The Accidental Vegetarian - Rosa's Hearty Chestnut Pie

Today, I developed a recipe I want to cook for Christmas. It's a vegetarian main, which tastes nicely hearty, meaty, even a little game-y. And it's plenty naughty, with a big glass of red wine and a good amount of butter.

Ingredients
For the base mixture
3 banana shallots (or 6 English shallots), peeled and sliced into rings
10g of butter (for frying the shallots)

200g cooked and peeled chestnuts, roughly chopped

200g chestnut mushrooms, quartered
1 medium-sized carrot, quartered and sliced into quarter inch pieces
2 sprigs of rosemary, stalks removed, chopped finely
20cl Bourgogne pinot noir
freshly ground pepper and sea salt

For the mushroom sauce
25g of butter (for the roux)
25g flour
500ml of mushroom stock (or 1 mushroom stock cube dissolved in 500ml hot water)

For the lid
a tiny knob of butter for greasing
20cm by 20cm piece of puff pastry
1 egg yolk

Cooking the base mixture
Fry the shallots in the butter on a high heat for approximately ten minutes, until soft and browned.

The shallots before they're browned	The shallots after browning

Remove the shallots from the pan and set aside. Add the mushrooms, chestnuts, carrots and rosemary to the still hot pan, with just enough butter to prevent it from sticking. Fry at a medium high heat until well browned, about 10 minutes.

The chestnuts	Mushrooms, chestnuts, carrots and rosemary after browning

Once the mixture is nicely browned, and the carrots have softened, add all of the wine, and let this reduce until it is a thick syrup. This takes about 10 minutes.

Adding the wine	The wine is reduced to a syrup

This is your base mixture for the pie. Remove the pan from the heat and set aside. 

The mushroom sauce

Now you are going to make the sauce. For this, you'll have to make a roux from 25 grams of butter and 25 grams of flour, as follows: melt the butter in a pan at a low to medium heat, then add the flour and stir continuously until it forms a dough-like ball.. Then, slowly add your mushroom stock, stirring continuously to prevent lumps, until the stock and the roux have combined into a smooth, silky sauce. Season to taste; be careful with the salt, because stock is already quite salty.

Stir butter and flour until a ball forms	Add stock and stir continously

You will now have a sauce you can add to the base mixture. Fold the sauce into the base mixture until well mixed, then add to a pie dish (I've used a 20cm round ceramic dish with high sides).

Added the sauce	The sauce will colour because of the red pigment in the syrup

The lid
All you need to do now is add a lid to the pie, and bake it. Preheat your oven to 200°C and start on the lid. Grease the sides of the dish your mixture doesn't touch. Then, cut out a 20cm circle, pinching in the sides to make it fit over the base mixture and sauce, and put it on top. Beat the egg yolk, and brush the lid with the yolk. Make a few holes to make sure the air can escape. Then, add the pie to the oven and bake for 45 minutes. If the lid gets a little too dark, cover with foil to protect it.

The lid	The lid brushed with egg yolk

The pie was finished so quickly, I didn't have time to take a picture of the finished product! :)

Sweetcorn and chicken soup

Last night, I dreamt I was making two kinds of soup - but my mother messed both of them up by putting in some extra ingredients, and they turned out horribly. Finally, I tried a third batch (some kind of black bean soup) and caught my mother throwing in some limes. The soup came out great. Thanks, dream mum! Next time I've got a batch of black beans, I have to try that.

It must have been the chicken and sweetcorn soup I made from scratch last night, sitting in the fridge, sending rays of soup-panic my way. Because soup is difficult; I think what I'm trying to capture in a soup is a food memory. That may be why I'm so picky. Chicken soup, for instance, isn't chicken soup without some sweetcorn. Vegetable soup isn't complete without potatoes. And tomato soup can't have any other veg in it. Why? I don't know. But the wrong kind of soup gives me a nasty headache. Or bad dreams. The problem is, food memories don't have recipes. So you have to make them from scratch, very patiently, and experiment.

