Bean dish can be adapted to please just about everybody.

Byline: Home Cooking by Jim Boyd The Register-Guard

ELIZABETH STEWART, who lives near Alvadore, joined the Seventh-day Adventist Church in 1979 and adopted a healthy, largely vegetarian lifestyle. She and her husband, Mervin, usually eat only one meal a week of fish or chicken. The rest are vegetarian.

The recipe she offers today is a bean dish that can be made either with ground beef or with crumbled vegetable burgers.

Specialty: "I like to cook almost anything, just good, wholesome, good tasting, nutritious food."

How she began cooking: "I think it was watching my mother make gravy when I was not even tall enough to reach the sink," she said.

Stewart grew up in Star City, Ind., a little town about 50 miles south of Chicago. She said she just picked up cooking from her mother and from the 4-H program that she joined when she was 10.

Her biggest cooking success: "Well, I think when I was about 14, my mom and dad were helping the neighbors do some remodeling, and I was kind of watching the neighbors' kids," Stewart said.

`(My mom) had a chicken defrosted and she said, 'Why don't you go ahead and fix this dinner?' '

Stewart felt a little trepidation at the prospect of making her first full, unsupervised meal, but she went ahead.

"I made a whole Sunday dinner, you might say - mashed potatoes, gravy and fixed the vegetable and fried chicken," she said.

"I dirtied every pot and pan in the kitchen, I think, but everybody thought it was good."

Her biggest cooking failure: "Well, I think that was one time I was making homemade chicken and noodles in a pressure cooker, because everybody was in a hurry to eat," she said.

"I went and opened the pressure cooker before the pressure was all the way down. If you wanted chicken and noodles that night, you ate it off the ceiling. It just went, 'Phewwwwww!' '

She was of junior high age at the time.

Her favorite cookbooks: She said the three cookbooks she recommends are ones with healthy recipes that reduce fat and calories.

"My husband has a heart condition, and so I have to try to cook for his heath and taste, too," she said.

She recommends "Seasoned With Love" by Sharon Cress, a cookbook put together by women of her church and available from an Adventist Book Center.

Her other favorites are "The Ultimate Vegetarian Cookbook" by Roz Denny and "Carnevale Italiano: The Romagnolis Meatless Cookbook" by Margaret and C. Franco Romagnolis.

Why this recipe was chosen: "This recipe was my husband's grandmother's," Stewart said. "It was passed down to his mother. And then when we got married, he kept telling me, 'Oh, Mom makes great beans.'

"I tried making different recipes for beans and stuff. He says, 'These are good, but, boy, Mom's are really good.' So I went and I asked Mom.

"She gave me the recipe for the Spanish Beans, and I've been making them about as long as we've been married."

The original recipe uses ground beef, but Stewart substitutes crumbled veggie burgers for the meat.

Spanish Beans

2 cups dry pink or pinto beans

1 pound ground beef or an equal amount (4 patties) of your favorite frozen or canned veggie burger

1 large can commercially canned whole tomatoes or 1 quart home-canned tomatoes

1 tablespoon olive oil 

1 medium onion, chopped

2 cloves garlic, chopped

2 small cans tomato sauce

2 tablespoons vinegar

2 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon black pepper (or to taste)

2 teaspoons chili powder (or to taste)

1 small, fresh chili pepper, minced (optional)

Soak beans overnight or, as an alternative, place the dried beans in a pot of water, boil for 5 minutes and allow to stand for 1 hour.

In either case, pour off the water after the beans have soaked. Refill the pot with enough water to cover the beans. Bring to a simmer and add the canned or home-canned tomatoes.

For the meat version: In a frying pan, brown the ground beef. Pour off fat. Place the beef in a container while you use the frying pan to saute the onion in 1 tablespoon of olive oil.

When the onion becomes almost translucent, add the chopped garlic and continue cooking for a short time until you can smell the aroma of garlic. Be careful not to burn the garlic or a bitter flavor will ensue.

Place the browned ground meat back into the frying pan with the onions and garlic. Add tomato sauce and seasonings.

Stir well and simmer to blend the flavors, about 5 minutes. Then add the meat mixture to the pot of beans.

If browned bits remain in the frying pan, add water to deglaze and then add the water to the beans, too.

For the meatless version: Saute the onions and garlic. Then add the tomato sauce and seasonings, and simmer to blend the flavors. Crumble the veggie burger patties into the seasoned tomato sauce, and add the this mixture to the pot of beans. Surprisingly, the chunks of veggie burger will not dissolve in the beans but will hold together like chunks of ground beef.

To finish either version: Toss in the diced chili pepper, if desired, and simmer the beans for 2 hours or until the beans are tender.

Serve with a salad and corn bread or French bread.

To nominate a cook for this feature, mail it to: Home Cooking, P.O. Box 10188, Eugene, OR 97440; contact Jim Boyd at 338-2363; or e-mail it to [e-mail]. Include the nominee's name and phone number as well as your name and phone number.