Canned beans make beautiful and healthy salads

Easy summer salads make colourful additions to backyard barbecues and picnic lunches

My local independent grocery store is a mash-up that reflects the neighbourhood it's in. The vegan cheese hangs out with Chinese sausage, the Lindt chocolate bars and off-label mac and cheese flirt across the aisle with each other, and the organic carrots exist peacefully with the pork rind snacks. I love the place and have been a regular there for more than 20 years. It has almost everything I need and if I left this neighbourhood, it's the thing I would miss the most.

The sisters who own and run the store are always on the floor restocking shelves, carrying boxes, doing inventory and offering direction when needed. Everyone is in motion and I admire that they have the skills and the patience to run a store of this type. I share a mutual friend with one of the sisters and we chat when she's not too busy, mostly about food and recipes.

One day I was poking around the area that houses the canned beans and she mentioned that they have to restock the beans several times a day. The beans were a good brand and a screaming deal at $1 for a 14-ounce can. I wondered who was buying all those beans, and what they did with them. When I'm waiting in a long line at the checkout, I'll look at people's baskets and invent stories about what they're going to cook.

The can of beans became the fuel on which my culinary wheels began to turn. I wanted the recipes to be simple and without a lot of fuss. Since warm weather is upon us, bean salads seemed like a good choice.

Everything I used in the salads came from that store and reflects a tiny part of the mash-up that's always been a great inspiration to my cooking. If you see me in the lineup with a few cans of beans and wonder what I'm going to do with them, the secret is now revealed.