Meat Cooking for the Faint Hearted #6 - Bacon and Beans

This is the kind of warming dish I've wanted to try out on/for the Chap for a while now.  I finally made it prompted by my bargain purchase of 3 tins of cannellini beans for 99p at a newly opened 99p store close to

Flanked by some other bargains.
2 packs of the tuna fillets - 99p and
garlic salad 99p.  :-)

us.  This makes it tick the 'frugal' box and the usage of whatever veg you have in that needs using up makes it even better as a cheap meal.
I did a little scooting about on the t'internet and came up with the below; mostly influenced by and adapted from this recipe.

Bacon and White Beans
Lump bacon - you can get cheap mis-shape packs in S'burys and butchers.  (I forgot to weigh how much I used but you can use rashers instead, as much or as little as you like / your pocket dictates.)
1-2 cloves garlic (to taste)
1 small onion / half a whopper (that's what I had)
1 carrot (or a stick of celery or both)
1 can beans - drained and rinsed (I used cannellini but white beans of your choice will do)
250ml stock (I used veg, you could use chicken if you have it)
Black pepper
Sprig Rosemary
1 bay leaf

Chop the bacon into lardons or leave whole if using rashers and chop after cooking.  Fry off the bacon in a heavy based pan - I used my cast iron one person sized casserole.  Fry until crispy then remove but leave the fat in the pan.
Add the sliced and rough chopped onion, minced garlic and the diced carrot and cook for a few minutes until softened.  (I used carrot as I didn't have any celery in the house but use both or either or neither -it's not a real picky recipe.)
Add the beans and bacon and cook for a couple of minutes whilst you nip outside and get the herbs - these are mine by the front door.  Or use dried of course.  :-)
Scrunch up the bay leaf a little and chop the rosemary finely if using fresh.  Add to the pan with plenty of freshly ground black pepper.
Add the stock, stir well and whack up the heat to bring to the boil.  [At this point I realised I forgot the garlic so chucked in a good half teaspoon of garlic granules instead.  Doh!]

Reduce the heat and simmer covered for half an hour, stirring occasionally.  Then uncover and simmer for up to a further 30 minutes stirring more often to ensure it doesn't catch on the bottom.  It may not need the full 30 but do it for as long as it takes to get to a nice sticky consistency.  Adjust this to your preference, leave it more soupy if you like, everything's well cooked by now.
Serve with some fresh greens on the side and watch the Chap wolf it down - he professed it to be lovely and ate the lot at one sitting!  :-)

I had to entrust the Chap with taking this shot but to be fair, this kind of meal is never going to win any 'pretty' awards!

Aaannnnd......first foraged meal of 2013

Open the fridge and see what sad things need using up to add to your free wild garlic and nettles.  Having 'foraged' within the fridge as well as along the river bank go forward thus:

Heat a little olive oil and sweat off a sliced onion (mine was red) and a bunch of slighly limp spring onions.
Add plently of freshly ground black pepper, 1tsp dried basil, 1tsp dried oregano / marjoram (they are pretty much the same thing aren't they?) and about 0.5tsp dried sage.  You may need a little splosh more oil at this point as the herbs will suddenly soak it up.
Slice the last handful of cherry toms in half and add.  Give everything a good stir each time you add stuff - I don't actually need to say that do I?

Rinse your wild garlic and nettles well and seperate the two if you only had one bag on you to forage with, as I did.
Reserve a few of the smaller leaves of the garlic and roughly chop the rest.  Add to the pot.
Slice a few mushrooms (I used 5 chestnut ones and 3/4 of a white one that had randomly been left in the fridge - that was deffo the Chap and not me!) and add to the pot.  Cover to gently cook down whilst you get the beans.
Open mahoosive tin of cannellini beans.  I got 3 tins on my last Approved Food order for the princely sum of £1.20, ie 40p each and only when they were delivered did I realise they were the big 800g / 480g drained size!!  Absolute bargain!!  Drain and rinse well then add to the pot and stir some more.
Add 100ml dry white wine.  TBH ours was just a cheap bottle from Aldi I got to cook with.  Cover again (after some more of your finest stirring action, natch) and let simmer for 10+ mins. 
We weren't actually that hungry yet so I let it go for about 10/15 mins then turned it off.  Do stir every so often whilst it's simmering so it doesn't catch or stick.
Once you're ready to eat stir in your washed and picked over nettles - get rid of as much stalk as possible is my personal advice, they can be a little on the tough hairy side!  Add the reserved garlic too and wilt them both in for 3-5ish mins.
Taste and season; you will need salt as the beans soak everything up but beware of adding it earlier as it can apparently make beans go hard.

