Broad Bean Hummus

The local market had lots of broad beans the other day, so I bought a big bag of them – also, because I was curious what you could make with them. I searched around on the internet and tried out a few dishes, but I found out that I don’t like them that much when they are cooked – so far at least. I did like them a lot as a cold mash (again, photo will follow when film is finished) with spices on bread, the recipe for this paste being derived from the Broad Bean Paté on the Vegetarian Society website.

Basically, shell some broad beans (they’ve got really amazing insides!), boil them for 5 mins, put them in the blender with coriander, cumin, turmeric, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. If you do not have all of the ingredients, don’t worry. Just season it to taste. The above combination tastes just like hummus and is much quicker to make. You can also add sesame oil to emphasise that flavour if you happen to have a whole ‘oil rack’.

I read somewhere that broad beans are a ’stone age food’. People who follow a Stone Age diet seem to omit them, however. For a laugh, I ate the ‘hummus’ on rhyvita which seemed to me the closest approximation of stone age bread. Delicious!
I also thought, maybe they should recruit me for a prehistoric survival research project to see whether I can still make ’something from anything’

Peanut Butter Oat Cookies

Sorry, camera is still not working, but film is finally finished, so here is the picture!

Anyway, about once a month I get very intense peanut cravings. The last peanut craving outbreak took place in a pub. I can still see the bartender’s face in front of me: ‘What? You don’t want a pint? Just two bags of peanuts?!’ Luckily I didn’t live in the area. Today, I fortunately was at home and happened to have a jar or peanut butter in the fridge. But I didn’t have toast! I could just have eaten the stuff out of the jar, but then I attempted a more civilised way of imbibing the peanuts.

I quickly grabbed some oats, flour, butter and sugar and, together with the peanut butter, I made a firm dough. I didn’t have eggs, but I think I also added some vanilla essence and a bit of cinnamon just to see if it makes a difference in taste, and squished the flapjack-ish mixture into the shape of small cookies. I baked these cookies at medium heat and had to restrain myself from consuming them all at once!

So I guess the most basic recipe is:

Plain Flour
Porridge Oats
Butter
Sugar
Peanut Butter

Just vary the quantities according to whether you want the cookies to be more cookie or flapjack like!

Additional things could be small quantities of buckwheat flour, vanilla flavouring, cinnamon, other nuts, chocolate bits for you chocoholics.