The Glycemic Index Diet for Dummies (90 page)
Preparing and cooking both kinds of beans
Similar to whole grains
(covered in the earlier "Presenting your whole grain cooking guide" section), beans may seem intimidating, but they're not as bad to work with as you may think. Granted, dried beans require a bit more preparation, but cooking them is a fairly straightforward process. Of course, if you really don't want to tackle the soaking and cooking steps of dried beans, you can easily use canned ones. Regardless of which way you go, the following sections present some quick preparation and cooking tips.
Canned beans
Whether you want the convenience canned beans offer or you just prefer the taste of them, keep the following in mind:
If you're adding cold beans to a salad, rinse them in a colander. Doing so removes the saucy liquid and helps decrease some of the sodium used as a preservative.
When adding canned beans to a hot dish, make sure to add them toward the end of cooking. Otherwise they can become too soggy and fall apart.
Dried beans
Eating dried beans requires a little more upfront work, but it's certainly worth it. First things first: preparation. Preparing dried beans for cooking involves soaking them in one of two ways:
A leisurely soak is the most common method for preparing dried beans. Soak 'em in a large pot of water overnight. Afterward, simply discard the liquid and cook with fresh water.
You can also soak your dried beans the quick way. Bring water to a boil, remove it from the heat, and let the beans soak in the hot water for three to four hours. Discard the liquid and then cook the beans in fresh water.
To cook dried beans after soaking, cover about 1 pound of beans with 6 cups of fresh water (not the soaking water). Simmer the beans until they're cooked and soft. Table 15-3 shows you some great low-glycemic beans along with their cooking times (which depend on whether you're cooking in a saucepan or a pressure cooker).
A tale of old beans
Have you ever bitten into cooked beans and gotten one that was hard as a rock? No, you're not a horrible cook who didn't soak her beans long enough or cook them long enough. The real problem is that the bean was an HTC, or "hard to cook" bean (quite the technical term, I know).
HTC
refers to beans that are old or have been stored improperly. Telling one of these beans from a good bean when dried is absolutely impossible, but you can take a few steps to avoid getting these little HTC rocks, I mean beans, in your bunch:
Explore new recipes: Your waistline will thank you
If you fall into a rut of using only one or two low-glycemic grains, breads, fruits, or vegetables, you'll feel deprived quickly. Imagine if you only use pearl barley with dinner every night because it's an easy low-glycemic grain to add to your diet. Yawn. I bet you'll get bored quite quickly. Research shows that feeling deprived or restricted with food can backfire and interfere with weight loss. Many individuals who feel restricted end up binging on foods they feel are "bad."
I'm here to tell you that living a low-glycemic lifestyle doesn't have to be restrictive. You have many food options to choose from, so get out there and experiment with different foods and recipes so you don't ever feel limited. Having a wide variety of low-glycemic choices at your disposal every day is guaranteed to keep you from getting stuck in the food doldrums. I encourage you to experiment with your old standby recipes and check out some new ones. Chapters 16 through 19 provide some great recipes to help get you started.