White Beans With Sage & Tomatoes

Summer is well and truly over - we had the first, gorgeous, snow of the year on Mt Wellington this week - but my tomato plants have been hanging on. It's time to do something with both the red and the greens. I'll deal with the green ones in another post but tonight I felt like making a simple, filling and warming dish to eat by the fire using the lovel ripe tomatoes that are bursting with flavour and sweetness. I suppose you could think of it as something like baked beans but without all the sugar and gunk they put in the tinned versions. In actual fact bean dishes similar to this are quite traditional in some parts of the world; I remember eating something like this with green beans in Tuscany.I hope you'll like it.


Ingredients
350g small white beans like cannellini or navy beans
half a leek
350g ripe tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon sage leaves
1 teaspoon salt
pepper to taste

Method

1. Soak the beans overnight, drain, add fresh water and cook the beans: 20 mins in a pressure cooker, or more like 90 mins on the stove top. You want the beans to be cooked but still reasonably firm and not mushy. Drain the cooked beans and set aside.
2. Heat the oil in a large pot and gently fry the leeks until soft, about 5 minutes.
3. Add the chopped tomatoes, the cooked beans and the teaspoon each of sage and salt. Put a lid on the pan and simmer for 15 minutes.
4. Serve with a few twists of pepper and some crusty bread. Buon appetito!

---

small white beans!

tomatoes on the vine

no need to chop the leek too finely

make yourself a leek chrysanthemum from the stub :-)