This black bean salad has a bit of an identity crisis. Is it a salad? A salsa? A filling?
When I worked in central London, I’d regularly pack this black bean salad for my lunch. It travels well and the flavours improve over time. I’d eat it as it is, maybe with some crackers, or use it to fill a wrap. It’s also good mixed with an equal amount of cooked quinoa or other grain.
I turned the too-soft butter beans from the other night’s dinner into this impromptu dip. You could easily make it with a tin of butter beans instead. Definitely one to make again – it will be a nice change from the girls’ regular lunch of hummus-olive-pitta sandwiches. Continue reading
This butter bean salad recipe comes from Yotam Ottolenghi’s vegetarian cookbook Plenty. (Apparently, so many Londoners are cooking his food these days, that a columnist in the Financial Times recently suggested that “to ottolengh” should become a verb.)
I’m always on the lookout for recipes that make use of sorrel (and lovage for that matter – I have a entire bush of that stuff…) The combination of feta and sumac sounded intriguing as well. Continue reading
Made baleadas for lunch to represent Honduras in our World Cup cooking challenge. This dish was right up our alley – the tortillas were soft and fluffy, and delicious filled with refried beans, cheese, slices of avocado and topped with chismol – a fresh vegetable salsa. I followed the flour tortilla recipe on the This is Honduras website, but just made my usual refried beans. Continue reading
Gallo pinto is the national dish of Costa Rica, making it the right choice for their World Cup dish. I was originally going to serve it for lunch with a fried egg on top, but we were all feeling a bit egged out. The fried plantains were a good way to go as well. My gallo pinto looks more brown and mushy than the pics I’ve seen. I think this was because I used freshly cooked rice, which was still soft and absorbent, instead of leftover cooked rice. I followed the recipe I found on The Hot Plate website for this meal. Continue reading
Refried beans are very easy to make, and taste so much better than the tinned ones you can buy. Continue reading
If there’s one recipe that stands out as a clear family favourite, it would definitely be chickpea pasta soup. I’ve been making this soup for years, and we haven’t tired of it yet. It’s easy to make, smells wonderful while it simmers, is delicious to eat, and tastes even better the following day.
It’s a great dinner to follow a big Sunday lunch, but filling enough to be the main event as well. It’s vegetarian, and popular with most kids I feed it to (aside from the odd garlic hater). I clipped the original recipe from the newspaper a good ten years ago, but it’s evolved into our own version. Continue reading
Ten More Bites 