Click beans!

Jai and Bee's wonderful event 'Click' is at its monthly deadline, and hopefully I can squeeze in my entry even though it's already past midnight, on Eastern time! The theme was 'Beans and lentils', although for some reason I thought only beans were involved, and so I chose to use only them as a subject... so, here is my picture!

Beans (and indeed also lentils) are one of my favorite foods, especially since I started being almost vegetarian. I love them in any way they're cooked. I particularly like garbanzo beans, and I recently discovered mung beans. While the former are commonly used also in Italian cuisine, the latter aren't. I love both of them, and I think a combination of them is delightful in soups especially.
In this case, though, I just wanted to taste them as naturally as possible. So I just boiled them. I boiled separately the chickpeas in one pot (soaked in water overnight at first, of course), and the mung beans and rice in another pot. Since I wanted to use whole wheat rice, which takes a little longer to cook, I started the rice and only after ~10 min of cooking I added the mung beans. When both types of beans and rice were cooked, I drained the water and mixed them together, and added some olive oil and herbs (finely minced oregano and thyme). I simply love these flavors together. It's the simplest dish ever, but it allows to clearly taste the delight of these legumes. You can eat it as a side or main dish, warm, or you can also add small pieces of tomatoes to it, and have it cold as a salad.