Recipe of the Month: White Bean and Butternut Quinoa Bowl

March has been a pretty busy month for us. Between medical appointments (including our first COVID shot, yay!), gardening tasks, and our first few tentative social engagements of the spring, we never quite got around to trying a brand-new vegan dish. However, Brian did experiment with a new variant on his one of his existing recipes, first introduced a year ago as Black Bean Butternut Burrito, and I think the new version is different enough to deserve a Recipe of the Month slot of its own.

Mind you, this variation didn't come about all at once. It was actually some time last year that we discovered that the bean-and-butternut mixture he originally conceived as the filling for a burrito worked just as well, if not better, as the topping for a quinoa bowl. This doesn't really take any longer to make than the burrito version; the quinoa cooks up in just a few minutes, and this can overlap with the cooking time for the squash and beans, so everything is ready at the same time. Then just dish up some of the quinoa in a bowl and scoop the beans and squash onto the top. It's more substantial than a burrito wrapped in a flat little flour tortilla, and it makes plenty of leftovers.

The second or third time Brian made the quinoa-bowl version of his black bean recipe, he added yet another twist: he roasted the seeds from the butternut squash and sprinkled them on top. We normally roast the seeds anyway, so this wasn't any extra work; we just incorporated them into the main dish instead of enjoying them separately as a snack. Their crunch adds a satisfying bit of textural variation to the dish, contrasting with the chewiness of the quinoa and the softness of the squash and beans.

This month, Brian decided to try yet another adaptation: substituting white beans for black. He initially planned to use some cooked butter beans he had in the freezer, but here he ran into a snag. Apparently freezing hadn't agreed with them, and when he cooked them in the pan with the butternut squash, they turned inexplicably hard and dry and crumbly. No matter how long he cooked them, they didn't soften. So eventually he fished them out of the pan as best he could with a fork, then added a can of cannellini beans to take their place.

Along with the substitution of the beans, he made some alterations to the seasoning. The black-bean version, originally intended for use in a burrito, contained garlic and scallions, so as to be compatible with guacamole. However, his white-bean version was inspired by another recipe he'd tried in which white beans were paired with sage and caramelized onions. Accordingly, he added onions to the pan along with the squash, replaced the scallions with sage, and skipped the guacamole.

Adding all these iterations together, the current version of the recipe looks like this: 

WHITE BEAN AND BUTTERNUT QUINOA BOWL

1. Cook 1 cup quinoa until tender. (In the pressure cooker, this requires 1 1/2 cups of water and 1 minute of cooking at full pressure.) 
2. Remove seeds from 1 butternut squash and spread on a baking sheet. Roast at 250 degrees F in the oven or toaster oven until crisp, around 20 minutes. (Do not turn the heat any higher, or they will start to pop and scatter all over the place.)
   
3. Meanwhile, finely chop several leaves (about 1 Tbsp.) of fresh sage, chop half an onion fairly small, and dice about 4-6 oz. butternut squash into pieces about 1 cm square. Saute squash and onion together in olive oil over low to medium heat until onions are caramelized. Squash should be slightly browned, tender but not too soft. 
4. Drain 1 can white beans, reserving the liquid. Stir beans into pot with the sage, plus salt to taste (start with 1/4 teaspoon salt and adjust as needed). Cook until heated through, stirring in as much of of the reserved bean liquid as needed to keep it moist.
5. Serve beans over cooked quinoa and sprinkle the toasted seeds on top.

This adjusted version of the dish is at least as good as the original, if not better. The added flavor of the sage and onion compensates for the relative mildness of the beans, creating a balance of sweet and savory flavors. The combination of starchy beans, tender squash, chewy quinoa, and crisp seeds gives it a good texture balance as well. It's hearty enough to be quite satisfying. And conveniently enough, it doesn't call for any ingredients we don't typically have around for most of the year. (Although butternut squash is a fall crop, we usually grow enough of it to last through the following spring, and our outdoor sage plant is vigorous enough to provide us with a few green, usable leaves in all but the very dead of winter.)

In short, what we have here is a tasty, inexpensive vegan meal that we can whip up on pretty much a moment's notice. It's an ideal addition to our ecofrugal repertoire. The only thing we have to be careful of is remembering not to make it with frozen butter beans.