I hosted a dinner party for a bunch of very good friends last week. For once, I decided not to make a mountain out of a molehill and to keep the food very simple. I guess my "clean and simple" mindset from my card crafting is making it's way into the kitchen as well. Instead of planning an intricate three course meal I decided I would stick to something easy and delicious and spend all my time with my guests instead of in the kitchen.
One of my guests is vegetarian, and I knew my other guests wouldn't mind eating veggie so I decided to just make the whole meal vegetarian instead of having separate options. I was browsing the food blogs I follow in case I would stumble upon inspiration, and there it was right in front of me. How Sweet It Is was featuring a white bean and tortellini soup and I thought that would be perfect. Easy ingredients, and I could partly prep it in advance and then it would only take me a short while to cook it when my guests had arrived. I also served sundried tomato and goats cheese muffins and garlic breads. I didn't have any starters, I just had some olives and grapes out on the table that we nibbled on while enjoying some bubbly before the meal. I had planned to make a crumble for dessert, but it turned out the Culinary Consultant wanted to bake so he made an apple cake and some banana bread for dessert. Although I have to admit we never made it to the banana bread, as we could hardly move after finishing the soup, bread, muffins and apple cake with custard.
I made a double serving of the soup in a huge saucepan as there was five of us for dinner, and I also hoped there would be some left over for me to take to work for lunch the following week, which there was. The original recipe uses tortellini, but as I wanted a vegetarian soup, I went for tortelloni instead. You can easily choose whatever pasta you prefer.
White bean and tortelloni soup (from How Sweet It Is, serves 4-5):
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp butter
1 yellow onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 tsp smoked paprika
salt and black pepper to taste
2 tbsp tomato puree
300 g spinach
2 tins (400 g each) crushed tomatoes
2 cans cannellini beans (I used cannellini and butter beans)
2 1/2 cups vegetable stock
400 g fresh tortelloni (I used a mix of spinach and ricotta as well as basil pesto)
(1/3 cup grated parmigiano reggiano cheese)
The howto:
Chop the onion and garlic. Drain and rinse the beans. Heat oil and butter in a large saucepan. Add onions and garlic and cook until softened, about 5 minutes. Add the spices and tomato puree and give it all a good stir. Add spinach and let cook until wilted. Add the crushed tomatoes, beans and vegetable stock and let cook for about 5 minutes. Add the pasta, and cook according to instructions (my fresh tortelloni required 5 minutes of cooking). Make sure not to over-cook the pasta. If you want to, stir in some grated cheese right before serving. I didn't as I was serving this with cheesy garlic bread and cheesy muffins.
The verdict:
The food was certainly a success, all the guests enjoyed it, and even the Culinary Consultant went back for seconds. I will certainly be making it again, although I think switching to a meat filled pasta would make him like it even more.
The soup is really tasty, I don't often cook pasta but this was a great way of having some. I used a mix of store bought crushed tomatoes and some of our home-made tomato and garlic sauce from our fantastic sun ripened fresh tomatoes. I usually use very little salt in my food, but to bring out all the flavour from the tomatoes and beans, you want to make sure you season the soup properly. I had some leftovers for a few more days, and it was as tasty when re-heated as it was when first served. I certainly consider this a great success.
The wonderful thing about the soup is that it hardly required any effort to put together. I chopped the onions and garlic before my guests arrived. When it was time to prepare dinner, I just chucked in the chopped onions and garlic and joined my guests while they were cooking, went back after five minutes and added the spinach, joined my guests, went back to the kitchen to add the tomatoes and beans, joined my guests, and then finally added the pasta. I felt like I hardly missed any of the conversation, and the soup just cooked all by itself. I had also pre-prepared sundried tomato and goat's cheese muffins which I put in the oven when I started the soup, and I also pre-prepared some roasted garlic and mozzarella bread which I popped in the oven 10 minutes before the soup was done. It all worked perfectly together.
Unfortunately I only managed to take very bad photos of the soup on the day I served it. The photo at the top of this post was taken the next day, but at that point most of the liquid had been absorbed into the pasta, so it didn't look much like a soup. It was still tasty, but I included the very bad photo below from when it was still an actual soup.
