Bean and bacon lasagna

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 Piles and piles of tins, beans and rice which are months if not years out of date.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.

Oven poached eggs

This is a really old post I wrote ages ago, but then never got around to posting. I'm not quite sure why it never made the cut,mad this is one of my absolute favourite egg breakfast/brunch recipes. Seeing it now, I also realise I haven't been cooking it for a long, long time. After I get back from my holiday (more about that in the next post), I will be making this for brekkie. As much as I love having bread and cheese and sweets for brekkie, my body is screaming for protein. I can't wait to get some eggs in me. And chicken and salad. I can't believe I just wrote that. But this whole paella-ice cream-churros-cheese and bread diet is quite tough to be honest. I love it tha my body is finally craving the right things.

It should have become quite obvious that I love me a good old breakfast. Proteins, fibre and at least one or two of your five a day. And this works just as well as vegetarian lunch, its quite hearty. The recipe is stolen from Epicurious, and only modified minimally.

Oven poached eggs with chickpeas (serves 2):
1tbsp oil
1 onion
1 clove of garlic
1 medium chili
piece of fresh ginger root
1 tbsp dried cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 can chopped tomatoes
1 can chickpeas
chopped flatleaf parsley
chopped coriander
4 eggs
100g feta

The howto:
Preheat oven to 200 degrees C. Chop onion, garlic, chilli and ginger root and saute in the oil. When the onion is starting to get soft, add spices and fry for another minute or so. Add tomatoes, chickpeas and herbs, and let cook for 10 minutes, until the sauce starts to thicken a bit. Transfer to a oven proof dish, make indentations in the tomato sauce, and break the eggs in them. Sprinkle feta on top, and bake in the oven until yolks are the consistency you like (about 6 minutes for runny yolks).

According to my estimate, which was dine using MyFitnessPal, one serving contains 513kcal (25g fat, 30g carbs of which 6.7g sugars, 22g protein).

The verdict:

This is one of my all time favourite egg brekkies. It combines so many things I love. Tomatoes, cumin, chickpeas, eggs and feta, all delicious. Obviously if you want to be super-healthy, you could always skip the feta, but I like the savoury touch together with the tomato. And the chickpeas, oh the chickpeas. I love the combination of chopped tomatoes and chickpeas. First you have the sweet tomatoes, and then the silky smooth chickpeas to bite into. And make sure not to over-cook your eggs, the yolk should be nice and runny so that the lovely, golden goo spreads all over the tomato and chickpea yummyness.

I should never write a blogpost when I'm hungry, this is pure torture. So I better stop, as I'm very unlikely to get food anytime soon... Sigh, one of those (many!) times when I decide being single is so much better than the alternative. At least you get food whenever you want. Can you see I have some pent up negative energy here? Well, I get very grumpy if something comes between me and my food, and if that something happens to be football, that just makes me outright furious. Well, if you don't hear back from me, I perished of hunger in a hotel room. Otherwise I'll be back soon to blog about my holiday food experiences. Expect a lot of sugar highs!

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Emergent lentil and tomato soup

Emergence. That phenomenon where the whole is more than the sum of it's parts. Like putting together two people who are used to be alone. In my recent opinion, that is certainly emergent. Or maybe an emergency?

This post is obviously about something much more important than relationships. It's about a truly amazing soup I just created. Or maybe it's more correct to say the twisted recesses of my brain gave birth to this soup. It's basically the love child of my two favourite soups, lentil curry soup and Moroccan tomato and chickpea soup. I so love lentils. And chickpeas. And although I'm not a big fan of spicy food, I do like the somewhat sweeter hotness of harissa compared to chilli paste. And I love tomatoes. So I thought, why not try to marry these two soups into a over the top, everything you could ever want, tomato-chickpea-lentil-harissa extravaganza. And it turns out the result is very much more than the sum of it's parts.

