In a combined effort to continue getting through our pantry items in anticipation of our move this fall & to create an original recipe for entry in Culinarty’s Original Recipe Round Up, I created these Chard & Tepary Bean Empanadas.

Teparies are an heirloom bean varietal native to the southwestern United States and Mexico that are very similar to the pinto bean, in fact, my description of their flavor, is that they taste like pinto beans that have already had sugar and fat added to them, even though they have not. Tepary beans can be ordered from Rancho Gordo. There are two varieties of teparies, white and tan. The white teparies are a bit sweeter than the tan. I use a blend of the two.

Just to be thorough with my very first food blog event entry, this is also my entry to MLLA-13 conceived by Susan of the “Well-Seasoned Cook” and currently being hosted by Sunshinemom of “Tongue Ticklers”

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We’re moving in a few months so I am always cooking with an eye to using up our pantry items. Browsing through Herbivoracious, Michael Natkin’s gorgeous blog, I came across a couple of simple (but well paired) polenta dishes and I immediately thought of the three quarters full bag of polenta in my pantry. Keeping Michael’s suggestions of gorgonzola and aged balsamic, I substituted some brocollini that needed to be used up for the chard and added in some homemade rosemary basil oil. The result was a quick simple delicious meal that didn’t require a trip to the grocery store.

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I cook Indian often, ever since I fell in love with a particularly ghee filled dal on an otherwise uninspiring thali plate and discovered the next day that I could recreate it perfectly for a third of the cost.

Indian is a fantastic cuisine, at least to my probably untrained palate, because I can make three dishes the first night, planning for leftovers, and then add a dish or two a night, and all of a sudden the week has passed with delicious meals every night that didn’t require too much thought.

This particular recent batch of Indian dishes have also had the uncharacteristic trait of being relatively quick to make. I started off on this latest Indian cooking bought with a half a head of cabbage that needed to be used up. This curried cabbage (adapted from somewhere on the internet that google does not want to reveal) has turned me into a cabbage lover:

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