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!