Emergent soup (serves 4-5):
15 g extra virgin coconut oil
1 tbsp ground ginger
2 tsp harissa paste (gives a rather mild hotness, can be increased depending on taste)
2 onions, chopped
1 clove of garlic finely chopped (can be increased)
3 carrots, sliced
3 stalks of celery, sliced
1 can of chickpeas (380 g, 230 g drained weight)
500 g tomato passata with garlic and herbs (you can use regular passata or chopped tomatoes, but in that case add 2 more cloves of garlic and a teaspoon (each) of dried oregano, basil and parsley)
2 cups (500 ml) water
1 vegetable stock cube
120 g (3/4 cups) split red lentils
500 g diced turkey thigh (can be replaced by chicken, or omitted)

One serving (a quarter of the recipe, which results in a rather generous serving with lots of meat) contains 513 kcal, 40 g protein, 37 g carbs (of which 9 g sugars) and 20 g fat. Ok, so that's quite a big serving, but feel free to have a smaller one, and don't judge me please. I'm still sticking to my 1200 kcal diet even when eating this!

The howto:
Chop and slice the onions, carrots, celery and garlic. In a big saucepan, heat up the coconut oil. Add the ginger and harissa and cook for 2-3 minutes while stirring. Reduce heat to medium, and add onions and garlic. Mix with the spices in the saucepan, and let cook for a few minutes, until translucent. Add carrots and celery, mix and let cook for five minutes. Add the rest of the ingredients (the chickpeas with the liquid included), cover with a lid and let slowly cook for 45-50 minutes.

The verdict:
I'm not very good at creating recipes of my own, I like to steal other people's ideas and then slightly fine tune them to fit my tastes. Maybe I'm not a very imaginative person. And I'm pretty sure there will be another lentil, chickpea, tomato and turkey soup out there, but I don't want to google it because I will think of this as my very own recipe. Which I'm immensely proud of! It turned out to be one of the best soups I've ever had. I might obviously be a bit biased in my evaluation, but trust me, it was really, really good.

The harissa brings a nice warmth to the soup, and the tomato passata a wonderful smoothness along with the taste of oregano, a herb I haven't used in a long time, and almost forgotten how good it is. And the chickpeas. Oh, the chickpeas. I love biting into one of those babies, they are just so incredibly good. And that smooth texture feels so lovely as well. 

I decided to use turkey instead of chicken simply because the turkey thigh was quite cheap, only £2.50 for a 500 g pack and it looked nice. And letting it slowly simmer makes the meat nice and tender, and it is more flavourful than chicken fillet. Which you can obviously use in the recipe if you prefer. But I was positively surprised with the turkey leg, and will definitely use it again for something else. So all in all, I think this soup is quite a winner. Even if I say so myself.

Hummus 2.0

I have been using an app called My Fitness Pal ever since I started my weight loss journey in September 2011. Or I guess I should call it my new life. I really like the app. It has a huge database with nutritional information on food items, and it allows you to create your own recipes and calculates the nutritional content of them. It's really easy to use, and it even has a barcode scanner, which has identified the majority of food items I have used it for. Basically you tell the app your weight, and how much weight you want to lose per week (1 lb, 0.5 lb, stay at current weight etc) and it will calculate your calorie allowance. You can also add workouts, there is a database of approximate calorie burns for many sports, although I always wear my heart rate monitor when I work out to get a more exact count. It's a really nifty little app, I have it both on my iPhone and iPad, and you can use it online as well, although the few times I have used it online, I have found the user interface to be much inferior to the apps.

Anyhows, although in general I have mostly good things to say about the app, I was bitterly disappointed last week. I thought the app would save your data indefinitely. However, I wanted to go back to my data from 2011, to the time I was losing weight really quickly, to check on things like daily carb amounts I was eating, but there was no more data left!! I was so disappointed, as on of the reasons I started using this app was to find something that would form a lasting database of my eatings and sports. Seems like I didn't eat anything before March 2012. Which makes me so sad. I would really have wanted that data. But other than that, I still really like the app for keeping check on my daily calorie intake, and to keep an eye on carb and protein levels. Below are a few screenshots from one day last week. I'm currently on a really calorie restricted diet, just to kick start my weight loss. I'm also aiming to reduce my carb intake a bit more than I have for the last few weeks, again just as a kickstart. I seem to quite comfortably get into the 100-150 g carbs per day range, which is quite ok as I work out a lot, but thought I would aim for 50-100 g for the next few weeks, just to be extra strict and hopefully get some booming results during January.

