Recipe of the Month: Greens, Beans, and Mashed Potatoes

As the days ticked down toward Christmas and our annual trip to Indiana, I realized I had one task to complete before the trip that had nothing to do with holiday gifts: finding a Recipe of the Month for December. I had a couple of downloaded recipes I'd been meaning to try, but none that were both vegan and vegetable-forward. So I turned to our shelf of cookbooks and started flipping through them, looking for inspiration. On page 69 of Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven, I found what looked like just the thing: a dish called "Green And White Beans Under Garlic Mashed Potatoes." It was a casserole of white beans, fresh green beans, and spinach topped with a layer of mashed potatoes, in the manner of a shepherd's pie. All the ingredients were either in our kitchen already or easy to get hold of. It did have a rather lengthy preparation time (an hour and 45 minutes, with 30 minutes of hands-on work), but since Brian had three extra days off before we had to leave for our trip, he'd have plenty of time to make it.

As usual, Brian modified the written recipe in several ways. First, he had to swap out a few ingredients to make it vegan. That wasn't difficult: he just replaced the butter and milk in the mashed potatoes with oil and soy milk and the gruyere cheese that was supposed to go on top with a spritz of oil and a sprinkling of nutritional yeast and salt. He also replaced the olive oil used to saute the veggies with cheaper canola oil and the fresh green beans, which are quite expensive in December, with frozen. He boosted the 10 ounces of frozen spinach the recipe called for to a full pound and dialed down the half-teaspoon of nutmeg the recipe called for to just a quarter-teaspoon to avoid overpowering the other flavors. And rather than simmering the white beans and boiling the potatoes on the stove, he did them in the pressure cooker, thus saving a good chunk of time and energy.

Even with that change, this recipe was fairly time-consuming. First, he had to cook the soaked white beans and set them aside. Then he cooked the potatoes and mashed them (skins and all) with soy milk, oil, garlic, and salt. The next step was to saute two chopped leeks in oil with salt, thyme, and more garlic, then add flour, pepper, nutmeg, and water to make the sauce. When all that was done, he integrated the cooked white beans into the dish with the green beans and spinach, cooked it briefly, and spread it in a casserole dish with the potatoes and his improvised nutritional-yeast topping layered on top. And finally, he loaded the whole thing into the oven to bake for around 40 minutes.

The finished casserole didn't look much like a vegan dish. Between the golden-brown topping and the white sauce that had bubbled over the sides, it gave a very good impression of something rich and cheesy. Unfortunately, its flavor and texture didn't live up to the hype. The biggest problem was the green beans; after nearly an hour of cooking between the stovetop and the oven, they were mushy and bland, doing nothing to relieve the stodginess of the bean-and-potato mixture. (Fresh ones might have stood up better to the long cooking time, but even they might not have survived it.) And while the leeks, garlic, nutritional yeast, and spices did their best, there just wasn't enough of them to perk up such a vast mass of greens and starch. Unfortunately, Brian had decided to make a full batch of the recipe (six servings), so we had quite a lot of it left over after that first meal. We managed to get through it all before leaving for our trip, but we were pretty sick of it by the end.

Despite these shortcomings, I think this dish has potential. If you left out the green beans altogether and made it with only spinach and leeks, it would basically be a variation on colcannon, a classic Irish greens-and-beans mixture, but with an added pop of protein from the white beans. Another variant of this dish, called Rumbledethumps, was a staple meal of ours for years until we gave up cheese; this beany casserole, with a little more nutritional yeast to boost the flavor, could potentially fill the same role. (But if we decide to try it this way, we'll probably go with just a half recipe.)