Chicken soup done right - serves 6, takes 3 hours to prepare + left overnight
Carcass of a 1 kg organic chicken (back, neck, tail, bones etc.)
3 sticks of celery
3 medium-sized carrots
1 large onion
3 cloves of garlic
2 organic chicken stock cubes
1 can of sweetcorn (300 grams)
1 can of bamboo shoots (150 grams)

1 chicken breast

salt and pepper

Put the pieces of chicken carcass in a pot with a teaspoon of salt and cover completely with cold water. Bring to a boil, then turn down the heat to a simmer. A lot of white fluff (the impurities off the chicken carcass) will come to the surface. Skim these off until the surface remains clean.Then put the lid on the pot and let simmer for 1.5 hours. Then remove the chicken pieces and let them cool. Chop up the celery, carrots and onion into small cubes and put these in with the chicken stock. Add the stock cubes and stir. Let the soup simmer for another 1.5 hours. Once the chicken has cooled, strip off the nicer pieces of flesh and add to the soup. When the 1.5 hours are up, remove the pot from the heat and let it cool off before putting in the fridge overnight (don't put it in the fridge immediately, or the other things in your fridge will warm up and spoil quicker!). The next day, remove the layer of fat on the surface of the soup. Bring to a simmer again, then add the corn and bamboo shoots. Chop the chicken breast into bite-sized chunks and add these to the soup as well. Once the breast pieces have cooked, serve. This soup is nice served simply with artisan bread and butter.

Hash browns

I woke up yesterday hankering for a fry-up, so I made my own hash browns  They were tasty, crispy and salty and would go well with some sunny side up eggs with runny yolk and grilled tomatoes.

Ingredients

4 medium-sized white potatoes
1 small onion
sea salt and freshly ground pepper
1 egg
sunflower oil

Peel the potatoes and the onion. Use a food processor with grater attachment (or a simple box grater) to grate both the potatoes and onions. Put them in a clean tea towel and squeeze the excess liquid out of the veg by twisting the closed towel above your kitchen sink. A very satisfying experience. Repeat this motion a couple of times until the potatoes and onion are quite dry. Now put them in a big bowl and crack in the egg with it. Season generously with salt and pepper. Mix the ingredients well. Now heat about 1 inch of sunflower oil in a frying pan until a bit of the potato bubbles up as soon as you put it in (test this!) but before the oil starts to smoke. Put in a spoonful of the potato mixture and squeeze flat with a slotted turner. (I fried three hash browns at the time - this depends on how big your pan is. Don't crowd the pan.) Turn when the bottom bit has turned a nice golden brown colour, and remove to a plate lined with kitchen towel when both sides are browned (this took about 3 minutes).

Restaurant review: Allans, Hay's Galleria

Last Saturday, my fiancee wanted to buy me breakfast. Both of our favourite greasy spoon cafes were closed though, so we tried a new French bistro at Hay's Galleria (near London Bridge) called Allans. Why Allans? Well, it was nearest to our usual breakfast hunch. It looked alright from the outside. And a guy very convincingly, when asked "Do you serve breakfast?" said "Yes." then gave us a tasty bit of crepe with sugar to lure us in. Hurrah, we thought! But never had we been so wrong. Never.

We sat down upstairs in a cozy but distressingly kitchy and faux seating area, full of couches, mis-matched chandeliers (some of them with bits of wiring sticking out) and trapped tourists. We took one glance at the menu, then ordered two vegetarian breakfasts from the nice but awfully shy waitress. She gave us some 'freshly squeezed orange juice' which was most definitely not fresh. It came straight from a pack and it had a sugary aftertaste. Almost like, well, store-bought orange juice with sugar. Another far grumpier waitress came quickly, served us two plates of the most distressed version of an English breakfast ever seen, without even a word or friendly smile. She nodded, then left, as if to say: "Ahh, yu zilly peeple, orderink an Engleez brek-fast at mon love-ly Frènch restaurant, I will teech yu un lesson! I will zerve yu... an English monztrozity! Your fa-zer was a hamstèr et your mo-zer zmelled of le elderberries!"

The plate contained the following: 1 deep-fried store-bought tasteless vegetarian burger (instead of the vegetarian sausage on the menu); 1 big oilspil of beans that when tasted turned out to be extremely acidic and actually made us wonder whether 1) the stuff had gone off, or 2) the stuff had gone off and they had tried to mask this by adding a cup of vinegar; 1 pile of obviously tinned, grey-greenish, slightly warmed mushrooms that were especially foul-tasting (a bit like the beans, actually); 1 tiny omelet (this was one tasty omelet, we must admit, but we had ordered scrambled eggs); 1 very sad pile of iceberg lettuce with a slice of cucumber (instead of the tomato that was on the menu); 2 slices of brown toast with a cup of butter. We tried a little bit of each, then looked at one another, and raised one eyebrow (a move amusingly repeated almost exactly by the couple that came in after us and ordered the same).