I'm actually off on holiday the first week of February, so it would be nice to have shed at least a little bit of the wobbly bits before that. Also, I know from experience that staying on a really restricted calorie diet and working out 1-2 hours a day is really tough. It's ok as long as you have quite a bit of fat to burn off, but later weight loss has to slow down and I have to get in a bit more calories if I want to keep up this amount of sports. Which I'm totally ok with. One and a half year ago, when I started my new life, I decided not to think of this as a diet, but as a permanent lifestyle change. And I'm still doing that. I know I failed in the latter half of 2012 and put on some of the weight I had worked so hard to lose, and I am incredibly disappointed with myself. I did keep up with my exercises, but my eating just got out of control. Too much chocolate, and way too many mince pies. But I also know I have two options, to dwell on that and keep on eating like a pig because I feel like nothing I ever do will make a difference. Alternatively I can admit that I strayed, payed the price, and will now be strict and work hard to get back to the healthy me I was last summer. And I am happy I don't have anywhere near as much weight to work off as I did back a year and a half ago. I also know I will stray again, and put on weight, but I hope the next time I will catch myself a bit earlier so that there is less to work off. Carboholism is a tough thing to live with.

Anyways, that was quite a long detour to today's recipe. The point is, I enjoy having fruit for snacks, but decided that for the moment, I need to control my sugar intake a bit more. So I needed another snack instead of the fruit, and decided to make hummus my snack for next week. I have made more and less successful attempts at hummus in the past, and I have posted one of my favourite variations on the snack here. As yummy as that variation is, I still wanted to master the original hummus as well. Also, the other recipe contains pistachios, which firstly are too expensive for every day use and secondly add quite a bit of calories to the recipe.

I stumbled upon this recipe of ethereally smooth hummus on Smitten Kitchen, one of the great food blogs I follow. Apparently, the secret to really smooth hummus is to peel the chickpeas. Fair enough, lets peel. In the comments section to that post there was a link to another food blog called Coffee and Quinoa for something called extra creamy hummus. The author of the blog had wondered how to get that really light and fluffy hummus consistency, and discovered that there are over 3 million google hits for the search term 'creamy hummus'. Apparently, the secret is in the order you add the ingredients, you need to emulsify the tahini with lemon juice and water before adding the other ingredients. That should take care of the textural aspects. However, I am still also in search of the exactly right proportion of ingredients for my palate. And I think one of the secrets is that you need to add a bit of salt to enhance all the flavours. I'm usually not a big fan of using salt when cooking, and have gotten used to quite a small amount of salt in food. Which is one of the reasons I have to make my own hummus, I find the store bought one way too salty. But here, I have admitted defeat and use a bit more salt than I would optimally like to, as it's the only way to get the taste just right. Also, I added a bit more tahini than I have used before, and lastly, reduced the amount of garlic quite a bit. Raw garlic is a bit too bitter for my tastes, and I always make my hummus as a snack for the next few days, so the garlic taste really has time to develop while the hummus hangs around in my fridge. A little goes a long way in this case. Of course, you can easily change the amount of garlic to fit your palate. Also, I would love to roast my garlic before adding it to the hummus. But I just can't be bothered, especially since I usually make my hummus on a Sunday night which for me is not a time to be very fancy with my cooking. Using all these small changes, I think I have finally arrived at a recipe I'm happy with. Both textually and flavourly (yes, I know it's not a word, but nonetheless...)

Hummus 2.0 (serves 3-4 as a snack):
1 pack (1 cup) of chickpeas (net weight 380 g, drained weight 230 g)
3 tbsp tahini
juice from 2 lemons
1 tbsp water
1 garlic clove
1 tbsp ground cumin
0.5-0.75 tsp sea salt
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

One serving (a third of the recipe, as that's what I consider a large enough snack, contains 233 kcal, 16 g fat, 18 g carbs of which 1.2 g sugars, and 7.3 g protein)

The howto:
Peel the chickpeas. This is easily done if you place the chickpea between your thumb and index finger and gently pop the chickpea out of it's shell (see pictures below). It's a bit tedious, but worth it, although probably not absolutely necessary. Put tahini, lemon juice and the water in a food processor, and mix for about 20-30 seconds until the tahini becomes white and fluffy. Then add the garlic, cumin, salt (maybe start with a smaller amount, and add more later if you think it's needed), olive oil and chickpeas. Mix until you have a creamy paste, I needed to add about 2 tbsp of water (or the liquid from the chickpeas, if you aren't an idiot like me and drained it all away) to get a nice texture. Serve topped with some olive oil and smoked paprika.

