Anasazi Beans

My ole foot seems to be healing and I be on the mend. Will know Wednesday when I return to the doctor. For lunch, Judy is fixing Anasazi beans. They are really pretty beans.

Most popular of the modern boutique beans, the Anasazi bean is also called the Aztec bean, Cave bean, New Mexico appaloosa and sometimes Jacob's Cattle. It is a 1,500 year old variety: the most popular story behind the modern origin of the New Mexico Cave Bean is unusual. As it goes, in the 1980's a member of an archeological team from UCLA was looking for remains of Pygmy elephants that roamed the earth thousands of years ago in the area now known as New Mexico and came upon these beans. The beans were in a clay pot sealed with pine tar and were determined by radio carbon dating to be over 1,500 years old, yet some still germinated! The beans were simply called "New Mexico Cave Beans" after the discovery of the half dozen or so beans found in a cave once inhabited by Native American peoples. The usual germination period for stored beans being at most 50 years.

No one knows what the missing tribe actually called themselves - anasazi is a Navajo word that means "ancient ones" or ancient enemies. And the origins of this bean are also mysterious. Years later, after the beans were grown by a few different heirloom growers, some of these very same New Mexico Cave Beans were renamed and trademarked as Anasazi Beans by Adobe Mills, a privately owned company.

This attractive purple-red and white bean cooks in about 2/3 the time of an ordinary pinto bean to a creamy even pink. It has a sweet mild full flavor and a mealy texture, perfect for any Mexican, Latin American or Native American dish. Compared to other beans, it contains only 25% of the specific complex carbohydrates sometimes responsible for gastric distress associated with dry beans- so, less gas.