Ways to make beans and lentils bearable

For a few years, during my student days, I was a vegan. It was mostly out of laziness and dislike of making an effort to cook fancy food for one. I basically ate the same things over and over again:

• Porridge for breakfast, usually with mix-ins such as grated apples, ground flaxseed, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and almonds. Topped with soy milk and more nuts.
• Dinners: usually some stir-fry combination of tofu or seitan with whatever vegetables were on sale, doused in soy sauce, over a bed of brown basmati rice or buckwheat noodles.
• If I wasn't caring about protein much, I'd happily subsist on spaghetti with tomato sauce, with a sprinkling of that alarming, rubbery vegan cheese on top. 
• If I was feeling especially lazy and rich (ha!), I'd eat processed vegan products, such as veggie burgers, Quorn products and so on.
• Lunches: microwaved leftovers from the night before, plus an apple or other fruits.

Notice anything missing that vegans are supposed to be madly fond of? Oh yeah, the beans and lentils. I rarely ate beans and lentils, because I didn't like them. I found them chalky and floury and overpoweringly...wholesome, I suppose, sort of like eating a bowlful of boiled knitting. 

I'm no longer a vegan, because I no longer really agree with the ideology. I was a vegan for environmental rather than animal cruelty reasons, but you can get around that if you make an effort, as Mr. B and I do, to seek out animal products that aren't completely trashy. Organic, grass-fed, that sort of thing. And I'm convinced that eating locally is more important than eating vegan. We are lucky to live in an area that has very fertile soil, and where local produce is easy to acquire cheaply. So there's that.

However, we are stupidly broke right now, and beans are cheap. Mr. B, bless him, refuses to eat tofu and seitan, so we need to find some cheap forms of vegetable protein. (All kinds of beans and lentils are grown in our area, so it's a great locavore option.) So I decided to figure out exactly what to do with beans. It's a work in progress, but I'm slowly finding some recipes that I wouldn't mind eating again and again.

Here are some things I've figured out that you should put in your bean and lentil recipes.

• Something acidic. For some reason, this brings out the savoriness of beans and lentils. In my Lentil-Sausage Soup, balsamic vinegar is the difference between something that tastes like boiled knitting and something that doesn't. In my Non-Disgusting Black Beans, the combination of balsamic vinegar and wine do something similar. Hooray!
• Lots of strongly-flavored ingredients. Onions, garlic, salt, pepper, spices, carrots, celery, green peppers, etc. My Crock-Pot "Refried" Beans recipe contains several of the above.
• Vegans may now get mad at me, but...meat. The crumbled sausage in Lentil-Sausage Soup gives it extra substance and really fills you up. I find it a bit low-fat otherwise. I know it's supposed to be healthy to keep your intake of fat right down, but lentils alone are so incredibly low-fat that I feel hungry again five minutes later.

More later, as I discover more!