Chronicles of a Late Bloomer

• Taste Rating:
  
• Health Rating:
  
• Environment Rating:
  
• Processed Rating:
  
• Portability Rating:
  
• Overall Rating:
  

Taste Rating: Very mild and not too bean-y, although the texture may be hard to get right for some people.

Health Rating: So good for you, high in fiber and protein and low in fat and calories. It’s also packed with B-vitamins.

Environment Rating: You can buy beans pre-cooked in cans, but you don’t have to. In my case, I had 1-lb bags of dried beans and cooked them myself. Soaking them overnight required less cooking time and therefore less energy used. If I had bought them in bulk and carried them in a cloth bag, I would have given it 5 stars.

Processed Rating: These are fresh and contain no preservatives or artificial sweetners.

Portability Rating: Dried beans are super portable. Cooked beans are pretty easy in tupperwares, and are unlikely to spill or make messages.

Overall Rating:

One pound of dried baby lima beans, soaked overnight, cooked up nicely in my crock pot on Monday night. In fact, the one pound of dried beans expanded to perfectly fill the medium-sized crock, and provided me with a week’s worth of protein-y, fiber-y goodness.

The baby limas have a mild taste and, I find, provide more benefit to texture and mouth feel than anything else. I did toss them with some vinegar and sliced grape tomatoes for a cold lunch salad/side dish. That was yummy.

But I’ve been using them mostly as an extender and a filler. For instance, I tossed in about 1/2 cup when I made a tuna salad for sandwiches. I used it to extend my Amy’s Organic Chili at lunch today. I also tossed them as an alternative to garbanzo beans or croutons into a leafy green salad topped with diced chicken. It made the salad taste and feel like there was a lot more chicken than there really was. That’s always a bonus, in my book.

One cup of baby limas has:

• only 229 calories
• only 1 gram of fat
• a colon-busting 14 grams of fiber!
• and 15 grams of protein

Nice.¹

On top of that, it provides a ton of amino acids, important B-vitamin stuff like folates and thiamin, and minerals. Oh, baby limas. TODAY I LOVE YOU.

1. One cup also has only 4 Weight Watcher points — unless you do what I do and don’t cap the protein benefit at 4 grams. Then it reduces down to 2 points, dude. [↩]