Monggo Beans (or Mung Bean Soup)

Whoa! There it is, in all it’s shockingly green wonderfulness.

If I just saw that picture and post title on someone else’s blog, I would think two things:

1. It’s veryvery green.
2. Monggo, Mung, Malunggay? Way too scary.

If this is any comfort to how you might be feeling, Bjork was watching me take pictures of this green mess and he said with a crinkled nose, “What is that again?” So no, you’re not the only one wondering what this craziness is all about. PS. He might not want me to tell you this, but he ate it and totally loved it. Psh, boys.

Today I’m gonna get all y’all excited about some delicious green international food. Yeah? Let’s do it.

Starting with the monggo beans.

Monggos are the same thing as mung beans. They are widely used in Asian countries and they cook almost exactly like lentils. LENTILS! My favorite! And something you can almost for surely buy wherever you live. Whether you use lentils or monggo (mung) beans, you’ll pretty much turn into a walking picture of health. These little guys are your friend.

Now these beauties. These are malunggay leaves.

Malunggay leaves a new to me – and apparently they’re like the world’s best superfood. Of course I learn this just a few weeks before leaving the land full of malunggay. But I haven’t been living with my head under a rock or anything.

If you are cooking in a place that doesn’t have malunggay leaves available, just use fresh baby spinach. Chop it up and use it in the exact same way. It’ll be almost the same except the little malunggay leaves are 200 times cuter than spinach could ever be.

A reader actually commented on my post about the market and asked suggested trying a recipe with kamungay, but when I asked for some help finding it, the guy at the grocery store told me that kamungay is the same as malunggay. Is that right? Anyways, thank you Melissa for inspiring me to go find something new even if I ended up with something that starts with a different letter.

So now that you know about monggo beans and malunggay, let’s talk about what this tastes like.

The main flavors here are coconut milk, garlic, ginger, and onion. The creaminess comes from the coconut milk but also the monggos, because as they cook the skins start to fall off, and some of the beans sort of just dissolve into the soup. The fresh malunggay gets stirred in and the end because Melissa told me to. And it’s fresh and yummy.

This is going to be weird, but I cannot tell you how much this is like comfort food to me. Not because I am so familiar with monggos, but because it’s like a hot, creamy, flavorful gravy sauce that’s just gets soaked up and mixed in with the rice. I love that kinda stuff.

I have a confession that I feel really guilty about. I did add a little curry paste to this which is totally not authentically Filipino, but I couldn’t resist. I looked from the brand new jar of yellow curry paste, to the pot of boiling monggos, to the sauteing onions and garlic and ginger, back to the curry paste, back to the monggos… and suddenly my house smelled like curry. I loved it and regretted it all at the same time.

When I’ve had this made by Filipinos, there’s no curry flavor – just a beautiful combination of fresh ginger, coconut milk, maybe even lemongrass? and these cute little beans. I will put the curry in the notes but I think you should try it without first.

Speaking of curry like I do allthetime, this recipe reminds me so much of those green curry lentils I made a while back with the spinach, coconut milk, and bulgur. Except instead of bulgur, I used the last of my brown rice blend for a little bed to serve it on. We just stirred it all up and kept the leftovers that way, too.

In fact, I’m going to go finish those leftovers when I’m done writing this post and I.am.excited.

I know there’s somebody out there that will like this with me, even though it’ s a lot green and has two unfamiliar double G ingredients.

Right? Somebody?

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