White Bean and Walnut Bruschetta

Seeing as I haven't gone grocery shopping in approximately 10 days, my refrigerator was starting to look pretty bare this morning (except for some of the great northern beans I cooked on Monday, which I still haven't finished!) I decided to do my menu planning for the week and figure out some ways to use up the rest of the beans. I know people swear by freezing their home-cooked beans, but I've just never enjoyed the texture of frozen beans - they always taste mushy to me. I'd rather use them fresh or canned, but that's just me.

I knew I had half a frozen baguette languishing in my freezer, so I thought I would kill two birds with one stone and make a family favorite for dinner which would use both the beans and the baguette - the White Bean and Walnut Bruschetta from Eat, Drink & Be Vegan. ED&BV is one of my favorite and most-used cookbooks. I know I've been cooking up a storm from Appetite for Reduction lately, but that's partly due to the fact that AFR is one of my newer cookbooks. I've had ED&BV for almost 4 years now, and at last count, I had made almost 80 recipes from it. I love Dreena Burton's cooking philosophy - she emphasizes fresh vegetables, beans, whole grains, natural sweeteners, and alternative flours (such as barley, oat, spelt, and buckwheat, rather than just using wheat flour all the time). I found her infant/toddler feeding tips in Vive Le Vegan! to be enormously helpful when my son started solids, and she's just a cool person in general. Even though she's a big-time vegan cookbook author, she's still nice enough to be friends with me on Facebook! :)

The White Bean and Walnut Bruschetta is one of those recipes that looks so fancy, but it is SO easy to make. I think it took me 20 minutes from start to finish! It's simply white beans, chopped tomatoes, fresh basil, garlic, walnuts, salt, and olive oil, mashed and spread on toasted slices of baguette. We had it with a simple side salad drizzled with some quick homemade agave-dijon-flax dressing.

Here's the bruschetta topping:

Spread on some pre-toasted baguette slices:

 Then back into the oven for a few minutes to warm through:

And finally drizzled with some EVOO:

This would make a lovely party appetizer, but my hubby and I love to just eat it as a main dish with some salad. We told my son these were "little pizzas" and he gobbled them up (once he figured out how to pick them up LOL)!