When we told the shy-but-nice waitress, "We're sorry, but this tastes off," she did not attempt to argue, but immediately said: "Would you like something else?" Good service, that. We ordered two crepes, hoping for the lovely morsels that lured us into this odd restaurant in the first place. Then the grumpy lady came to our table, and with a graceful French arm movement produced a plate of cake. "On ze house," she muttered, then left. The cake, it turned out, was not as acidic as the beans. It was a bit... odd. Perhaps we were barbarians, under-appreciating a carefully produced French delica-zy, but we could've sworn there was something sour in the cake as well.

A few minutes after we finished our cake (in the meantime entertaining ourselves by observing a teenager handing out flyers for the cafe in the laziest way possible) we got our crepes. They were OK: the Nutella and banana one was mostly Nutella with some crepe, the plain banana crepe was alright. They turned out to cost about 5 pounds each, which was a bit pricey for our portion size. But, well, let's be honest and give praise where praise is due: the crepes didn't taste of vinegar.

Aubergine and potato winter stew

Once when I was still a student, me and my fiancee decided to check out a Turkish restaurant down the street from my flat. There was nearly no-one in there, but the food was excellent. One dish I still remember was an aubergine stew that was so tender and meaty it made me forget all the bad ratatouille I had ever had.
The tomato sauce it was sitting in reminded me of  a simple and beautiful dish I had in Antwerp one summer in what was then advertised as the cheapest restaurant in town. Basically, it was potatoes that had been stewed in tomato sauce until they nearly fell apart. Inspired by both dishes, I've made a hearty winter stew. It's vegan, but only by accident. If you do want to have some meat in it, try adding some cubed, fatty lamb neck or shoulder when you add the potatoes and add another 20 minutes to your simmering time.

Ingredients (serves 4)

An aubergine

4 medium-sized white potatoes
1 aubergine
2 400ml tins of peeled tomatoes
400ml can of cannellini beans
1 medium-sized onion
2 cloves of garlic
125 ml red wine
1 tbsp paprika
1 tsp cumin
3 tbsp olive oil

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Slice the aubergine into 1 cm thick slices and put on a plate. Sprinkle generously with salt in order to drain them of some of their bitter juices and make them more tender. This takes about 30 minutes. Just before this is done, roughly chop the onion and garlic and fry these on a medium heat in a large casserole pan in 1 tbsp olive oil. Peel the potatoes and slice into 1 cm cubes. When the onion is softened and slightly browned add the potatoes and the rest of the olive oil. Now carefully remove the salt and the juices from the aubergine with some paper kitchen towels. Slice the aubergine into 1 cm cubes as well, and add to the pan. Stir occasionally, and wait for the aubergines and potatoes to colour a little. Then add the peeled tomatoes, cannellini beans, wine, paprika and cumin. Once the stew comes to a boil, turn down the heat a little, put the lid on the pan and simmer for about 60 minutes. Serve with crusty bread (I used ciabatta).

Well-researched Pea Soup

Like I blogged a couple of days ago, I got a food processor for my birthday. But there were some other presents that went along with it, one of which deserves a recipe of its own -- The Flavour Thesaurus, by Niki Segnit. Highly recommended! Segnit has looked at 99 different ingredients (from cauliflower to caviar) and tried them in pairs to see what goes well with what. This results in some pretty nice-sounding combinations I've never tried before, so it's a great source of inspiration. The book doesn't include many recipes, so you're pretty much left to your own devices -- in my particular case, a pretty spiffy new device, the food processor! ;-) I'll be honest with you, I was at a boring meeting today and by the end of it all I could think about was how to use my new-acquired flavour knowledge in a recipe. This is the result: a hearty pea soup.

