1 bag of beans - 3 dishes

It's no secret that I love beans. I think they are a great inexpensive, easy, nutritious staple. I prefer the dry beans to the canned ones, but that's just me. Either way, beans are great. All varieties. My personal favorites happen to be the black bean and the navy bean. But I also love a dark red kidney bean, a spotted pinto bean, a crisp, fresh-from-vine green bean and crunchy black eyed peas. I have to feed a family of six, so a can of beans gets us almost no where. I like to buy a bag, soak and cook them on a Sunday night and then use the beans through out the week for whatever. With just two cups of soaked, cooked white beans you can create three wonderful dishes. And most of the time, there are more than two cups in one bag of beans so you will have more beans to create with! Can't wait to hear what you come up with.

A very important appliance to have in order to make the bean so versatile is a good blender. My Ninja took a dive this week, so I've resorted to my baby bullet - works great, although it doesn't have the volume capacity that the Ninja did. I think I've made one too many batches of peanut butter with that poor Ninja. I am saving up for a Vitamix - the master of all blenders.

Anyway, here are three recipes you could make this week with one bag of beans.

Curried Garlic Chicken Salad:

One of my challengers in my Solid Strength challenge group inspired me to make chicken salad - no mayo, no greek yogurt, no sour cream, no dressing of any sort - yet it is NOT lacking in flavor, crunch and crisp smoothness. The best part is not only are you using beans, you are using one half of a rotisserie chicken - the other half you'll use in the next recipe! I love it when I can stretch out my protein sources over multiple dishes!

Chicken Enchilada Casserole:

This recipe is very loosely based on a chicken enchilada recipe from 100daysofrealfood.com.

White Bean Cookie Dough Craving:

I have an incredible sweet tooth. Phew, glad that's off my chest.

But I have managed this sweet tooth with Shakeology and creating fun recipes like this. There are so many version of this out there. I cannot site one version as my main inspiration. But after trying a few different versions and tweaking things to my liking, this is my version. Let me know what variations of this you may have tried. I'd love to try them!

You can find all of the recipes here: 1 bag of beans - 3 dishes.