Growing Bolder Community

I don’t remember where I first came across the idea of replacing shortening in brownies with puréed black beans. Applesauce or vanilla yogurt had been my go-to replacements in the past. But the idea of using black beans in place of shortening intrigued me, and I couldn’t wait to see what the outcome would be. Searching through my cupboard, I found a chocolate truffle mix....

A few weeks ago, I wrote about experimenting with a recipe that replaced shortening in brownies with an equivalent amount of black beans. I first noticed the recipe on Heidi Swanson’s wonderful Web site 101 Cookbooks. Heidi wished she had created the recipe but instead credited Ania Catalano’s new cookbook, Baking with Agave Nectar, as the source. Applesauce or vanilla yogurt had been my go-to...

I grew up on a small, 100-acre farm in Iowa. To make ends meet for our family of seven, my father sometimes worked in nearby Illinois as a tool and die maker. He’d commute to his job on Sunday night and return the following weekend. In the summertime when school was out, my younger sister and I would sometimes travel with my father to his urban home to escape hot and boring days on the farm. (We...