In college, way before the PB&J Campaign, I spent a semester aboard in Guanajuato, Mexico, where I lived with a local family and ate with them most meals. I ate extremely well, with a nice variety of dishes, but at almost every meal we had tortillas and beans. The beans would start off as large pot of pinto beans cooked with some light seasoning, but after being reheated a couple times over the next few days would end up as kind of mashed up – delicious and great in a tortilla with a little bit of salsa (whichever we had for the meal – green, red, etc.).

Treehugger recently posted refried beans in their weekday vegetarian series, motivation enough to go out and buy a bag of pinto beans to work with, or a can of pinto beans, or if you’re feeling a bit on the lazy side buy a can of refried beans at the market. “Lazy” because this is one of the easier foods to make, making it a perfect PB&J Campaign recipe. You can check out the full official recipe here, but basically you’re making some beans with basic Mexican seasoning (garlic, onion, cumin, chile, oregano) and then mashing them up. How easy is that? It’s also a variation on whatever other beans you’ve made but maybe made too much of and now want to try in a slightly different form.  Best of all it’s easy, ridiculously cheap, and helps save land, cut water use and pollution, and fights global warming.

The PB&J Campaign carries on in its quest to introduce tofu to the American people, at least easy tofu that’s not likely to freak people out (don’t worry, it won’t turn you into a hippy) or make them feel like failed cooks. Of course this blog has also been going gaga (for at least two years) over Mark Bittman and his quest to get us all to eat a healthier diet – healthier for the planet and healthier for us.

This week on the Minimalist he dropped this incredibly easy salad of celery and pressed tofu. This is not necessarily easy to find; you generally have to find a Chinese or other East Asian market – easy in most big cities, maybe less so elsewhere. Pressed tofu is just what it sounds like – tofu that has most of the water squeezed out of it. It solves several problems for the tofu neophyte – it holds together no matter how much you toss it about in a pan, and it has a denser texture. In this recipe it works like the chicken you might put in a cold salad. He maybe complicates it a little too much with making your own chili oil. It might be really good chili oil, but you can also buy chili oil in a jar and it works pretty well.

And don’t forget, we’re still taking applications for our live-event outreach internship – send us your resume if you’re psyched about connecting college campuses and grassroots environmental organizations with the wonders of PB&Js.

Please, don’t get freaked out and stop reading. Tofu is one of those foods we hesitate to promote because of it’s strong association with far-out, hippy culture (not that there’s anything wrong with hippies; some of my best friends…), sort of the soft, squishy antithesis of the red meat that is definitively American. Whatever misconceptions we have about tofu, it’s truly great stuff. It is a popular, basic food for about a quarter of the world’s population, and you too can learn to love it, a cheap and yummy (we kid you not) way to fight global warming, reduce your water use, cut pollution, and use less land.

Start at a decent Chinese or Japanese (or Korean, or Indonesian, or Burmese…) restaurant. We don’t want you to start experimenting and get turned off, so order a couple dishes designed for tofu and see how it works, and then find some basic, tasty recipes to work with at home. This baked tofu recipe comes to us from Take Back Your Table!, a great blog for busy parents.

Baking is one of the easiest ways you can get started with tofu. You basically just drain, marinate, and bake. The soy/citrus marinade here works great, but you can play around or use up whatever store-bought marinades you’ve got hanging around the fridge.

After our last post, we have to at least talk about how tofu is made. Tofu is about as processed as we’ll recommend over here at the PB&J Campaign. (Almost all food is processed, when you think about it: Bread is wheat processed by grinding, mixing with water, yeast converting sugars to gas bubbles, and heat from the oven. We cook pretty much any beans we eat, and any animal products are either grass or grains (with some fish meal thrown in) The exception is the fresh fruit or vegetable we can eat as-is.) Tofu is soybeans that are ground up with water to make soy milk, boiled a bit, and then sort of curdled and pressed into forms. This is how it’s been done for a couple thousand years, at least.

This amount of processing, albeit traditional and minimal, does make tofu more resource intensive than something as basic as beans prepared in a traditional way, but still probably less so than the most efficient animal product, poultry, and without the big ‘manure’ problem you get from chicken operations. See this great discussion in Slate for more info.

PB&J’s aren’t just for lunch, they’re also for parties!

Sure, you might be rolling your eyes right now – anything can be party food (maybe not oatmeal – not sure how you’d work that into a party, and the thought of chasing a bowl of oatmeal with beer is kind of un-stomach-settling) – but PB&Js work particularly well. You have to cut them up into quarters or eighths to make them into finger food, but the sweet/umami combination of the jelly and the PB work well with beer. AND eating peanut butter is a traditional African hangover prophylactic.

I sort of tripped over this at a party two and a half years ago. I was eating nothing but PB&Js for a fundraiser, so I brought a plate of PB&Js as our contribution so that I’d have something to eat. I only ate a couple sandwich’s worth, but the plate was empty halfway through the party.

Eating the PB&J bites is only half the fun; for those of us who get a kick out of doing the planet a favor, you’re saving water, land, and greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution compared to other finger food based on animal products (cheese cubes, pigs in a blanket, deviled eggs, etc.) .

This is also a great time to try out some of the more daring PB&J recipes – spicy PB, chocolate PB, fresh fruit versions that you need a toothpick to hold together…

Here are a couple plates from a recent spread. One platter is chocolate PB (Peanut Butter and Company) with strawberry jam on whole wheat, the other is a raisin nut bread with chunky PB (again, Peanut Butter and Company) with blueberry preserves.

