Lean Mean Three Bean Salad Recipe

Hi! I'm Betty. Welcome to Betty’s Kitchen. Today, we are making Three Bean Salad. Now, this is a very healthy dish and also it’s very colorful. I think you will all find it to be a pretty dish and it’s easy to put together.

So let’s start with the big bowl or any kind of mixing bowl and we are going to start with vinegar. This is just white vinegar and I have measured out ½ cup so that goes in our mixing bowl. I'm going to mix it up with sauce that will go over the three beans that we’ll put in the three bean salad. Next, granulated sugar and just this kind of stuff and it’s ½ cup that I have measured that out. Put that in and then we have some oil. I've chosen canola oil. I like to use that lighter oils and I'm going to consume that in raw condition if I'm going to put it in a cake or something like a pan cake then I might use a heavier oil because it’s not like I'm eating that and don’t taste the greasiness of it. So I use something light but you can use any kind of vegetable oil that you choose. It could be even a heavy as olive oil; it could be something like corn oil, peanut oil, any of those. We need one half cup so it’s easy so far. It’s ½ cup of each of the things that we’ll put in for our salad mix.

Now, we have some solids for the sauce. We have ½ cup of chopped onion. Now, I just used the kitchen chopper to do that really quickly. It’s about ½ of one large onion, so ½ cup of chopped onion.

Now, for some color for our sauce, I have ¼ cup of chopped green pepper, green bell pepper and I have ¼ of cup of chopped red bell pepper. Now, you can use ½ cup of all green or ½ cup of all red. This will depend on what you have in your refrigerator. If you have green bell pepper which I keep all the time, then I might just put it all green. I don’t want to have run to the store just for a quarter cup of red pepper. So these to go in ¼ cup green chopped bell pepper and ¼ cup of red chopped bell pepper. Those kind of I want to stick a little bit and you get as much as possible.

And then we come to our beans. Before I put those in, I think I'm going to just stir this around and see how pretty good is already. That thing have the beans in and those are colorful but we have a nice sauce and I do want it blended well so that it will get all of the flavor mixed appropriately so that it will sink into those beans.

The three kinds of beans I'm using and you can change this up if you like. But these are traditional. This is just a traditional dish that we use here in the South and this is pretty much way of better mix here except most people don’t put the red pepper in. You need cut green beans and you need to drain those and that means drain that water down the sink. You have a use for it in this dish. So this about 15-ounce or so at 14.5-ounce cup, so all of these are cans of the same size. The next one is wax beans that are cut. You can see the very yellow color of those, drain them be sure to drain them before you put them in. And then the last one is red kidney beans. This just says kidney beans but they will be is this dark red right here.

So you probably can find the lighter red but I think that dark red that gives more contrast here. Now, what I did in draining these is I drained them but I put drained off of them, down the sink was very thick and that meant that there was a lot of thick juice that was still seeking to the beans. So I put water on the top and drain it about a three more times by putting more water in and draining water and drain. So these are cleaned off. We want this sauce so stick to that beans. We don’t have to have any extra sauce and you can see in the bottom there that it’s very thick but the sauce it comes with this. So you really don’t want that. I have a few beans; just leave those along because it gets all the clean beans out.

And then we start this around and you begin to say how nice and pretty this is. And how quick and easy and how healthy it is. If you are watching your calories, watching your diet, I did look at the calories on all with these cans. Actually, the kidney beans have considerable amount of calories but the wax beans and the green beans have almost no calories per serving. So if you average it all out, it’s a very low calorie dish and of course the green pepper, the red pepper, the onion are adding almost nothing in calories and the oil being spread out among this whole salad and you don’t necessarily eat the oil as such. We need to dip a serving like this, you will get some oil but it’s just insignificant amount.

Now, I'm going to pour this up into a nice serving dish you see. I have just used this large mixing bowl to get every thing together because you need space in order to get all of this blended. So I'll come back on a second and show you my finished product.

So here is what my finished three beans salad looks like. It’s in an appropriately sized bowl and it’s a bowl that has a little bit of design on it so it looks pretty at the table. It’s nice and colorful so you’ll find that it is very pretty. It is very tasty; it’s going to be tastier when I let it sit in the refrigerator so I have my plastic wrap out. I'm going to get off a measure of that. Put it on the top and then refrigerate it for at least four hours or it could be refrigerated overnight and you kind of useit the next day. This happens to be early in the morning so I'm putting it in and we are going to have for dinner tonight.