Beans & Cornbread

Today's lunch was a really easy one to prepare because it only involved cooking a couple of things from scratch. It's still colder than whiz here, so I wanted something hot for lunch again. I thought about some type of pasta or something like that, but then I finally decided on making something more along the lines of "country food" and ended up fixing a bunch of beans & cornbread.

I didn't bother making the beans from scratch. I know that when you soak them and cook them yourself they taste a whole lot better, plus you can reduce the huge amount of sodium that they put into the canned beans, but time was of the essence when I packed the lunch so I relied on canned beans. All I did was dump a can of Pinto Beans and a can of Great Northern Beans together in a pot and heat them up. I usually just buy the cheap store brand of beans, but the last time I was in the store I did glance at a few of the other brands. Geez, you really have to pay attention when buying those things. I never realized that so many canned vegetables were seasoned with pork. On some brands it was obvious, because they would put it in huge letters and advertise it as a plus. On other brands, however, it was mentioned nowhere and you had to study the ingredients to find out it was in there.

To accompany the beans, I brought some more of those steamed mixed vegetables that I got out of the freezer section at the local grocer the other day. These are, again, just the cheap store brand. They're really good though, and I bought a huge bag, so they'll probably be appearing in the lunchbox quite frequently this week.

I also cooked up some Rosemary Roasted Potatoes using the standard old method. It's just potatoes & onions roasted in some olive oil, garlic salt & rosemary. Yummy.

Then I made some cornbread muffins using my favorite cornbread recipe, but I altered them just a little bit this time. I make these all the time, and they're really good, but sometimes I thought that they were a little too crumbly, like they didn't hold together quite enough for me. I assumed that was due to the fact that there was no egg in them. So this time when I made them, I replaced half of the flour with some ground flax seed. I know that you can use this as an egg replacer due to the large amount of soluble fiber in it, which makes this nice big slimy mess when you get it wet, so I thought it might do a good job of holding the cornbread together a little bit better. Plus, I would be adding lots of fiber. So that's what I did. You can really see the flax seed in the cornbread, but it didn't alter the taste really. I think it did help hold them together a little bit better, so I'll probably do this from now on when I make cornbread.

So that does it for Tuesday's lunch. Not a lot of work, but a pretty good lunch for a really cold day.

Thanks for stopping by and I'll see you tomorrow.