Coronation Chickpeas (a year late)

 Ok, so it's now a year since Charles was crowned and I first heard of the concept of Coronation Chickpeas. It's somehow waited until now for me to try them. I certainly won't be leaving it long to make the next batch - it was yummy!

I looked at several recipes and settled on an amalgam of them with some tweaks of my own - I didn't fancy the raisins that many had in, and I felt some garlic would help things along tremendously. Next time I'll add some lemon juice and chopped coriander - I had intended to add those but they somehow never made it into the bowl.

Ingredients

Chickpeas - 1 can drained, or 125g dried, soaked, cooked and drained 

Mayo - 3 tbsp (vegan or not, as you wish)

2 cloves garlic, crushed

20g mango chutney

2 tsp curry powder (I used a mild Madras)

3 soft dried apricots, chopped into 5mm pieces 

Method

Mash 2/3 of the chickpeas roughly in a bowl. Add mayo, garlic, mango chutney, curry powder and apricots and stir well. Add the rest of the chickpeas and stir again. Add salt if you think it needs it.

If you're going to add a squeeze of lemon and some chopped coriander, this would be the time to do it, and stir again. 

Fab as a sandwich filling or on toast.

Roosevelt Beans (vegan version)

 At Roosevelt Lodge in Yellowstone National Park, a few years back, I had Roosevelt Beans, which the server assured me were “completely vegan”. They were delicious, but when I looked at the recipe card she gave me afterwards, they did not appear to be vegan at all. Sure, there were lots of beans in there - but, disappointingly, also rather a lot of meat. So, I had a go at making a fully vegan version. After a few attempts, this is the recipe I’ve settled on. I’ve also omitted the sugar from the original recipe as it was weirdly sweet.

Ingredients:

300g onions, chopped

30mL olive oil

6 cloves garlic, finely chopped 

450g frozen soya mince

2 teaspoons smoked paprika

1 tbsp whole grain mustard 

2 400g cans butter beans, drained

1 400g can baked beans

1 400g can kidney beans in chilli sauce (or taco beans in sauce)

1 400g can kidney beans (not in sauce), drained

400 mL water

8 tbsp tomato purée

Salt and pepper to taste

Method

Fry onion in olive oil gently for 10 mins until translucent and soft; add the garlic and fry another 1-2 mins. Add the soya mince, smoked paprika, mustard and stir well for another couple of minutes. Add all the beans, the water and tomato purée and bring to the boil. Simmer for 30 mins or so. Add salt and pepper if needed. Enjoy with a green vegetable and rice.

Agg

Butter bean, mushroom and coriander salad

375g dry butter beans (or you could use 4 x 400g tins, drained and rinsed)
500g button mushrooms, sliced
3 large cloves smoked garlic, finely chopped
1 lemon
3 heaped teaspoonfuls ground coriander
2 tablespoonfuls olive oil
A few sprigs flat-leaf parsley, chopped
Salt and ground black pepper

Soak and cook butter beans; drain.
Put garlic and olive oil in large pan (I used a wok) and sizzle gently for 1 minute. Add sliced mushrooms and stir around until they are starting to soften and get juicy.
Grate the zest off the lemon and add to pan, then squeeze it and add its juice to the pan, along with the coriander. Stir well, then add the cooked butter beans and chopped parsley, and heat the beans through. Add salt and ground black pepper to taste.

Plant-based and experimental

As of 9th January this year I thought I'd give plant-based eating a go.
Whole food, limited salt, no added sugar, no added oil.


My cholesterol levels are high, which isn't great news; also, with diabetes and high blood pressure in the family, and having lost my Mum to a devastating stroke in 2014, it was time to start eating to get healthier.


So, I tried it for a week, to see how I felt at the end of it. That was over 9 weeks ago now, and I'm still going (plant)-strong. The biggest surprise was that various long-term aches and pains cleared up or improved significantly; I started sleeping a whole lot better and was able to reduce 2 of the long-term medications I was taking by 50% and 60% with no ill effects.


The Engine2 Seven-day Rescue Challenge group on Facebook has been a huge support and source of inspiration along the way. I've watched Forks Over Knives and a lot of the videos on nutritionfacts.org and going plant-based makes a lot of sense.


Today's challenge was to see if I could make a version of the warm Puy lentil and cranberry salad that I've been making for a while that was better compliant with E2 7DR guidelines.
I reduced the oil from 45 ml to 15 ml and the salt to 1/2 a level teaspoonful and it still tastes good. This time, I didn't put in the parsley (because I didn't have any) but the leaves from the celery went in instead.

The Baked Beans Experiment

Yesterday I had baked beans on toast for lunch. I was struck by how overwhelmingly sweet they were. Reading the can label, I saw that there were 5.5g sugar in every 100g which is pretty dreadful - so a 210g portion contained about 12g sugar. Why would anyone add this amount of sugar to a savoury food?

Today, I thought I would have a go at making my own baked beans. With no added sugar.