The PB&J Campaign is NOT just about the PB&J! It might be more to the point to say that the PB&J Campaign is all about beans and grains. After all, the peanut is just a bean by another name, and the protein in the two slices of bread (ideally whole grain) is coming from wheat.

Eat a meal getting most of its protein and calories from legumes (Falafel – chickpeas, tofu or tempeh – soy beans, bean burritos – well, beans) or grains (oatmeal, pasta) and you can help fight global warming, cut pollution and water use, and conserve land.

On previous recipe posts I’ve mentioned my recent exploration of beans – that might sound like a boring and geeky quest, but think of it in a gourmet, earthy peasant food light (check out Rancho Gordo Beans for a gourmet spin on our legume friends) and impress your friends with your foodie exploration of the underestimated beans.

And then serve them Cranberry Bean Soup. I presented this (recipe thanks to Saveur) as the center of a big dinner a couple weekends ago, with a multi-grain sourdough bread from Four Worlds Bakery, and a couple fresh salads, and I relished the expressions of surprise and enthusiasm as people tasted how awesome a humble bean soup can be (and then asked for seconds). FYI, cranberry beans also go by ‘Roman’ beans.

Lately I (Bernard Brown) have been cooking up a bean series. There are a lot of beans out there, and I’m discovering that not only are they incredibly cheap (a pound of most dry beans for about a dollar, a bit more for the fancy heirloom types, and a pound makes a lot of meals), but they’re really easy to make and to make taste good.

We’re not ALL about the PB&J – something we say a lot, especially when people miss that point and ask us about the health effects of eating nothing but PB&Js. Any plant-based meal can help shrink your footprints (carbon footprint, water footprint, land footprint, etc.), and pretty much any meal based on beans fits that bill.

It helps to have a pressure cooker (saves a lot of time) but you can do it with a standard pot, it just takes a bit longer. All I’ve been doing is soaking the pound of beans for at least a few hours ahead of time (easy to do before you go to work), and then tossing in a couple chopped onions (hard to over-onion) and ideally a couple bay leaves, some garlic, and a chopped carrot. Add whatever other spices and herbs you feel like and cook until the beans are tender. If you’d like to add tomato or anything else acidic, it’s a good idea to wait until the beans are nearly or already soft, since higher acidity can toughen the beans.

The latest version I tried out is butter beans with wild mushrooms. To make my ad hoc cooking process look like a real recipe, here are the ingredients I used:

1 pound butter beans (a.k.a. lima beans) – soak the pound of dry beans ahead of time, say before you head off to work in the morning, then drain them before you start cooking.

1 to 2 large onion, chopped

3 bay leaves

1 large carrot, chopped

1 or 2 ounces of dried wild mushrooms

Black pepper, cayenne pepper, and salt to taste

First, put the mushrooms in a large bowl, immerse them in two or three cups of hot water, and cover for at least fifteen minutes.

Then pull the mushrooms out of the water with a slotted spoon, reserving the liquid.

Trim any remaining tough parts and chop the soaked mushrooms.

Then add the mushrooms to the beans in a large pot with the bay leaves, onion, and carrot.

Now use that reserved mushroom soaking liquid to fill the pot of pre-soaked beans a little above the level of the beans. Make sure you hold back the grit at the bottom of the mushroom bowl.

Cook the beans until they’re soft – with butter beans I like to over cook them until they start to fall apart, forming a sort of silky base.

I sprinkled it with some parsley to make it look pretty for this post, but consider the parsley optional. Eat this with a salad and some good bread.

Last thing, make sure to eat this while listening to the B-52s’ Butter Beans!

Some foods reward skill in the chef – there is some trick or difficult feat of dexterity required, say to properly fold the ingredients in the souffle, or careful manipulation of heat and timing.

Hummus is not that kind of food, at least at a basic level. I hear of particularly amazing hummus, tahini and lemon balanced ever so perfectly in the chick peas blended just so, but the truth of hummus is that you can thrown chick peas into a food processor with some basic additions (garlic works, lemon juice works, olive oil is fabulous), and it will be pretty damn good even if you don’t measure all that carefully.

You can also throw in all kinds of other fun stuff. Want to make hummus with balsamic vinegar instead of lemon juice? That’ll work. Want to try curry powder or paste? Rock on. How about curry and raisins? Fabulous! Check out this Curry Hummus with Raisins recipe from Meatless Monday, originally from The Plant-Based Dietitian and give it a shot next time you see your kitchen.

I’ve been on a little okra kick lately, pairing well with my recent beans kick (rotating through the beans – wrapping up black eyed peas and moving on to red kidney beans and navy beans). Somehow I only just figured out that you can buy frozen okra and that it is really easy to cook.

Okra is another word for gumbo (or the other way around), and the word ‘gumbo’ got assigned to a stew made from okra, the vegetable being handy as a thickener.

The PB&J Campaign isn’t JUST about the peanut butter and jelly sandwich, however perfect America’s favorite sandwich might be, so check out this Zesty Bean Gumbo recipe at Meatless Monday (originally from My Recipes), another easy, low-on-the-food-chain meal that can cut your greenhouse gas emissions, water use, and your land and pollution footprints.