The verdict:
Finally a hummus that tastes exactly the way I think hummus should taste like. It is so much better than the store bought, it has lots of flavour and a nice tang from the lemon juice. And like I said, it might seem like there is quite a bit of salt, but it really brings out the rest of the flavours. I think it's garlicky enough with one clove, especially after an overnighter in the fridge, but if you are fond of garlic or are serving it right up, then another clove or two might be a good idea. Ideally, I would love to use roasted garlic, but as I said above, I can't be bothered. Which in itself is a bit ridiculous, it's not like it takes long. Well, the baking time is rather long, but the prep takes all of five seconds. But the hour long wait is usually too much for me.

There are quite a few variables to making good hummus. First you need to find chick peas to your liking. One option is also to buy dried ones and cook them yourself. My favourite brand is Tesco's Organic chickpeas in water, they seem to be cooked to perfection, usually every single chickpea is whole and not mushed up at all, and they are very easy to pop out of their skins. Another variable is the tahini, I used to have another brand, now I'm using Al'Fez Natural Tahini, which I like better than whatever it was I had before. Although tahini is usually something you don't have a choice on, there is just one brand (if that), and you should just thank your lucky stars your grocery store stocks any brand. I got the one I have now at the Co-op. Then of course there is the lemon juice, which will vary from lemon to lemon, and some garlics are more potent than others. Which is why it's good to sample the tahini, and possibly adding some lemon juice or salt if the flavour is not quite perfect. And I guess it goes without saying, you want a good extra virgin olive oil. I usually keep two different olive oils at home, one cheap for cooking, and then an expensive, really good one for things like dressings, dipping and hummus.

Yummus

It should be fairly obvious from some of my previous posts that I love chickpeas. And let me tell you, I really love hummus. The cumin, lemon, garlic and tahini. What's not to love. However, I have struggled to find a really good hummus recipe. And funnily enough, my new favourite one is not even proper hummus. It doesn't have any tahini or lemon in it. And it's modified from a recipe for chickpea burgers from the wonderful blog A Cosy Kitchen. I made the burgers a while ago, and when I was tasting the mixture for the burgers, I realised this is like hummus but much better. So with a few changes it became my new pseudo-hummus. It's so darn yummy it became yummus. 


Yummus (serves 3):
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp harissa paste
1tbsp ground cumin
1tsp paprika
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 can (230g) chickpeas
30g unsalted pistachios
2tbsp olive oil
salt to taste


Finely chop the onion and garlic, and saute until onion is done, about 5 minutes or so. Add harissa paste, cumin, paprika and cinnamon, and fry for another minute. Add about 2tbsp of water so that a paste-like texture forms. Combine the onion-spice mix, chickpeas, pistachios and olive oil and blend to a paste. Add water if needed. Season with salt to taste. Serve with carrot, cucumber and sweet pepper sticks.


One serving contains 260 kcal (17g fat, 21g total carbs of which 3.0g sugars, 8.5g protein)


The verdict:
Well, I guess it should be obvious from the above that I absolutely adore this. My only problem with it is that when I make a batch, I plan to eat it as a snack for the next few days. Often, it tends to just disappear right out of the bowl where I make it. Fancy that, disappearing yummus. 


Compared to the other recipes for (proper) hummus I have tried, I think the key to success here is that the frying somehow softens up the taste of the garlic, the onions add a wonderful slightly sweet taste, as do the pistachios. I'm usually not big on using salt in any food, but I would say, in this recipe, just give it a good pinch of salt. It somehow brings out the sweetness of the onions and pistachios to a whole new level. I think next time I'll try to throw in a bit of tahini as well, see if it gets even better or if it will mess up the perfect symphony of flavours.