Ingredients (for about 1.5 litres of soup)

2 parsnips
1 medium onion
150 grams of potatoes
750 grams of frozen peas
1 chicken stock cube, dissolved into 500 ml of boiling water to give 500 ml of chicken stock
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
olive oil
some rashers of streaky bacon to serve

Slice the cleaned parsnips, onions and potatoes thinly and fry them in a large pan with two tablespoons of olive oil. (If they stick to the bottom of the pan, add a few tablespoons of water.) Once the onions have softened, turn down the heat and let these vegetables stew in their own juices for 10 minutes.
Add the stock and season well, then add the frozen peas. Turn the heat up, bring the soup back to the boil, then turn down the heat again. Now let the soup simmer until all the vegetables are easy to pulse in your food processor. (For a more rustic version, you could leave the soup as-is, without pulsing it.)
Fry the rashers of bacon in a hot frying pan until crispy and put them on the soup as croutons when you serve.

Spinach and ricotta lasagne

I made this lasagne because I really like spinach and wanted to focus on that flavour alone. It is a very easy recipe: you don't even need to make a bechamel sauce. I left the bechamel sauce out because I wanted this to be a relatively light dish, compared with the stodgy bechamel lasagnes you can buy ready-made. And on top of this, it's very quick! If you're multitasking you can have the lasagne in the oven within 15 minutes, and then it only needs about 25 minutes to finish cooking.

Ingredients
4 rashers of smoked streaky bacon

500g (frozen) chopped spinach
200g ricotta
1 big ball of mozzarella
1 clove of garlic
1 medium onion
200g dried (egg) lasagne sheets
nutmeg
olive oil
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Parboil the lasagne sheets by first bringing water to the boil, adding the sheets and then letting them cook for about 5 minutes. Drain and add some olive oil to separate the sheets. Meanwhile, heat some olive oil in a frying pan large enough for all of the spinach. Chop the onion and garlic finely and slice the bacon into inch-long bits. Add to the pan and wait for the onions to soften and the bacon to brown a little. Add the spinach and stir continuously, until either the spinach has wilted (if you're using fresh spinach) or melted (if you're using frozen spinach). Season well with the nutmeg, salt and pepper. Then keep on a high heat until all the excess water in the spinach has evaporated and you're left with quite a dry mixture. Now assemble the lasagne: use some olive oil to grease an oven-proof lasagne dish. First put in a layer of spinach, then a layer of lasagne sheets (covering the spinach completely), then a thin layer of ricotta (spread nicely using the back of a spoon). Repeat. The top layer should be spinach. Slice or rip pieces of the mozzarella ball to cover the dish. Put in a 200C oven for 20 minutes. Once the mozzarella has completely melted and the lasagne sheets are quite soft, turn on the grill of your oven and grill the lasagne for about 5 minutes. This will make the top layer nice and brown. Keep checking though, you don't want to burn the cheese!

Parsnip and nutmeg soup

This is a very simple soup, combining the earthy flavours of parsnips and nutmeg. This is the first dish I've made with my lovely new piece of kitchen equipment, a 1.4 litre food processor. Yay! I am insanely happy with it, a birthday present from my mum.

Ingredients
2 carrots
2 sticks of celery
2 onions
2 parsnips
a generous serving of grated nutmeg (about 3 tsp)
500 ml chicken stock, or 1 chicken stock cube
cream
olive oil
cracked black pepper
sea salt

Roughly chop the carrots, celery, onions and parsnip. Fry them in a little olive oil until everything is soft. Add 500 ml of chicken stock (or, simply 500 ml of water and a stock cube), the nutmeg and the seasoning. Bring to the boil, then turn down the heat and let the soup simmer. Just before serving, whiz the soup up with your NEW FOOD PROCESSOR. Alternatively, you could use a masher, but the soup won't be as refined. Serve with a little splash of cream.

Next week

While I'm getting over a cold by eating a spicy Indian lentil soup, made from ingredients in my cupboard, I'm online ordering groceries for next week. I love doing that, it allows me to plan my meals ahead and budget things a lot better than in my days as a student, when I went out to get groceries nearly every day. For the coming week, I've managed to find a few ingredients that I'll use for several meals. I've also decided to try out a new cuisine: I've bought the ingredients for Chinese egg fried rice and crispy pork belly. I love Chinese food, but I've never cooked it before, so that will be exciting!  Of course as I'm cooking for two, a 800g pork belly is far too much for one night; I've decided to split the pork in half and use the other half for a roast pork belly with apple confit, kale and potatoes. Another new recipe that has the same autumnal feeling is a parsnip and ginger soup. Then, I'm going Italian with a spinach lasagna, a tagliatelle with creamy mushrooms, and some veggie pizzas. Last this week I'm going back to lentil soups, making one with red and green lentils and some cannelini beans. Yum! I'll put some of the recipes online when I've tried them, dear readers :)

Indian-style vegetarian burgers, plus a carrot side salad

Yesterday I made Indian-style vegetarian burgers again, this time with a curry paste spice mix and 1:1  chickpeas to (what my supermaket calls) 'mixed beans and pulses' (this includes black eyed beans, soy beans, kidney beans etc). They turned out quite well, the beans made them a little softer than my other veggie burgers.

