Black Bean & Olive Chilli

A catering job got cancelled last minute, so I’ve now got black bean and olive chilli for 30 people to freeze and distribute. Hence the (fake) tupperware picture. Thankfully, I hadn’t made the Mexican-style rice and the corn salad yet. The recipe is inspired by a chilli I had in Tuscon. I tried to guess the ingredients from memory and then expanded on that I can’t remember what’s exactly in the chilli, but it’s something like:

Dried black beans, soaked and boiled the next day
Tomato puree and a few pureed tin tomatoes (to thicken the bean liquid)
Garlic, Onions
Green Chillies
Sliced black olives
Veggie Mince
Fresh Coriander
Cayenne Pepper
Semi-random spices. I think Basil, Paprika, Cajun mostly.
Salt, Pepper

Black beans are probably my favourite bean of all – I love their nutty taste! I once tried to make refried beans from them, but they look gross as a puree (cement looks more tasty!). But they make fantastic chillis. Normall, I mash part of the beans in a chilli to thicken it up, but I don’t recommend doing it with black beans.
I love experimenting with chillis – using different beans and slightly different spices and ingredients. My trip to the US-Mexian border has expanded my chilli horizon by quite a bit. I love the culinary experimentation that is going on in this area!

Improvised Dinner for Two

A friend spontaneously came over tonight, and I decided to make us some ‘grand’ dinner from scratch with stuff I already had in the house. What we ended up with:

Aparagus with potato gratin
German bed-time relaxation tea (luckily, my guest brought some wine and supermalt!)
Carrot halva

I had some British asparagus in the fridge, so I did not want to withold this treasure from my guest. The problem was I only had five small-ish potatoes to go with it – not enough for two people! What did I do? I sliced them thinly (with peel), spread them out put a mixture of cheeses (courtesy of goats, sheep & cows), that another friend had conveniently left, as well as oil, salt, pepper, garlic! I think that was it anyway. Turned out just perfect for the green goodness of the asparagus! Unfortunately no picture of the assembled dish… too hungry!
Would also recommend adding a bit of yoghurt to the cheese mix, if you’ve got any. Might also be nice!

And this was our dessert:

I had an enormous bag of carrots I was struggling to finish on my own, so I thought I should make a carrot salad with apples and lemon juice. But I was suddenly overcome with guilt about scoffing the cherry compote (with yoghurt) earlier today – rather than offering it to my guest – that I decided a replacement dessert had to be found. And the bag of carrots told me what it wanted to be: carrot halva! After all, I had some almonds and raisins in the cupboard (courtesy on mum). I had eaten this ‘pudding’ only once when a friend invited me to a posh Indian restaurant where all of the desserts were so amazing that we had to order several of them (it was a posh restaurant, so the portion sizes were only small – that’s my excuse anyway…). One of the desserts was carrot halva (I also have very fond memories of a certain saffron yoghurt thingy). So, today, I boldly decided to recreate this dish from memory – just to see if I can! Ended up with the following recipe:

Carrot Halva

- Heat pan, toast chopped almonds (make sure you don’t get distracted and burn them like I did!)
- Put almonds aside. Heat butter in pan. Add grated carrots. Stir-fry carrots for a few minutes until pale.
- Heat milk with ground cardamom seeds (from inside the pods). When hot pour over carrots (about the same amount of volume as that of the carrots). Stir until liquid has evaporated (takes a while).
- Add oil, toasted almonds, chopped raisins and sugar (about an eighth of the volume of the stuff that’s in the pan, but you can put in more). Stir some more.
- Serve in small portions (I hope you’ve got more matching pots than me), because it fills you up extremely quickly!

It almost tasted like the real thing. I would recommend making it with ghee (I have to admit I have a soft spot for desserts that sit in a pool of ghee!) and maybe also additional nuts if you have the option!

Afternoon Tea Arizona Style

Wooha! Finally I’ve managed to get round to making something from the mesquite meal I brought from my crazy trip. Mesquite meal is made from the beans of the mesquite plant that grows in the desert on both sides of the Mexican-US border. In the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument I attended a talk on desert plant use by a ranger who is also part of the Tohono O’odham tribe. Amongst other things, she explained how, for instance, cactus fruit are harvested and then turned into tasty treats such as ‘cactus jam rolls’ (can’t remember the actual name, just the process of boiling down the cactus insides and when they are thick enough, spreading them onto a sort-of burrito and rolling it up a bit like a crepe… I think). Another plant to make tasty stuff with is mesquite of which the rangers sold some bags with some recipes attached on site. I bought one despite my fears the bag of brown powder would get me into trouble at the customs! Luckily, I did not get stopped, so afterwards I was annoyed that I did not buy more, especially as I still owe a fellow ‘foodie’ a birthday present! If you buy this stuff in the UK, a bag costs at least £15 (for a kilo I think and not including postage). I got a small bag in Arizona for around £3. The people that produce it are called Native Seeds who work toward creating biological and culinary diversity in their region, the Greater Southwest. As well as conservation activism stuff, they also have recipes on their site, which may come in handy if you happen to have access to desert produce.

