Low-Calorie Bean Recipes

By cooking your own dried beans, you save money, reduce sodium and get better flavor along with, surprisingly, more vitamins and minerals. If you can't use the whole batch, freeze surplus cooked beans for later use in soups, salads and dips. The range of time for cooking beans is wide and varies with the age and the type of beans selected.

These slow-cooker beans are super flavorful and tender. To save time, process the garlic cloves in a small food processor instead of mincing them by hand. You can also make this a day ahead and refrigerate overnight to give the flavors more time to mingle. Garnish with fresh cilantro leaves, if desired.

Traditional three-bean salad gets a healthy, fresh spin with the addition of black soybeans, snap peas and a tarragon-infused dressing. Find black soybeans near other canned beans; they're a sweeter, creamier relative of the green ones you're probably familiar with.

This lima bean recipe is the creation of Mable Clarke, a South Carolina cook and activist. This side dish is on the menu for Clarke's monthly fish fry that she started to save the Soapstone Baptist Church. No need for ham hocks with this recipe--her onion-rich roast turkey stock gives these humble beans a rich, savory flavor, but store-bought will also do the trick. A long, slow simmer coaxes the creaminess out of the limas.

The pleasantly sweet-and-sour pomegranate molasses in the tangy vinaigrette here is made by reducing pomegranate juice into a syrup. Look for it at well-stocked grocery stores and Middle Eastern markets.

Think hummus meets tabbouleh in these vegetarian stuffed grape leaves, bursting with chickpeas, parsley and bulgur tied together with a lemony, garlicky sauce. The grape leaves will seem soft when just finished cooking, but will firm up as they cool. We prefer these at room temperature or cold--perfect for bringing to work for lunch.

Two Cypriot specialties--good olive oil and fresh lemons--lend sunny flavor to this simple bean dish, served as a side in Cyprus. Chard adds a hearty touch. Top with a dollop of Greek yogurt, or nondairy yogurt to keep it vegan, for a meatless meal.

Instead of getting flavor from a ham hock, this mess of black-eyed peas and collards gets its smokiness from canned chipotles and caramelized shallots, thereby keeping it vegetarian.

This combo may seem wild, but trust us--it works. Indian-American chef and cookbook author Raghavan Iyer developed it to have everything he thinks a perfect recipe should: a balance of heat, sweetness, a little pucker and a hit of salt combined with a tango of textures.