Indian spice veggie burgers
Ingredients (for 8 small burgers or 4 persons)
an inch-long piece of root ginger
3 cloves of garlic
1 tsp garam masala (an Indian spice mix)
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp ground, dried coriander
2 tsp whole yellow mustard seeds
1/2 - 1 red chili
the stalks of a 40g bunch of fresh coriander (you use the leaves for the side salad - see below)
a 400g tin of chickpeas, drained
a 400g tin of 'mixed beans and pulses' (or just some beans you particularly like - I'd suggest mellow-flavoured ones though, like kidney beans -- black beans are probably a little too strong in flavour and colour)
1 egg
flour for dusting

sunflower oil


Chop up the coriander stalks, ginger and garlic very finely. Add these to the spices and pour in about 2 tsp of the sunflower oil. Make a curry paste out of the mixture, either by whizzing it in a food processor or by using a pestle and mortar. (If you're extra keen you can first heat the dry spices in a dry frying pan to release the flavour...)

Put the curry mixture in a large bowl and put aside. Now, ground up the chickpeas and beans in either a food processor or using the pestle and mortar. Do it in batches if you're not sure it will fit. Now, add the ground up chickpea-bean mixture to the bowl with the curry. Add an egg. Form 8 small patties out of the mixture, dust these with flour and put in the fridge for 30 minutes. Heat up about 4 tbsp of the sunflower oil in a frying pan and fry 4 of the patties for about 6 minutes (3 on each side) or until golden brown and hot. Repeat for the other 4 patties. Serve with chunky chips and a fresh side salad like the one below.

As a side dish I made the following.

Indian-style carrot side salad
Ingredients
4 large carrots
peel and juice of half a lemon
olive oil
the leaves of a 40g bunch of fresh coriander
40 grams of shaved almonds

Heat a dry frying pan and add the almonds, shaking continuously so that the almonds don't burn but just turn a nice golden brown. Grate the carrots very finely. Add the coriander leaves and lemon peel. Make a dressing 1:1 of lemon juice and olive oil and dress the salad with that. Scatter over the almonds. Enjoy with the veggie burgers (alternatively, this is a nice fresh side dish to go with a curry).

Mushroom and bacon wraps

Autumn! Seems like there's more yellowing leaves every day. We have a tree in front of our window now that we've moved, which is brilliant because it's a constant reminder of the season. It makes me want to cook rich, flavourful dishes: pies, soups, stews. And this wrap, a very simple recipe that has a lot of autumnal flavour.

Mushrooms!

Ingredients (2 persons)
300 grams of mixed mushrooms; I used a 1:1 ratio of chestnut and oyster mushrooms
100 grams of smoked streaky bacon (in rashers)
1 red onion
4 (wholemeal) wraps
1 tbsp paprika
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
1 tbsp olive oil

Heat the olive oil in a frying pan. Chop up the onion very finely and fry. Add the rashers of bacon. Fry until the onion is caramelized somewhat. Meanwhile, slice the chestnut mushrooms and roughly chop the oyster mushrooms into bite-sized chunks. Add to the bacon and onion. Now add the paprika and season to taste. You don't need much salt because you're using bacon! Fry until all the excess liquid of the mushrooms has bubbled away and the mushrooms have browned a bit. Heat the wraps in a microwave (should take about 20 seconds). Put the mixture on your wraps and serve, perhaps with some refried black beans.

Tofu?! Yes, you can.

