Beans Beyond Dinner

Ditch the doughnuts and start your engine in the morning with lowfat protein. The typical carbo-centric American breakfast (biscuits with butter, pancakes with syrup, cereal with milk, toast with jam) doesn't provide enough protein power. No wonder so many of us are drooping before lunch.

Dry beans make it easy to get a high-protein start to the day. You can cook them on the weekend, in large batches, and reheat them all week. Or you can use canned beans, drained to minimize sodium (see below), for a running start.

Just a few ideas to get you brainstorming about beans for breakfast…

From Egypt: Ful mudammas, or beans cooked with onion and tomato, are a popular morning meal. Egyptians prepare ful with dry fava beans, but cranberry beans or pink beans would work, too. They eat them whole, lightly mashed, or fully mashed, topped with olive oil, melted butter, a hard-boiled egg or a fried egg. According to an Arab saying, ful is "the rich man's breakfast, the shopkeeper's lunch, the poor man's supper."

From Lebanon: Ful again. Here it's eaten for breakfast with feta cheese, cucumbers, black olives and pita. Make it a whole-wheat pita for good measure.

From Tunisia: Leb-lebi, a hearty breakfast bean stew, is seasoned with cumin and harissa. Tunisians use chick peas; Great Northern beans would take the seasonings well, too. Tunisians buy leb-lebi in the morning from small shops on the street and add a variety of garnishes — chopped tomato, chopped green peppers, croutons, cilantro or poached eggs —to taste.

Dry beans also make a smart choice for lunch — filling, fast and high fiber. Add them to a salade Niçoise, a chef's salad or a chopped salad. Puree them and use them in place of mayonnaise as a sandwich spread, as you might use hummous. Pack a bean dip in a brown-bag lunch with raw vegetables. Or make the Turkish sandwich from Anissa Helou's book Mediterranean Street Food: pita halves stuffed with a marinated white bean, onion and olive salad.

Breakfast and lunch recipes to try:
Black Bean Omelet with Avocado Salsa Verde
Spiced Black Bean Burgers