Easy to Make, Healthy Salad, Mostly From Cans

Yes, I call this salad "Easy to Make, Healthy Salad, Mostly From Cans." And it's not an oxymoron.

It can also be titled Corn, Bean and Tomato Salad, Corona Lock-down Recipe #4, because the canned food was delivered to us as part of the senior citizen care package at the height of the corona lock-down. Following are the first three recipes I developed with canned food from the carton:

• Cooking With Canned Beans, Corona Lock-down Recipe #1
• Cooking With Canned Pineapple, "Apple-Pineapple Compote," Corona Lock-down Recipe #2
• "Sauerkraut Salad," Corona Lock-down Recipe #3

If you had inspected my pantry before getting these COVID-19 "care packages," you'd have found almost no cans, not even tomato paste. The few cans would have been "food gifts" from the Purim mishloach manot. But suddenly I found myself with all sorts of canned food and decided to make up recipes.

This salad is also a great vegetarian-vegan "one pot meal." It contains protein plus raw and cooked vegetables. Of course you can substitute different types of beans and vegetables and add more fresh salad. Just looking at it you can probably guess almost all of the ingredients:

canned corn
canned white beans
diced tomato
diced onion
coarsely ground pepper
dehydrated dill
dressed with a bit of olive oil and lemon juice

Yes, that's it. Think of the recipe more as inspiration than an exact recipe. Try it, and tell me how yours turned out and how you varied it. Enjoy in good health.

Cooking With Canned Beans, Corona Lock-down Recipe #1

Life in Corona Lock-down. This week I "gave in" and accepted the offer to get some ready-made meals. There are perks to being 70+. We're registered as one person, not two, because I do cook. It's just that the idea of receiving ready-made "restaurant meals" seemed irresistible. The meals are like TV Dinners or kosher airline meals with a bag of pre-washed salad.

The day after we received our first meals, we got two cartons of food staples, disposable eating utensils and a few dozen rolls of toilet paper.

As you can see there are lots of canned goods, and I almost never use canned food.

"Never say never."

Presuming that the cartons will arrive about monthly, I decided that our lunches will be based on the food we've received. Since I had baked sandwich rolls the day before, my husband got a tuna sandwich and I ate the other half of the can with cooked vegetables.

The following day I challenged myself to come up with a meal using the Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce. So I cut up an onion and two nice squashes and put the pieces in a pot, added the contents of the can plus some water.

After the vegetables were fully cooked, I served the "stew" with fresh salad, as you can see in the photo below. My husband also got a serving of pasta.


It was delicious,frugal and we ate much too much. This bean vegetable stew was easy to make, healthy and inexpensive. Call that a success, thank Gd.