Whilst my noodles are soaking in hot water, and the rest of my prep is just waiting for me to heat up the stove and start cooking, I thought I'd update what I'm making today! It's really nice because it involves tofu. Most people I know fall into either of two categories. The first kind of people are not vegetarians themselves, so would never dream of cooking with tofu. But one of these days, they're going to have to cook for a friend or family member who is vegetarian, in which case they're going to serve a delicious 'tofu crumbled through tomato sauce served with spaghetti'. You know, because tofu is just like meat, only squishier. Yuk. The second group are vegetarians, who think tofu might be nice to add to a dish but feel a bit timid when they have to face one of those big blocks of processed white stuff, so rather opt for stuff made from tofu. Like smaller blocks. Today, I am going for a third option: I, a non-vegetarian, will face the processed block, and transform it! Make it delicious! It will be magical.

Ingredients
3 tablespoons of sambal (or, alternatively, of ground up whole medium hot chilis)
Enough oil to cover about a quarter inch of your wok
1 scary-looking block of tofu

Make sure the tofu is at least a little dry. You can do this by folding it into a clean tea towel and putting a brick on top of it (or just squeezing gently yourself), or you can do it with kitchen towels if you prefer. I squeezed the tofu, and I am proud of it.

Slice the tofu into finger-sized pieces, about a quart inch high. Heat up the oil in your wok, add the sambal and stir until you have a chili-flavoured oil with little chili seeds floating in it. Watch out for the hot oil! Now add the first batch of the tofu pieces, just so many as will cover the bottom of your pan with a little room to flip them over later. After about 5 minutes (depending on how hot your oil is!), the bottom of the tofu will be crispy and chilicious, so you can flip the tofu. Wait another 5 minutes or until the rest is crisp and transfer this batch onto a plate lined with kitchen towels. That way, you'll drain the oil. Now do the next batch, until you end up with the tofu in the photo!

Hurray, you've conquered the tofu! Make a stir fry with this, some bok choi, water chestnuts, ginger, coriander, garlic, sesame seeds, soy sauce and noodles - it will be delicious.

A decent curry

I've just come back to the UK after a long holiday. I've also moved into a new studio, with (finally!!) a a proper kitchen that has room for all of my cooking equipment, the different kinds of flour I have, all the herbs and spices, and (most importantly) I can now give my pestle and mortar a prominent in-view spot on the kitchen counter. So what else could I cook, in my very own new kitchen, than a curry? This one's simple, but you make it from scratch so it feels pretty impressive.

My curry when it just started to boil

Ingredients
A 2-inch piece of fresh root ginger
2 cloves of garlic
2 tsp dried cumin
1 tsp dried coriander
1 tsp mustard seeds
2 tsp of tomato puree
A small bunch of fresh coriander
2 tomatoes
200 grams of chickpeas
2 tsp oil (neutral in taste)

Peel and roughly chop the garlic and ginger. Roughly chop the fresh coriander, stalks included. Put the garlic, ginger, fresh coriander, spices, tomato puree and oil in the mortar and crush everything with the pestle until you get a fine paste. The leaves of the coriander will probably just wilt, don't worry if they still show as little green specks in your paste. Heat a frying pan on medium heat, put in the curry paste you've just made, add the chickpeas and about 200 ml of water. Slice the tomatoes into quarters and add this to the curry. Bring to the boil and wait until the water has evaporated and you're left with tender chickpeas. The tomatoes will break down, so you can pick out the skin of the tomato before eating. Serve in a bowl with rice or naan bread, or just eat as-is, enjoying your new kitchen :-)

Breakfast of (Hungover) Champions

After writing the black bean nachos recipe a few months back, I've been coming back to that recipe to make slight changes so that I can eat black beans more often. Today, they made for an excellent spicy breakfast. To keep it simple, I always keep some fried black beans in one-person portions in my freezer. I added some squash leftovers from last night (recipe coming soon!) and sprinkled over some feta cheese - voila, a breakfast of (hungover) champions. (Incidentally, try a web search for breakfast of champions - I find you either see incredibly healthy wholegrains or something extremely fatty. For shame, internet!)

Prep
As with the nachos you need to boil the black beans in water with a few bay leaves, an onion, some garlic and salt; then, you fry the beans in a little olive oil with (fresh) shallots and garlic, and sprinkle over some fresh lime juice. In this case, I would advice you add a (few) chili(s) to the fry-up with the shallots and garlic to make the breakfast nice and spicy. Then, you freeze this in one-person batches.

