Rice and beans are served at every single meal in Nicaragua. It's either rice and beans, or riceandbeans, otherwise known as gallopinto ("red rooster," though friends and I used to call it "painted rooster" due to odd translations and plain old foolishness). The name alludes to the color of the mixture of white rice and small red kidney beans, which mirrors that of the king of the coop. More

Fava beans are sweet, tender, and pleasantly starchy. When they're coated with a slick of olive oil, vinegar and garlic bits, the contrast between the sharp dressing and the mild greenness of the beans is really wonderful. More

As great as white bean salads are, they need a partner to make a full dinner. I've seen a few variations over the years, but I was particularly interested in this recipe from Leslie Glover Pendleton's Simply Shellfish, because it pairs the beans with squid. More

There are a couple of distinct advantages that canned beans have over dried, but there's one major disadvantage: flavor. Here are three easy soup recipes that pack flavor into canned beans, and can be made in under 30 minutes. More

Nothing goes with pork like beans. The greatest pork and bean dish I've ever had was in Toledo, Spain, where suckling pigs roasted in a wood-fired oven were served alongside a large cazuela filled with judias—a fat, white kidney-shaped relative of the butter bean or lima bean—cooked into a porky, tomatoey stew. Large and robust, they had a perfectly creamy texture and deeply porky flavor. Definitely something worth replicating at home. More

In its simplest form, cassoulet is a casserole of beans and pork (usually sausage) cooked slowly with aromatics. In its highest form it can contain wine, bacon and confit of pork, duck and even goose. To me, the fact that an excellent cassoulet can be made out of minimal ingredients is what makes this noble dish a necessary part of any cook's repertoire. More

Having grown up in a cold, maple-filled part of the world, my love of baked beans runs hard and deep. There is nothing like getting back from snowshoeing to the beer store to a house that is filled with the aroma of sweet, salty, fatty baked beans. As with many recipes, the secret ingredient to world changing baked beans is pork. More

Wendy's chili isn't much to look at, but it tastes leagues better than Hormel. It's much thinner, but the sparse beef is augmented by plenty of small red kidney beans and pinky-gray pinto beans, and there are cursory bits of tomato skin, onion and, in a huh?-but-harmless touch, celery. More

Chinese long beans make excellent pickles. Though I've been making dilly beans out of conventional green beans for years, these are different. The beans are tightly spiraled into the jar so that they hugged the glass. In the center of the jar were a few broken bits of beans nudged up against a collection of cracked garlic cloves, wintry spices and pungent, puckery brine. All markers of a perfect pickle. More

Despite the late summer arrival of heat-wilted afternoons, the chill of the evening skies and whispering hints of autumn are signs that the farmers' markets in the Northwest are coming to a close. So to finish out my own season for Market Scene out in Washington state, what better way to bid farewell to summer than from my own backyard—welcome to Duvall, just northeast of Seattle. Won't you visit for a final stroll through our little market? More