A couple of weeks ago, the hoarder in me sought empathy from the hoarder in you with a newsletter about “chickpea anxiety” — that impulse to grab an insurance can every time you grocery shop for fear of running out of chickpeas. From the looks of my inbox, suffice to say many of us struggle to fight our stockpiling instincts.
“You might be interested to know that this is a known phenomenon,” Claire, a reader, wrote in an email. “A friend of mine, a market researcher who ran a lot of focus groups, told me about it years ago. It comes up again and again; she called it a ‘cupboard blind spot.’ Everyone’s got one and it’s always different, but always some random pantry staple.”
For quite some time, Claire’s blind spot was red lentils: “Bags and bags of the things.” And a few other pantry staples came up again and again in your emails and Instagram comments: canned tomatoes and tomato paste, coconut milk and black beans, black beans, black beans.
Here’s what to do with all sorts of canned tomatoes, how to use up that tomato paste and a few ways to make a dent in your canned coconut milk reserves.
But you need black bean recipes. Ali Slagle’s vegan coconut-ginger black beans, topped with a handful of crushed plantain chips and lots of lime zest, will pull several canned goods out of the pantry to make room for your latest purchases. You don’t need me to tell you to make rice and beans, but maybe you need me to tell you to make Ali’s one-pot rice and beans?
Sarah Copeland’s five-star recipe for cheese grits with saucy black beans, avocado and radish (above), complete with vegan substitutes, is exactly what I’d like to eat for breakfast when I’m egged-out. And get a load of Ali’s weeknight-friendly bean and cheese enchiladas, which call for canned black beans and canned fire-roasted tomatoes and canned chipotles in adobo. Your pantry won’t know what hit it.