The squash side I made by peeling a squash, chopping up its flesh in 1 inch cubes, adding 4 tablespoons of tomato puree, and frying this in olive oil. After a few minutes, I added two cups of water and some freshly ground pepper and sea salt. After letting this simmer for at least 45 minutes (or until the squash is soft enough to easily bite through), I added a few sprigs of fresh curly parsley.

Ingredients
1 portion of frozen fried black beans (about half a bowl)
1 portion of leftover squash (about half a bowl)
75 grams of feta cheese
A few sprigs of fresh curly parsley

Defrost the beans in a bowl in your microwave. Push to one side of the bowl, add the squash, and sprinkle over the cheese. Put in a full power microwave for another 2 minutes or until the food is piping hot. Sprinkle over some fresh curly parsley. Enjoy!

Quick spinach, cream and lemon spaghetti

There's nothing better than my new pestle and mortar. With it, I made the following quick recipe. It takes about 10 minutes to prepare. If you don't have a pestle and mortar, you can use fine sea salt and freshly ground peppercorns. Make sure the peel of the lemon is grated very finely. Press the garlic. Mix these. It is not half as satisfying as mashing stuff with a big blunt instrument, though.

Ingredients (for 2)

1 clove of garlic, peeled
1 tsp of whole peppercorns
1/2 tsp of coarse sea salt
Grated peel of half a lemon
100 grams of creme fraiche
3 handfuls of well-washed baby spinach
125 grams of spaghetti

Cook the spaghetti until al dente. Make sure to keep a cup of the cooking liquid (easiest by just submerging a cup in the pan while you're cooking the pasta - make sure it's nice and starchy before you do this). Mash the garlic, peppercorns, sea salt and lemon peel into a fine paste using the pestle and mortar. Mix with the creme fraiche. Drain the spaghetti, then add the paste and creme fraiche and the preserved cooking liquid to the pan. Mix until covered. Add the spinach and stir until wilted. Serve quickly.

Squash & Black Bean Tortillas

Squash is a tricky ingredient. It needs to be peeled, diced and the seeds need to be taken out. Somehow, though, I find the entire exercise quite satisfying (and not as disturbing as, say, chopping up an entire chicken). It feels as if I've made an effort. It's not really that much work - five minutes tops, if you have a sharp knife. And once you have some tasty bite-sized dice of squash, you can make some lovely things. This is a filling for tortillas.

Ingredients (serves 3-4)
2 shallots, finely sliced
1 butternut squash (approx. 1 kg), diced into bite-sized chunks
250 grams leftover boiled black beans

olive oil
2 tbsp tomato purée
3 dried bay leaves
3 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp dried chili flakes
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar
sea salt
freshly ground pepper

150 grams feta cheese
plain flour tortillas

Fry the shallots with the bay leaves in plenty of olive oil until softened. Add the squash and tomato puree and stir until everything is covered in the puree. Add the beans, cumin, chili, vinegar, salt and pepper and 400 ml of water (two glasses). Stir and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down to medium. Let the mixture boil for about 30 minutes or until the squash has softened. Serve in heated tortillas sprinkled with feta cheese.

The Accidental Vegetarian - Black Beans Nachos

Black beans! Such amazing things. I put 250 grams of stone-hard tiny black beans in water to soak overnight and the water turned a deep purple, the beans swelled up to twice their normal size and when I boiled them for about an hour they turned into deep purple soft little creamy bites. Yes, it takes some time to get them where you want them - but then they're very, very tasty indeed.

Top left: dried beans; top right: swollen beans;
bottom left: boiled beans; bottom right: black bean nachos.

Ingredients - for two

Boiled black beans

175 grams of dried black beans

3 dried bayleaves

1 onion, peeled and quartered

3 cloves of garlic, squashed but still in their little jackets

2 tsp salt

Fried black beans

The cooked beans (see below)

2 shallots, finely sliced

1 clove of garlic, finely chopped

olive oil

half a lime

Salsa

2 tomatoes, finely chopped

1 green chili, finely sliced

olive oil

half a lime

Extras

1 avocado, skin and pit removed, halved and sliced finely

100 grams of feta cheese

2/3 bag of tortilla chips

Cooking the beans (start the evening before)

Put the beans in plenty of cold water to soak overnight (I used half a litre). They will swell up. The next day, drain the beans and put in a pot with a litre of fresh cold water, the bayleaves, onion and garlic. Don't put in the salt yet (this will apparently keep the beans from going soft). Now bring the water to the boil and leave it boiling for 20 minutes. Then turn the heat down to low, add the salt and let the beans bubble away for another half an hour. Drain, then take out the bayleaves, onion and garlic.

