or other non-dairy milk
• 1 tsp grated ginger (or more if you like)
• Several large handfuls of greens
• powdered garlic
• chopped scallions and parsley for garnish

1. Combine the beans and the sauce in a small pan over low heat. Stir occasionally. You can also add a handful of scallions.
2. Cook the sweet potato any way you choose- cut up in chunks and boil, or do what I did, and poke a few holes in the still whole and unpeeled potato and nuke about 4-5 minutes. Cut open and scoop out flesh when cool enough to handle.
3. Mash up the sweet potato with the splash of almond milk and ginger.
4. Toss the greens in a pan with a little water or broth, and sauté until wilted. Sprinkle with garlic and stir.
5. Put the greens on the bottom of the plate, mashed sweet potato above that, and half the beans/sauce on top. Garnish with parsley and scallions.

There you have it, quick and easy! Certainly, you can use half a can of beans and 2 tbs of sauce, but those seem like weird directions. If you want to make this for two, just double the sweet potato, ginger and greens! I just ended up eating the extra beans out of a bowl for dinner later in the week. They were tasty!