This warm cannellini bean salad is of those happy marriages of ingredients that are just meant for each other.
The combination of colours, textures and flavours – floury beans, silky rocket and salty pancetta, loosely bound in a lemony crème fraiche dressing – is a delight. Continue reading
This thick porridge of mung beans and rice might look like something Oliver Twist would have declined, but for me, a warm bowl of khitchri is pure comfort food. Continue reading
Fainá is a thick pancake (or flatbread) made of chickpea flour – and not much else.
It’s baked in a pizza pan in a hot oven, emerging crispy on the outside with an eggy-creamy interior.
Apparently, Uruguayans like to top their pizza slices with a wedge of fainá.
Continue reading
Mashed fava beans for breakfast… and why not?
It’s only a small step from the baked beans slopped onto every full English served in the UK.
And Egypt’s ful medames are all the nicer for not being in a sickly sweet tomato sauce. Continue reading
Bright, colourful, spicy, fresh… Senegal’s salatu niebe is something I’ll definitely make again after our World Cup 2018 cook-off is over.
This recipe makes a lot, so it’s fortunate salatu niebe keeps well in the fridge.
I served it on a bed of shredded lettuce one day, and heaped it into avocado halves the next. It would also work well stuffed into a pitta or wrap. Continue reading
Cauliflower and white bean stew is a one of those no-fuss, mid-week meals I’ve been making for years.
There’s something vaguely Mediterranean about it – Spanish or maybe Greek – which can be played up by adding smoked paprika, or a scattering of crumbled feta. But generally I just make it as below.
It took awhile for the girls to warm to it (courgette has always been a hard sell for some reason), but they eat it happily now. Continue reading
I love green beans, and have some great ways of preparing them – flash fried with garlic and chilli, steam-fried with mustard seeds and ginger, or tossed in an Indian-inspired dressing – but these green beans with toasted almonds and lime stands up to any of them.
The idea comes from my friend Debbie, who remembers being served delicious green beans dressed with lime when she was a student in Paris. Continue reading
Much of the pleasure of this salad is in the contrast of textures — chewy bulghur wheat, crispy beans, juicy beets.
Adding a hard-boiled egg makes it more of a meal…
Chickpeas are swapped for black beans (and sesame for pumpkin seeds) in this delicious Mexican take on hummus.
Red-red is a traditional Ghanaian bean stew that gets its name (and colour) from the tomatoes and palm oil used to prepare it.
The first red-red recipe I tried called for three types of chilli – fresh Scotch bonnet, chilli flakes, and chilli powder (plus additional minced chilli to garnish).
Despite cutting back significantly on the quantity of chilli (and omitting the chilli powder altogether), it was so blisteringly hot the girls were unable to eat it. Continue reading
Georgia is a country I would love to visit. A friend traveled there a few years ago, and came back raving about the scenery, the people, and the food and wine.
Until I get the opportunity to visit Georgia myself, my taste buds will have to do the traveling.
There’s a good local Georgian restaurant we visit occasionally in the winter months for their rib-sticking fare like hachapuri (cheese-filled flat bread), hearty soups and casseroles.
(I haven’t tried a Georgian dessert – we’re always too full to consider even sharing one.) Continue reading
Hummus is a staple food in our house – I whizz up a batch nearly every week. While we never get bored of hummus, adding a roasted beet to the mix now and then makes a change.
I prefer to cook beets by wrapping them individually in tin foil and roasting in a hot oven until tender. Boiled or grated raw beet work fine too. Continue reading
I’ve been making gypsy soup for many years. I have no idea why the Moosewood cookbook calls it “gypsy soup”, or what it means by “a spiced and delectable brew of Spanish and Dickensonian origins”.
Is it a reference to Linda Dickinson, one of the thirty-odd “Moosewood people” credited at the front? Or a mis-spelling of “Dickensian”? (Though what this soup has to do with Victorian England, social commentary, or sentimentality is anyone’s guess.)
Perhaps it refers to the length of the ingredients list?
Moros y Cristianos is a Cuban dish of black beans (Moors) and white rice (Christians).
In some versions, the rice and beans are cooked together – resulting in visually unappealing (though tasty) gray rice. I prefer to keep the rice and beans separate until the last moment to maintain the contrast of colours.