Greetings again from my little shoebox of an apartment, which is made even smaller by the piles of moving boxes waiting for the end of May. I'm lucky we will have a bank holiday Monday coming up in a few weeks, which will be a perfect moving day. Sadly it will mean I won't have time for any birthday celebrations this year, but hopefully I can make up for that later in the summer. For now, I'm still busy trying to use up all the food I have stockpiled in my kitchen. Oh how I wish I would learn from this and not hoard food in the future. It's crazy, I will probably be able to go all of May without grocery shopping (apart from the occasional fresh fruit/veg and milk) and just use up stuff I have hoarded. I keep thinking I will have to be incredibly firm with the whole no-hoarding rule in the new kitchen though, as the Culinary Consultant is even worse at hoarding than I am. Maybe we should join hoarders anonymous or something. I will have to give up the luxury of being within walking distance of a handful of grocery stores though. Well, I will be giving up on the luxury of being within walking distance of anything but sheep, it seems. Maybe a cow or two also, but that's it. And I worry, that if I have managed to stockpile all this food into a kitchen the size of a stamp, what will happen when I have a proper kitchen with loads of cupboards? I can already see it in my head. Piles and piles of tins, beans and rice which are months if not years out of date. Does anyone have a good system to prevent this? Maybe hook everything up to a database with expiry dates, which would send emails when things are about to expire. "Warning, you have three kilograms of pasta which will expire in three days."
I have been wracking my brain to come up with ways to use up all the beans in my pantry. And to add insult to injury, I found another four packs of chickpeas hiding at the bottom of a bag stuffed into a corner. I have been throwing various things into the slow cooker over the last few weeks, mainly tinned tomatoes and beans. This time I just had to come up with something different. So after rooting through my pantry a bit more, I also found some lasagna that needed using up. Perfect, bean and bacon lasagna it is. This actually helped me get rid of not only the lasagna but also a pack of chickpeas, two tins of beans, two packs of tomato passata and some bacon and parsley that have been hiding in the back of my freezer. Now I think I'm down to only two tins of beans and three packs of chickpeas. And a freezer bursting at the seams of the various more-or-less disgusting slow cooker bean stews. Pork, beans, tomato and barley or how about chicken, pineapple, coconut milk, beans and quinoa. I still have loads of tinned tomatoes, so I see another few weird bean-and-tomato-and-whatever-else-I-can-find-in-the-house combinations.
Making lasagna from scratch has quite a few steps, but it's worth it in the end. Making your own Bechamel is really rewarding. I used this recipe from Delia on BBC Food. I guess this is as close I will ever come to supporting the Culinary Consultant's football team. Apparently after the last game, they are safe from being relegated, so crisis is averted for this season. I just can't wait for the same craziness to start again next season...
Bean and bacon lasagna (serves 6-8):
Bechamel sauce
1 l semi-skimmed milk
parsley
2 bay leaves
20 whole black peppercorns
2 slices onion (1/4 inch or 5mm thick)
80 g butter
40 g flour
salt and black pepper
In a saucepan slowly bring milk, parsley, bay leaves, peppers and onion to a boil to infuse the flavours. Strain the boiled milk into a jug and discard the flavourings. In a saucepan, melt butter and add flour. Using a wooden spoon, whisk the mixture until smooth. On medium heat, add milk a little at a time (a few tablespoons) and mix until completely smooth before adding more milk. After adding about half of the milk, you can start adding more milk at a time. Keep whisking so that no lumps form. Turn down the heat to low, and let cook for 5 minutes and season to taste (I added a bit of black pepper but no salt, the bacon in the lasagna will be salty enough for my taste).
Lasagna
1/2 tbsp olive oil
8 strips of bacon
2 cloves of garlic (I used smoked garlic because I just loooove it)
2 tins (400 g each) beans (I used butter beans and borlotti beans)
1 pack (380 g) chickpeas
2 packs (390 g) tomato passata (mine had basil in it)
500 g lasagna
1/2 cup of grated cheese (I used mature cheddar)
Bechamel sauce as described above
Finely chop garlic, and cook for a minute or two in a pan with the oil. Add bacon and cook until cooked through. Finely chop the bacon and mix with with the cooked garlic. Preheat oven to 200 degres C. Assemble lasagna in an oven proof dish. Start with about a third of the bechamel sauce, then lasagna, top with one tin of beans and half of chickpeas. Add half of the bacon/garlic mixture. Add one pack of tomato passata and about a third of the cheese. Add another layer of lasagna, the other tin of beans and the rest of the chickpeas. Add the remaining bacon/garlic mix and the other pack of tomato passata. Top with one more layer of lasagna, and add the rest of the bechamel on top, along with the rest of the cheese. Bake for about an hour until golden and bubbly.