Frying the beans

Heat up some olive oil in a frying pan. Fry the shallots and garlic until soft, then add the beans. Stir for a few minutes, then turn down the heat. Add the juice of half a lime. 

Serving

While the beans are frying, divide the tortilla chips over two plates, evenly covering the surface. Top with crumbled feta cheese. Put each plate in the microwave for 25 seconds at full power. Mix the tomatoes, chili and lime. Top the plates with the chips with the beans, avocado and tomato mixture. Serve and enjoy!

Pre-weekly Links & Recipe Tips

I order my groceries online, which makes it very easy to complement dishes and remember every ingredient. It takes me an hour, mostly spent looking into cookbooks and websites for crazy new ideas. So, as if I'm an organised person, I can tell you that next week, I'll eat:

Indian & Vegan
Chickpea, Potato & Spinach Jalfrezi with Chapattis & Poppodums

Mexican
Black Bean Tostadas with Avocado (from Thomasina Miers's Mexican Food Made Simple)
Corn Tacos with Squash, Chorizo & Pickled Pink Onions (same book)

Quick Vegetarian Pastas
Fresh Tagliatelle with Chestnut Mushrooms & Stilton (my own recipe - coming up soon!)
Fresh Tagliatelle Alla Putanesca (from Valentina Harris' Perfect Pasta)


Easy Oven Weekend Food
Baked Cod with Lemon Potatoes & Greens
Pork Belly Roast with Baby Potatoes (my own recipe - coming up soon!)

Already looking forward to it!

The Accidental Vegetarian - Sweet Potato Bhaji

Never having heard of bhaji myself before I found them in the fast food isle of a supermarket, perhaps a little introduction is in order. Bhaji are Indian deep-fried onion & vegetable balls that you can eat as a snack or accompaniment to curry dishes. They're a little fatty (yum), and the supermarket version can be very dull, but when you make them yourself they're absolutely amazing. As always, this is my own interpretation, making it the simplest dish to cook, with very limited equipment needed.

The bhaji mixture and I.

Ingredients (for 12 bhaji)
1 sweet potato
1 onion
1 ten centimetre piece of fresh ginger
125 grams of self-raising flour
100 ml. cold water
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tsp cumin
2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp ground coriander
500 ml of sunflower oil

Grate the sweet potato and ginger. If you don't have a box grater (somehow mine was misplaced during our move) just chop up the ingredients really finely. Finely slice the onion. Put all this in a large bowl and add the spices. Mix. Now add the self-raising flour and mix again. Slowly add the water, in three or four attempts, mixing carefully after each measure is added and testing the doughy mixture. Stop adding water as soon as you can shape little balls of the mixture between two tablespoons.

Heat up the sunflower oil in a wok or deep frying pan. It needs to be about 180 degrees centigrade for the bhajis to form so wait a while. Test the oil is hot by adding a piece of sweet potato and testing if it comes up bubbling right away. Once the oil is hot, shape the little balls between tablespoons and add as many of them as will fit comfortably in your pan (mine held about 6). Turn the balls after about 2 minutes and take the balls out as soon as they're golden and crispy on all sides. Put on a plate with some kitchen towels to soak up the extra oil. Enjoy, but be careful, they're hot!

Quick Spiced Egg Noodle Soup

Remember the Indonesian spiced eggs? I was feeling peckish yesterday so I made four, two to eat right on the spot and two to keep in the fridge. Today I found out what you can do with any spiced eggs leftovers by improvising the following simple soup.

Ingredients
1 Indonesian spiced egg
2 tbsp of the sauce these eggs are cooked in
The green bits of 1 spring onion, finely sliced
1/2 a chili, finely sliced
A tiny piece of ginger (half a centimeter, tops), finely sliced
1 nest of medium egg noodles
1/2 a vegetable stock cube

Boil some water. Put the (hard) egg noodles and stock cube in a bowl and add the water. Add the egg and its juice. Sprinkle over the spring onion, chili and ginger. Wait until the noodles have softened up (that takes about 5 minutes) and eat. Enjoy!