We had ours topped with a salmon fillet and a handful of mussels each which I did quickly in a little water and a splosh more wine with a few of the wild garlic leaves in too.  Leave the fish off to make it even more frugal and veggie/vegan if you make sure the wine is. 
Nom for free!!!  Well - kind of.  :-)

Slow Cooker Barley Lentil Stew

Had a busy weekend down at the allotment so decided to knock up a quick (in prep terms) dish in the SC for dinner after a hard days graft. This came out thicker than I expected so you could add up to another half pint of stock to loosen it a little. Could also be adapted to your preferred flavour / herb combo; just use the recipe as a blueprint and adapt away.

SC Barley & Lentil Stew

2 small onions

2 cloves garlic

1 tin tomatoes

1.5 - 2 pints stock - see note above

2 bay leaves

1tsp rosemary

1tsp parsley

1tsp oregano

2 sticks celery

1 large carrot / 2 smaller

0.5 cup pearl barley (approx 3oz/75g)

0.5 cup red lentils (approx 3.5oz/100g-ish)

S+P

Chop onions. Crush and finely chop garlic, add both to SC.

Drain tin tomatoes - if ready chopped add pieces to SC, if whole ones slice into about 6 pieces each and add to SC.

Chop celery and carrot into small dice and add to SC.

Add barley and lentils, herbs and stock and cook on High, at least 4 hours.

I cooked for 6 hours in the end which was a little too much - one edge was starting to stick. As mentioned this turned out pretty thick - adjust the amount of stock used to your preference.

All in all tasty, ideal for cold evenings, filling and very time frugal to make. You could add more veg as well - a good recipe to use up odds and ends in the cupboard and fridge.

Lentil fail

I so wanted to call this post 'Delish Dhal-ish' as I made a lentil dhal type of dish and as it was based on one I'd done before I was confident it'd be good and tasty. Oh dear. I decided as a change to make it with green lentils. Then I didn't have enough so it ended up half and half green and red. Now - what I didn't know then (but do now) is that red lentils are used for Dhal as they go into 'mush' more on cooking which is what's needed for this dish. Green ones don't. Also, you'll be amazed but this is the first time ever I'd cooked with green lentils myself and hmm - it was a learning curve. I think they were a wee bit underdone and after macerating my way stolidly through most of a bowlful of this I decided it really was crap. I'll give you the recipe anyway as if it's made with just red lentils it's good. I'll then tell you how I rescued this into something actually edible! :-)

Adapted from a recipe from Mary Berry - The New Cook.

Dhal-ish

250g lentils - red ones!!

600ml water
1tsp Turmeric

1.5 tsp salt

Recipe called for 1 clove garlic and some grated fresh ginger to be added then simmer all together 20-30 mins. I substituted 0.5 tsp ground ginger and fried off 2 teaspoons minced garlic in pan first.

Add rest of ingredients and bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer covered for 30 mins - think the green lentils still weren't quite done at this point. Don't forget to stir every so often so it doesn't stick on the bottom.

Served with a splodge of soured cream and a dust of cayenne for the colour. Looks ok huh - but really was hard work to eat and not that nice tasting. I've made this before with just red lentils and not frying the garlic off first and really enjoyed it. Strange how so little a change can produce so different a dish.

Anyway later on I decided to take my 'chuck it in and see' approach to rescuing this dish [I play pool in the same 'smack it and hope' way].

I added (these are approx amounts) 0.5-1 tsp Garam Masala, a further 0.5 tsp Turmeric, 0.5-1 tsp cayenne, 1 tsp black onion seeds, 1 pint veg stock, a large grated carrot and 'some' cous-cous. Boil the lot until the cous cous absorbs the liquid.