I reheat leftover rice and beans separately while I cook the onion and peppers, then stir it all together just before serving. Dressed with a splash of vinegar or lime juice, and a dash of hot sauce it makes a very satisfying lunch. Continue reading
Easy to make, pretty to look at, tasty to eat – this dish could be called triple happiness beans.
I assume the “double” refers to the two types of bean involved – Chinese black beans and fresh green beans.
These are not the same black beans that feature in Mexican recipes like sweet potato and black bean tacos, but soybeans that have been dried and fermented with salt.
Pungent and intensely salty, Chinese black beans should be soaked before use to avoid overpowering the other ingredients.
Traditional Cuban black bean soup is made with a ham hock, which is simmered along with the beans and removed before serving.
I prefer this vegetarian version, adding smoked paprika to give the soup an element of the ham’s smokiness. Anyway, for me it’s the vinegar that gives Cuban black bean soup its distinctive flavour.
This soup tastes even better the following day, and freezes well too. Continue reading
This roast squash and chickpea salad with tahini dressing is becoming a favourite winter lunch around ours.
It’s lovely served with the squash still warm from the oven, and keeps well in the fridge. I bring it back to room temperature before serving, and freshen up the seasoning. Continue reading
Sweet potato and black bean tacos are currently the “go-to” taco around here. Last year was all about fish tacos, but the tilapia I favoured has vanished from the fish counter, for one thing.
Also, we are make a conscious effort to have more meat-free dinners each week, and these are helping with that ambition.
This turkey white bean chilli is a lighter, fresher take on the rich, red chilli con carne I grew up eating – though the chipotle paste ensures it still packs a punch.
Poor, unfashionable mung beans… While a number of ingredients have crossed the aisle from “health food” to mainstream (hummus, tofu), or even become trendy (quinoa, chia seeds), mung beans are not among them.
There is still something 1970s, socks-and-sandals, “knit your own yogurt” about mung beans (at least in their un-sprouted form). Or maybe it’s a name thing… if you were brainstorming names to market a new legume, I doubt “mung” would make the long list.
Having been a friend of the mung bean for years, I’d like to introduce them to a wider social circle. This mung bean coconut curry is a good place to start. Quick to make (mung beans don’t need pre-soaking), delicious, healthy and cheap, this curry is a winner.
Having made many a bean salad over the years, I’ve pretty much settled on this version.
I love the combination of smoked paprika, honey and vinegar in the dressing, which elevates the prosaic bean salad to unlikely heights. Continue reading
After tasting her salade liègeoise this evening, my older daughter remarked that what she likes best about trying recipes from different countries is recognising adaptations of familiar dishes.
“Like this salade liègeoise, for example – this is just a salade niçoise for people who don’t have tomatoes.”
She’s spot on, and it really brought home to me one of the reasons I cook the way I do. It a way of engaging with the world, of opening a window into different cultures – “dining table” travel, if you will. Continue reading
I’m naming this twelve-bean soup because that’s what I called it in Canada. Here in the UK, I have only ever found ten-bean mix. (I’m not sure which two types of beans have been omitted, but the soup seems none the worse for their absence.) Continue reading
Indian beans on toast is the happy result of one of those “what can I possibly make for dinner?” evenings. The kind where you’re that close to admitting defeat and ordering pizza.
But then you notice a couple of tins of cannellini beans you’d bought to have with the chicken breasts you forgot you’d already eaten, and decide that the onion with the shoots emerging from the top is still usable, and remember there are a few slices of sourdough bread in the freezer.
And with the last tin of tomatoes from the garage, you produce something that – while far from dinner party fare – is pretty tasty, if you do say so yourself.
Chicken, cannellini beans and kale is not the catchiest of names – more of a list of ingredients really. Which makes sense for a dish whose elements remain proudly distinct while combining in a deeply satisfying way.
I made this warm glass noodle and edamame salad to accompany some Vietnamese-style pork meatballs the other evening.
Edamame are great favourite with the kids – though what they like is best is eating them from the pods.
I love the way the word fasoulada rolls off the tongue. I’d order it just for the pleasure of saying “I’ll have the fasssooolaaadaaa please.”
