Category: Chickpeas, Lentils, Pulses Etc

For once: not Nigella.

Leave a comment

Apologies in advance if this post is a little lacklustre – have just watched a lot of telly and am pretty tired.

I have a difficult time staying consistently ‘healthy’ in my eating habits. I’ll do pilates, have some soymilk, and then follow it up with a buttered chocolate bar. Okay, I’m joking…barely. Last night’s dinner was a good enough example of this – salad and lentil soup (healthy) with homemade mince pies (unhealthy.) However, in my opinion, as long as there are lots of vegetables and other good things present, it can’t be too bad.

The lentil soup came from Alison Holst’s Dollars And Sense cookbook. I have no snarky comments to make – it was great soup, very easy and made from stuff I had in the cupboard. Yet another reminder of why this book is worth reading over.
Above: Lentils, vegetables, spices, water – this pretty much cancels out buttery pastry…right?

So taken was I with the beetroot and feta tarts that I thought I would make the pastry shells again and fill them with (much cheaper) mince to make a kind of homespun Big Ben pie, if you will. As you can see I got a little excited with the leftover pastry scraps…

Above: Twinkle, twinkle little pie…These were not just a pretty picture, they tasted rather lovely too. I could only manage one (my pie tin makes four) probably because I’d eaten too much pastry while making them, but Tim snarfed his down. He had my second one for breakfast this morning and said it was the best he’d ever had. Well, I guess anything beats Weet-bix (to which I have a particular aversion.)

Finally, balancing this out was a salad of beans, cucumber, and our old friends feta and walnuts. I didn’t have cucumber so replaced it with fennel, quelle surprise! This recipe comes from the New Zealand cookbook, and is a fabulous combination with a lovely lemony dressing. Tim and I hoovered it up in about ten seconds – it’s very more-ish.
Above: Hopefully everyone isn’t sick of seeing things scattered in feta and walnuts…

Dinner tonight was something I’ve been craving all day- a vast pot of pasta. I don’t know if there is Italian blood coursing through my veins somewhere but few things make me happier than pasta. Of course, creamy cheese-laden pasta dishes are a lot easier to love than the more austere tomato sauce that we had tonight, yet it was still richly flavoured and filling and all those other good things. I based the sauce on a Moroccan recipe in The Accidental Vegetarian, which adds cinnamon, cumin and tumeric to give aromatic depth. I biffed in a handful of red lentils and let them simmer away into nothing. It was delicious! I suppose it didn’t help that I ate half a packet of wine gums while watching America’s Next Top Model (oh the irony!)

Above: Made with canned tomatoes for 60c from Kmart! Tip for the wise: never buy your canned tomatoes from the supermarket, they are much cheaper at Kmart or the Warehouse. By the way…I crumbled some feta over the pasta, as you can probably see, but hastily stirred it through so it wouldn’t be a focal point of this picture.
Right, am off to bed now: being crosseyed and dozy does not make for a sparklingly witty blog.

No pudding again? Souper…

4 Comments

First post of November! Wait, it’s November already? Aaargh! Tim and I spent 4 hours at the library today, watching the BBC production of Richard III, which although erring on the side of endless, is really very enjoyable, with lots of fantastic lines. But still: Four Hours. I am drained…

I have restrained myself from making pudding lately, because, well, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to lay off the sugar a little. And boy, do I miss making pudding…sometimes a quartered orange just doesn’t cut it, but it is, as Nigella accurately notes in How To Eat, “something to stave off that moment of loneliness and despondency that always threatens to settle when you realise eating is over for the day.” Though it pains me a little to quote Meatloaf, she took the words right outta my mouth. The words were no doubt covered in butter.

Last night I made another recipe from Nigella.com, Tomato, Red Lentil and Chorizo Soup. I realise that chorizo probably isn’t the thing to eat if one is worrying about having too much pudding, but I figure the inclusion of red lentils and canned tomatoes instantly squashes any of that…At any rate, it was flavoursome and full of veges (and lentils!) and was very easy to make.


Above: Everything looks good in the bowls Ange left at our flat. Thanks, Ange.

Speaking of which, this soup would, I’m sure, be fine if you wanted to take it in a vegetarian direction and leave out the chorizo, or indeed you could replace the chorizo with bacon or somesuch to make it gluten-free. Now that I’ve talked it up, I feel I should provide the recipe, which is…here! Note – I halved it, used canned tomatoes, and didn’t have any capsicums. Still great!
To go with, I used a recipe from Annabel Cooks, a book by a very pleasant NZ cook, which I haven’t really used much because of the…expensive…nature of many of her recipes. I realise that someone so devoted to Nigella can’t throw stones but it’s different with her!! Anyway, Annabel Cooks is all “feta cheese” and “creme fraiche” this and “pine nuts” and “boneless skinless chicken breast” that. I did however find a recipe containing things I had in my cupboard, which was her variation on a dish that I consider to be a Kiwi ”classic” – potato bake.

The main difference in this one is that the potatoes are grated (kindly done by Tim.) It bakes slowly in the oven, ensconced in a mixture of eggs, milk and cheese, and comes out almost like a giant baked rosti, with lots of delicious crunchy bits on top and creamy yielding potato below.

Above: Looks good, right? Also vegetarian and gluten-free…oh what a world we live in.

Tonight’s dinner was a bit dull because I was pretty drained after all that Richard III and hadn’t planned anything exciting (and obv there was no pudding.) More soup though – something from Alyson Gofton’s Flavours cookbook, which is a million times superior to her schilling Watties products for Food in a Minute. Flavours has a good concept, too – each recipe is dedicated to a different flavouring, some familiar, like cocoa, vanilla pods, and ginger, some a little more interesting, like sherry, tumeric, and walnut oil, and some are those “I bought this on a whim and now what?” flavourings like saffron, verjuice and tamarind. I made the Garlic Soup, which although worryingly flatulent in title is nothing more taxing than onion soup with garlic in it. It is easy to make, with a lovely creamy texture – despite no cream – and is good for when you don’t think you have anything in the cupboards.
Above: Someone else: “Why is that photo cut off…let me adjust it a…” Me: “It’s supposed to be creative!” Just as some people can strew throw-pillows about their houses without looking messy, while others just look like they dumped cushions everywhere, well…you guess which category I fall into.
PS: Without wanting to sound like I’m asking for them…Don’t be shy with comments!