I'm not sure how correct or authentic it is to have cous cous and lentils together but as a veggie stew-consistency kinda dish (ie 'stodge'!) this was pretty nice and suitably tasty. Warming with the inclusion of the cayenne and just so much more interesting than the original version. I think the extra cooking made the green lentils rather more palatable as well; it has at least convinced me that it may actually be worth trying cooking with them again! :-)

Voyage into the unknown - Dried Bean virginity

As it was a bit cold and miserable and I'm still feeling a bit under the weather I decided to make this nice sounding soup from the Veg Inspirations blog. I had meant to make it Weds eve but didn't get round to it so did it last night instead. I put the beans on to soak before leaving for work Weds morning. I bought dried Haricot beans from the Weigh & Save, first time ever I've used dried beans! Hated pulses when I was younger though so it was a long time before I'd consider buying them in any form let alone dried. They're a very frugal way of buying an ingredient though being only 19p per 100g. The recipe called for a cup which by chance was exactly what I had - 150g for a measly 29p. Not bad. Here's how I made it; mostly following the recipe just with a couple of ingredient substitutions where I didn't have the stated item

Bean & Barley Soup

1 cup dried beans - I used Haricot

1 onion

1 tsp gound ginger [I used this as I didn't have any root ginger in the house]

0.5 cup pearled barley

2 tomatoes

2 carrots

1.5 cup sweetcorn

4 bay leaves

1 tsp cayenne peppper [I used in place of chilli powder]

2tsp cumin seeds [recipe called for powder but I only had the seeds]

4 cups (1 litre) veg stock, I used Marigold Bouillon

2 tbsp oil

4tsp lime juice

Soak beans overnight / day time with pinch of soda.

Drain, place in a large pan with fresh water and boil until soft but not mushy. After their 2 days of soaking my beans had 50mins boiling which was possible slightly over, 45mins may have been better. Drain and reserve.

Rinse pearl barley off and reserve.

Score toms all way round through skin 2x as if cutting into quarters. Cover with boiling water and leave. This will enable you to remove the skin.

Heat oil and fry finely chopped onions gently until approaching transparency. Add ginger and stir.

Skin toms and chop into small bits, add to pan and cook until soft, stirring occasionally.

Add bay leaves and spices and stir.

Add carrots, sweetcorn, pearly barley and stock. Bring to a gently simmer until veg / barley cooked. Mine had 20mins.

Add beans and stir well. Simmer for 15 mins to amalgamate flavours.

Remove from heat and add the lime juice. Stir through and serve.

A hearty looking soup however I was a little disappointed by how this tasted. First off next time I would halve the amount of cayenne / chilli pepper used. I like a little heat but I also like to taste the flavours in my food and all I was getting was chilli.

I kept my pan covered whilst cooking, and as a result the soup was a bit more watery than I expected and the broth part not particularly flavoured (except with chilli) so next time I'd leave the pan uncovered at least to start with and see how it went. I also think that this is an occasion where I'd be tempted to use the deeper flavoured OXO veg stock cubes as I feel they'd stand up better.

I like a bit more crunch to my carrots so I'd add these at the same time as the beans. I'd also double the amount of them in the recipe, ditto the toms; there didn't seem to be a lot of point to their presence.

As I was using cumin seeds rather than powder I really should have added these with the onions to get more flavour from them. I'd halve the amount of oil used to saute the onions.

I ended up adding milk to this after cooking to temper the chilli a little. I added 100ml to 3/4 of the total amount of the soup as left in the pot. I also added a handful of oats to soak up some of the liquid and hopefully some of the chilli. Later in the evening I mashed the beans in a bit to thicken the broth part; although that may be more because I overboiled them in the first place!

Had a second portion for lunch today and it was improved. I know the original recipe says serves 3 but I got 4 generous portions from this (2 in the freezer) and I didn't even have bread with it last night. If you served this as a starter with bread I reckon you could do 6 easy.

Verdict - nice but not as nice as I expected. Needs tweaking to suit my tastes.

Re: Dried Beans - easy just time consuming for the cooking. Cheap although I wonder how much extra power I used for the long cooking time.