And the girls are just as same. It’s “pass the fasssooolaaadaaa”, “my fasssooolaaadaaa is too hot” and so on throughout the meal.
Saltimbocca means ‘jumps into the mouth’ in Italian, presumably because it’s so delicious. It is good! Traditionally made with veal, I came across this recipe for pork saltimbocca in an issue of Waitrose magazine.
Actually it was the asparagus and cannellini bean salad that first caught my eye. The meat and salad combine beautifully to make a quick, tasty summer meal.
Now that I’ve overcome a lifelong pressure cooker phobia resulting from the applesauce incident, I prefer cooking dried beans to buying tinned.
It’s more work, but with recipes like tonno e fagioli, the difference in texture and taste is worth the extra effort. Continue reading
Once exotic, hummus is now a grocery store staple. It is also now considered children’s fare (at least in the UK), along with fish fingers, chipolatas, and those mini Babybel cheeses. Both my girls adore sandwiches filled with hummus and sliced black olives.
Other vegetables are getting in on the hummus act. Butternut squash, red pepper, spinach and beet hummus are all a thing. Call me old fashioned, but if it doesn’t contain chickpeas and tahini, it’s not hummus – it’s a dip. Continue reading
Lentils and smoked salmon make this a most satisfying main course salad. Easy to pull together on a weeknight, especially if you happen to have cooked lentils hanging about, as we often do. Continue reading
Piyaz is a traditional Turkish bean and onion salad, typically garnished with slices of tomato and hardboiled egg. The recipe varies from region to region – in Antalya they add tahini to the dressing, which gives it a pleasing mellowness. Continue reading
Last November in Hong Kong we ate the most delicious stir-fried green beans one evening. Finding ourselves without dinner reservations on Saturday night, we were turned away from several places before finally landing a table in one of the many restaurants in the iSquare building on Nathan Road.
These Gujarati green beans with mustard seeds and ginger make a lovely side dish to an Indian meal. The combination of stir frying and steaming results in vibrant green, crunchy beans. Continue reading
Very spicy delicious chickpeas is one of my favourite curries, and something I’ve been making forever. It seems like an excessive quantity of spices as you’re making it, but in time the sauce transforms into something thick, rich and delicious. Continue reading
This avocado lentil salad is one of my favourite lunches, and something I make whenever I have cooked lentils leftover from another dish. Actually, I enjoy eating it enough that I sometimes cook lentils in order to make it. Continue reading
There are lots of recipes for red lentil soup out there. Having tried a few, I’ve pretty much settled on this lemony red lentil soup, which is adapted from a Sophie Dahl recipe I came across in Waitrose magazine.
Falafel are another standby from my student days. With one tin of chickpeas you can produce a dozen crunchy little nuggets to eat alongside a salad, or stuff in a piece of pitta bread with tahini sauce.
Traditionally, falafel are made with uncooked chickpeas or fava beans that have been soaked overnight before being coarsely ground. This results in a nuttier texture than these falafel. While the outsides are crisp, inside they are soft – almost fluffy.
This chickpea green bean salad completely transformed my previously poor opinion of bean salads. It’s nothing like the mixed bean salads – tough kidney beans, black-eyed peas, chickpeas, and mushy tinned green beans swimming in oily vinegar – that I always avoided at potlucks and salad bars.
The recipe calls for two separate dressings – a garlicky one for the chickpeas, and a gingery one for the green beans. If time allows, it’s worth making the chickpea part of the salad a few hours ahead so they can marinate, then doing the green beans when it’s almost time to eat.
While it’s not much extra work to make both dressings, sometimes I just make the green bean dressing, and toss it all together at the same time. Another Madhur Jaffrey recipe from my trusty World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking. Continue reading
I was given a wonderful bag of produce from my friend Rachel’s allotment for my birthday last week. Courgettes, tomatillos, piquillo peppers, nasturtium flowers, electric daisies (which make your mouth tingle in a slightly alarming fashion), squash, French and runner beans – a generous sampling of their bountiful harvest.
Whenever I find myself with runner beans, this salad is the first thing I make. I love the vibrant colours and contrasting tastes and textures – crunchy croutons, tender chicken, just crisp beans, juicy tomatoes – high summer eating at its finest. Continue reading
Ten More Bites 