340g dry beans, soaked overnight, then boiled until done (I used a mix of beans which contained chickpeas, haricot beans, flageolet beans and aduki beans)
160g chopped onion
200g diced carrot
130g diced celery
4 cloves garlic
1tbsp vegetable oil
1 can chopped tomatoes
500g passata
1 teasp ground cumin
1 teasp dried oregano
1 teasp salt

I softened the veg in the oil for about 10 mins, then added the chopped tomatoes, passata, salt, cumin and oregano and simmered, covered, for 30 mins.
Then I liquidised the sauce, poured it over the cooked beans and simmered for another 30 mins.

Verdict: a bit on the sloppy side - the sauce to bean ratio was rather too high - but it tasted good. I had a ladleful of the beans over a slice of toast in a soup bowl for lunch. I've since added a can of chickpeas to the remainder.

French Onion Soup

I'd been meaning to make this for a long time. On Saturday I stocked up with sufficient onions etc to construct some this Sunday for lunch, as well as having enough onions for the rest of the week. We do seem to get through a lot of onions in this household.
I did some research before starting to cook, which left me somewhat confused. To flour, or not to flour? Wine, or beer? How much sugar? And should it be white or brown? Delia Smith, or an untested recipe from the internet? And what had happened to the piece of French bread I had earmarked for the croutons? Turns out Younger Son had consumed that already, so  it was good old English bread. But at least that meant that I felt less guilty about using cheddar rather than gruyere.
As usual, I ended up with a hybrid... but it tasted good.

800g onions, peeled and thinly sliced. This resulted in a lot of tears.
50g butter
3 cloves of garlic, chopped finely
1/2 level teaspoon granulated sugar
One can of beer (I was too mean to use wine; Tesco Everyday Value Bitter was fine)
2 pints of beef stock (2 elderly Tesco beef stock cubes and one beef Oxo cube)
Salt and pepper

And, for the cheese croutons:
4 slices bread
160g grated cheddar

Melt the butter in a heavy bottomed pan, and cook the onions, garlic and sugar gently together for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Delia assured me that it would be browning nicely after 30 mins, and this browning would improve the colour and flavour of the soup. It wasn't even starting to look as if it was browning after 30 mins, so I turned up the heat for another 5 mins, stirring all the time. The onions reduced in volume somewhat, but stubbornly refused to brown.
I shrugged, poured the stock and beer in, brought it to the boil and simmered gently for a further hour and 15 minutes, then assembled the croutons, as follows:
Toast the bread; put it on a baking tray and cover with grated cheese. Try not to leave any bare bits. Pop the tray of cheesed-up bread under the grill for about 3 minutes until it is bubbling and starting to brown. While the cheese is grilling, put the soup into bowls. Float one "crouton" (or "cheese-on-toast", as we call it around these parts) in each bowl. (Yes, I know you're supposed to put the soup in bowls under the grill with floating croutons in it, but my soup bowls are wide and shallow with big rims and I don't think I could fit even 2 under at once.)

The family were somewhat bemused by the concept - "Cheese-on-toast? In onion soup?? but tucked in with gusto. I will definitely prepare this again, but next time I think I will slice the onions in a food processor as slicing them lovingly by hand was a rather tearful experience.

Brown Betty

So, I had some leftover bread to use, and also some cooking apples were lurking shyly in the bottom of the fridge, and somewhere from the deep recesses of my memory came a recollection that making a Brown Betty might be a good way of combining the two. I'd never actually tried making one before, so spent a little while googling recipes before settling on my own take on it. But really - apples, butter, brown sugar, cinnamon, breadcrumbs - what's not to like? Even if I did have rather worrying memories of Michael Crawford playing Frank Spencer, alternating with Ram Jam's Black Betty, playing on my internal jukebox as I made it.

I took:
225g sliced wholemeal bread (all the recipes I saw said white bread, but I had only wholemeal) and made it into crumbs in my food processor.
90g butter
100g brown sugar
1.5 level teaspoons ground cinnamon (it was supposed to be 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and 0.5 teaspoons mixed spice, but my hand slipped when adding the cinnamon...)
and mixed these all together over a gentle heat.
(next time I do this I will melt the butter in the saucepan first, stir in the sugar and cinnamon and then the breadcrumbs; it will be a lot easier to mix)
Next, the apples:
4 smallish Bramley apples - about 650g before peeling - I peeled, cored and sliced them thinly, and put half of them in an even layer at the bottom of a Pyrex casserole dish.
1 dessertspoon of sugar sprinkled over these (son #2 grumbles if things are not sweet enough)
Then, I sprinkled on about 40% of the breadcrumb mixture.
Next, the rest of the sliced apples, then another dessertspoon of sugar, then the rest of the breadcrumb mix.
I finished off by sprinkling 2 heaped teaspoons of white granulated sugar over the top of it, which contrasted nicely with the brown breadcrumb mix.
Baked at 170 degC for about 45 minutes - until the apples were soft and the breadcrumbs had crisped up on the top. (If you use white breadcrumbs, they go brown, apparently. If you use brown breadcrumbs, they just stay brown and perhaps go a bit browner. Hard to tell.)

Absolutely delicious, with or without custard, hot or cold. The whole family approved of it, and I have been granted permission to make it again.