Bold Beans: recipes to get your pulse racing Hardcover – August 1, 2023

I 'discovered' this brand (Bold Bean) from a U.K. friend, which drew me to the Bold Bean IG grid - where I discovered their new cookbook there. I bought it... and I have had it less than 24 hours and already have made 2 recipes from it...Lemon + herby bean broth with greens for dinner last night - and Turkish style eggs + harissa beans for our breakfast. This is an amazing cookbook...not a sad, meek, mild, hippie, boring bean dish to be found on its pages. But instead flavorful and assertive dishes...which is right up my alley (as the saying goes) - as those are the types of dishes that interest us (will adapt to gf where necessary and is easily for the few recipes that have meat to sub out for something else). Mostly when I buy a new cookbook...there are a MAYBE a FEW recipes that catch my eye...but in my mind, I am re-writing them to make them 'better', even as I read them. Not the case here... I will be making every single one of them (well not the lamb one or the beet soup though, as I can not eat many beets). I have a lot of bean recipes in my repertoire...but this will absolutely add 80+ more. Even though their brand beans are not available here in the U.S. (gladly the cookbook is)…I am pretty adapt at cooking beans and there is a brand of glass jarred, organic heirloom beans (Jovial brand) - that has the detoxproject.org glyphosate-free seal too - so those will be my fast back-up when needed. As a note: it is very important to have glyphosate residue free - even when buying ORGANIC canned or dried beans/legumes, grains, oats, sunflower seeds, flax seed/meal etc - as under the USDA Organic label... the EPA and FDA allow glyphosate use (NOT during the growing season - but as a pre-harvest desiccant). So it CAN and IS being used as a pre-harvest desiccant on ORGANIC label products AND the FDA has remove glyphosate from the pesticide/herbicide testing for USDA organic label too. Some brands are doing the right thing in this area - and are worth your time to research out and use your consumer dollar to make a statement. There is lots of reading on this topic to be found on the EWG dot org (Enviromental Working Group) or the detoxproject dot org web sites for those interested. I have already bought 3 more of the books, to give to other friends who love to cook and are highly interested in expanding the healing of our earthly environment by the food we eat everyday (let alone our personal health too). The Bold Bean cookbook - is just plain EXCELLENT in my opinion!

I've made two recipes so far, but apart from the handful of meat recipes, I want to make every single recipe in this book. And of the meat recipes, there are a couple for which the meat can easily be omitted. This book will teach you how beans can make food sourcing more sustainable for the planet, how nutritious beans are, how to improve the quality of canned beans, and loads of delicious recipes that will make you very excited about eating beans. So far I made the black bean, watermelon & feta salad (photo) and the squash and chickpea stew. Both big winners that will definitely be in the rotation from now on. My only criticism is this book could use a wee bit of editing as far as timing and portions are concerned. For example, the watermelon salad serves 2, but for 2 massive servings, and it suggests that 3.5 lbs of watermelon would come from one small watermelon - I've never seen a watermelon that small. And both recipes I tried so far noted total time which would only be possible if all your ingredients were completely prepped and laid out and in the case of the stew, heating and boiling were instantaneous. I guess they were trying to sell the ease of the recipes with those timings. Better to be realistic, though. Nonetheless, this book is easily becoming a new favorite. Many thanks to the author and contributors.

We have been really enjoying this book, exploring different kinds of bean recipes. The recipes are really easy to follow and beautifully photographed. At least one of my friends has bought the book based on pictures of food we created following Bold Beans.

Great recipes. Most of them are vegetarian, but a certain amount (20%) are meat and seafood based.

This cookbook is full of bean cooking wisdom and great, different & interesting recipies.

I like that the aren't just one cuisine and that they all look easy to prepare. It's been kind of hot here so I tried the recipe for the beans with ricotta and hazelnut pesto. It was really good. Will be trying more recipes when it cools off.