Here at Compost Collective KC, we have a passion for composting, but ultimately we’d love for our services to no longer be needed. Reducing food waste is our ultimate passion and goal.

The graphic above explains exactly why we want to keep food waste out of the landfill, but we need to reduce the amount of food being wasted in the first place! That’s why today we are going to give you a recipe for a low waste meal that will taste delicious. Don’t worry, we’ve included a lot of variations so that you can change it to your tastes and what is available. 

Beans and Rice

For the beans: 

one bag of dried beans (soaked overnight) (I used red)

One onion (I used dried onion as that’s what I had left)

Celery (two stalks)

Carrots (2)

Bay leaves (2)

Garlic (in whatever form you have on hand)

Salt (to taste)

Pepper (to taste)

Louisiana Cajun Seasoning (to taste)

I used an InstantPot pressure cooker to speed up the cooking time, however, you can still follow the steps in a pot on the stove. The cook time for the beans will be closer to 1.5 – 2.5 hours (depending on the freshness of the beans you are using).

First, finely chop your veggies. Saute in some olive oil on medium-high heat until just softened, then put in the beans, water (enough to just cover the beans), bay leaves, and spices. Set the pressure cooker on high heat for 30 minutes.

Once the beans are done, take the bay leaves out and drain the beans then set aside. Cook whichever rice you prefer to serve with it.

*SAVE THAT BEAN JUICE! For one, you will want to store your leftover beans in some of the bean stock so they don’t dry out. Secondly, use the stock to cook the rice, or you can save it to make a soup if you’d rather. 

*Save the vegetable scraps to make your own vegetable stock.

Variations:

You can eat just the beans and rice, but you can also add roasted veggies, or some fried eggs on top. You can also always add meat, and change the seasonings however you’d like. Roasted sweet potato goes very well with spicy beans as the sweetness from the potato is tempered by the spice, and the spice gets tempered by the creamy sweet potato. 

What meals have you made lately that use up food waste or have been created by the necessity of quarantine?! We would love to see how you embraced #reducingfoodwaste for Earth Week! 

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