Anyway, today I tried out one of the recipes entitled ‘Lemon Poppy Seed Scones’. As you can guess from the picture, these scones do not resemble your average British scone. They have an earthy healthfood taste and are rather addictive. I did not have all of the ingredients in the house, so I improvised a bit. Luckily, my friend the bee-keeper had just dropped some luscious rape honey for me I also did not stick to the American cup measurement, but used normal tea cups instead.

2 generous cups of flour
3/4 cup mesquite meal
3 tsp poppy seeds
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup full fat yoghurt
zest of one lemon
1/3 cup rape honey
1/4 cup oil

The recipe actually calls for a mixture of baking powder and baking soda, lemon yoghurt (I added a bit of extra honey knowing pre-made fruit yoghurts are very sweet) and maple syrup, so if you may want to try this! I baked the scones for about 15 mins at gas mark 6 as I was to lazy to figure out what 425 fahrenheit was. Luckily, I was about right! Unfortunately, I left the first load in a bit too long, because the washing up took a bit longer than expected, so you may want to avoid that – or avoid a large washing up pile! Ah, and you may want to think of some theme drinks/foods to go with the Arizona Afternoon Tea theme, e.g. if you wanted you could have honeybutter to go with the scones – and herbal tea! (Come on, Arizonans, help me out!) And there is, of course, the obligatory Saguaro cactus cookie cutter… which I forgot to use – d’oh!

Improving cheap olives & squishy cherries

I got really late into olives. Before, I did I could not understand why everybody I knew worshipped these little critters. Now I even have occasional cravings for them! Unfortunately, the recent cravings coincided with being pretty broke, so I had to think of a way of having my cake and eat it… The solution I came up with was the following: Buying cheap olives in brine and marinating them myself with stuff that’s already in the house! I know that you can marinate olives in nicer stuff than dried herbs, cheap blended oils and chillies, but hey, as long as there is plenty of garlic in the mix, it’s okay!
My marinade was pretty straight-forward: oil (ready made supermarket’s own brand olive-sunflower blend), 5 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped, a few dried chillies, dried basil and majoram. I think that was it. I guess you can also make the olives more tangy by adding lemon/lime-y things.

The result is surprisingly tasty and goes very nicely with my latest bread experiment made with other stuff that was already in the house (a mixture of flour leftovers, mostly wheat and barley). Which reminds me, I still have to do more corn and mesquite meal experiments…

I also could not resist getting a bag of reduced, almost-off cherries. To rescue them, I turned them into cherry compote. I first wanted to make a cherry-apple soup, but was too lazy to also chop an apple. Will be eaten tomorrow with cream – if my temporary housemate’s leftover cream from earlier this week is not off by then, that is. Otherwise it’ll be milk or improvised custard (hmh, milk, cornstarch, sugar?).

Xtreme Sunday Roast

I’ve just returned from a morning of volunteer work kitchen mayhem. Luckily it wasn’t in my kitchen! The day started innocently apart from the mountains of food that needed to be chopped, fried, roasted, cooked, mashed, steamed, marinated etc. as usual. Within the first ten minutes we had the first ‘casualty’ shouting for the first aid kit. Five minutes later, the second person needed plastering up: ‘Bloody Mangoes’. Then, a newbie came in late, got dressed and… hit the fire alarm button mistaking it for a door opener. D’oh! The alarms started screaming with the power of a deranged DJ plus full sound system wanting to put on a rave at the wrongest time of day. So what now? Nobody had the keys for the silencers. The fire brigade couldn’t silence the alarms. And the person who had the keys seemed to be away on a bank holiday outing. And disabling the alarms would be against the law, so I wasn’t able to get my bicycle toolkit out to unscrew things. While I debated whether to disable the bloody things anyway, another knife casualty – so much for the vegetarian special. But nothing put us off today – we worked on with improvised ear-plugs for four hours until we had everybody’s dinner ready. And I mean nothing, because to top it all off, somebody got a really bad knife injury and nearly fainted, so she had to rest for a good hour before being able to move about again. Ah, and I did not count the burns…. When I left the place, the alarms were still ringing. At least we had some spare pudding!