The verdict:
As so many times before, I apologize for the utterly terrible photos. The tiny apartment makes any kind of food photography challenging under the best of circumstances. As the apartment is currently full of moving boxes, I would say that's a far shot from the best of circumstances. Also, as usual I was cooking way too late in the evening to have any resemblance of daylight left when the food was done, and the alternatives were taking crappy pictures or taking no pictures at all. I will leave it up to you to decide which one you would prefer, but this is what I went with. However, to my utter joy the flavour of the food was nothing like the pictures. Unlike most of my recent bean concoctions which have ranged from almost acceptable to purely disgusting, this actually turned out really delicious. If you want to make it vegetarian, you can exclude the bacon, but I think it really brings a lovely flavour to the rather mild beans, along with the soft and full flavour of the smoked garlic. I fed this to the Culinary Consultant, and he also ate it without any complaints. Although to be fair, he eats pretty much anything without complaints. But still, I consider this creation quite a success, and after I have gotten over my trauma of eating nothing but beans for the better part of two months, I might even make this again. I think this goes to show that as long as you have tomato passata and bechamel, anything you put between sheets of lasagna will taste like proper lasagna. Oh and if you are looking for other somewhat non-traditional takes on lasagna, take a look at my accidental sea-food lasagna.
Card of the day:
I made this for a chocoholic friend, with a sentiment inside saying "if all else fails, there's always chocolate". I cut out two different sized squares from brown cardstock, and used vintage photo and walnut stain distress inks around the edges. I attached them using dimensionals to look like pieces of a chocolate bar. For the bottom of the card, I used a part of a real chocolate wrapper and some aluminium foil. I stamped the sentiment using Hobbycraft black pigment ink, cut it out with scissors and used ink blending foam and spun sugar distress ink around the edges. Matted with some white cardstock, again with vintage photo and walnut stain blended around the edges, and to finish, everything was adhered onto pink cardstock.
I have to admit that I eat some sort of animal protein at almost every meal. I would love to eat more vegetarian foods, but I'm quite strict with trying to take in at least a gram of protein per kilogram body weight, so I really need to plan my meals. I could do protein shakes, and I do from time to time, but they are just so incredibly disgusting. But I really would love to eat vegetarian more.
I like the idea of beans, in theory (apart from the rather hilarious side effect they tend to produce). They are cheap and relatively high in protein and particularly high in fibre. And we all know you can't have too much fibre in your diet, the more the merrier. I always browse through the bags of dried beans at the grocery store, but then I always go for the tinned ones, for convenience. But then I saw this wonderful idea on One Perfect Bite about cooking your beans in the slow cooker. You can just pop them in there before going to bed, and in the morning you have perfectly cooked beans. So off I went to the grocery store to get a big bag of dried Pinto beans and popped them into the slow cooker. I only used half the amount of beans from the original recipe, but kept the amounts for the spices and onions the same as I wanted a really flavourful bean paste. And I think they turned out great, although I had a slight mishap when adding dried chilli flakes (I never measure spices but pour straight from the spice jar and just estimate the amount. What can I say, I'm a wild child) and the result was rather chilly for my tongue. But when added into the burrito with the rest of the ingredients, I was actually quite happy I made it a bit hotter than I usually do.
This recipe is from from One Perfect Bite. I changed the amount of the spices a bit more to my taste, and halved the amount of beans (but not the spices and onion).
Pinto beans in slow cooker:
250 g dried pinto beans
1 medium onion
3 cloves of garlic
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
2 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp chilli flakes
1 tsp smoked paprika
3.5 cups (8.5 dl) of water
The howto:
For the beans, rinse the beans and chop onion and garlic. Add all the ingredients to the slow cooker and stir. Cook on low for 7-8 hours. If you have a lot of liquid left over after cooking, transfer the beans into a food processor and blend to desired consistency. I didn't have much liquid left, so I just took my handheld blender and blended it right in the crockpot.
The verdict:
I'm so happy to bring you a recipe for real food after all those baking recipes lately. This is super healthy and absolute minimum effort food. You can obviously serve your bean paste however you like, but I put mine into some giant burritos. It would also be perfect for enchiladas, but this time I was monstrously hungry after working out and could hardly wait for the rice to boil, not to mention waiting for the enchiladas to bake. Beans, brown rice, home made guacamole, salsa and a bit of yogurt made a really tasty meat free meal.
Card of the day:
The card of the day is something I made for a good friend who recently had her first baby. I knitted a pair of tiny socks, and then made the background by stamping "Oh boy!" using clear embossing ink, and embossing using clear embossing powder. I then sponged using Tim Holtz distress ink. I only have one stamp alphabet, I'm not sure I really like it, but that was what I had, so that was what I used to stamp the sentiment. I can't wait for the day sometime in the distant future when I have my own craft room where I can fit all my stamps and where I also will have a printer so that I can print custom sentiments. Until then I will just have to make do with what I have.
