I’ve got a super easy new recipe to share with you today – Vegetarian Slow Cooker Black Bean Tacos!
Photograph copyright © 2016 by Helene Dujardin
This simple and tasty dish is from my friend Gina’s new Skinnytaste Fast and Slow cookbook (which I know many of you already own because Amazon tells me it’s commonly purchased together with my cookbooks!). This beautifully photographed book is full of both fast recipes and slow cooker favorites. It even contains an entire chapter dedicated to tacos, which immediately caught my attention – no surprise there, haha! I made these Slow Cooker Black Bean Tacos on Friday night last week, and it was sooo nice to have dinner taken care of with minimal effort. I don’t know about you, but we are often worn out by Friday around here!
Many dishes in the new Skinnytaste cookbook are vegetarian, gluten-free, and/or freezer friendly and follow our real food rules. They also all contain nutritional info for those who like to track that sort of thing. Thank you, Gina, for letting me share one of your lovely new recipes today! I think that the next time I make this, I’m going to double it. :)
Ingredients
Beans
- 1/3 pound black beans, dried (5.3 ounces)
- 1 cup vegetable broth, plus 2 extra tablespoons
- 1/2 cup onions, chopped
- 1 jalapeño, chopped
- 1 teaspoon cumin, ground
- 1 bay leaf
- 1/2 tablespoon lime juice, fresh
- 1/4 teaspoon salt, kosher
- 1 teaspoon olive oil
- 3 cloves garlic, crushed
Tacos
- 2 cups red cabbage, shredded
- 1/2 tablespoon olive oil
- 2 teaspoons lime juice, plus 1 lime cut into 8 wedges
- 1/4 teaspoon salt, kosher
- 8 corn tortillas
- 2 ounces Cotija cheese, crumbled (or queso blanco)
- 1/4 cup cilantro, fresh, just leaves
- 1 jalapeño, sliced into thin rings
Instructions
For the Beans
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Rinse the beans and place them in a medium bowl. Cover with water to 2 inches above the beans and let soak for 8 hours or overnight. Drain.
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In a slow cooker, combine the beans, broth, onions, jalapeño, cumin, and bay leaf. Cover and cook on low for 8 - 10 hours, until the beans are tender. Discard the bay leaf and stir in the lime juice and salt.
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In a small nonstick skillet, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the garlic and cook, stirring, until golden, about 30 seconds. Stir into the beans.
For the Tacos
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In a medium bowl, combine the cabbage, olive oil, lime juice, and salt.
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Heat the tortillas in a large skillet over high heat until slightly charred, about 1 minute per side.
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Put 2 tortillas on each of 4 plates. Place 1⁄4 cup beans on each tortilla, then top with 1⁄4 cup cabbage and 1⁄4 ounce cheese. Divide the cilantro and jalapeño slices among the tacos and serve with lime wedges.
Recipe Notes
I wanted the beans on the drier side so the filling wouldn’t spill out of the tortillas, but if you prefer them to be soupier to serve over rice, add 1⁄4 cup more broth.
*Gluten-free if gluten-free corn tortillas are used.
We recommend organic ingredients when feasible.
How to Make Homemade Vanilla Extract (a great gift!)
Black beans are very hard to find in France, at least in my town. But I discovered a source! Can’t wait to try this recipe. I am trying to reduce our meat consumption. Not eliminate entirely, because we LIKE meat, but just make it less, and less often. Recipes like these are a godsend.
Can this be made on the stove top and also using canned beans?
Hello. We’ve not tried but I’m sure you can.
Wow. What a great recipie. thanks for sharing it. Today itself, I will me trying it at my home. Keep posting more recipies. Thanks a lot.
I do your slow cooker refried beans and make bean burritos or bean and rice bowls! Next time I’ll try this recipe instead :)
For some reason this recipe didn’t work out for me. By the time I got home from work, the liquid had all dried up in the slow cooker and the beans were burning. My slow cooker is 12 years old and usually we don’t have problems with dishes cooking too fast.
I used 1 can of black beans in the crockpot and it came out DELICIOUS!! I left the broth the same. Also, this dish is SPICY. FYI!!