Delicious Kake Food

Red, white, and black bean stew. Slice onions thinly and garlic thickly; sauté in olive oil until golden. Add quartered chestnut mushrooms; cook until liquid starts coming out. Add a splosh of white wine; deglaze.

Add previously-cooked soya beans, aduki beans, and black beans, along with cooking liquid from the aduki and black beans (I discard the cooking liquid from the soya beans as I’m not keen on the taste) and a can of chopped tomatoes. Season with paprika, Chinese black vinegar, balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, and vegetable stock concentrate (or a stock cube).

Cook until liquid has reduced enough, adding chopped courgettes about 10–15 minutes before you expect it to be ready. Serve with rice. Optional garnish for meat-eaters: lardons and chopped chorizo, fried in their own fat.

Khis soko, lobio nigozit, buckwheat pilaf. As described at the link, except I missed the instruction to chop the mushrooms finely, I left the pomegranate seeds out of the bean dish, and I used buckwheat instead of the bulgar wheat. The individual things tasted a bit boring while I was cooking them, but when they were all together on the plate they complemented each other very well and weren’t boring at all.

Black bean stew with courgettes and peppers. Simmer a chopped yellow courgette and a chopped red pepper with a can of chopped tomatoes, a couple of Maggi cubes, a finely-chopped scotch bonnet pepper and a bit of water, until the vegetables are soft and most of the liquid has gone. Add some smoky chilli sauce (I used Mad Ass Double Smoky) to taste. Stir in a drained can of soft black beans and simmer for a couple more minutes.

(The beans I bought were really very soft, so I didn’t want to cook them in the stew too long or they’d have disintegrated.)

Vermicelli rice. Made with olive oil instead of butter.

Nigerian brown beans cooked with palm oil. Following instructions from eccentricyoruba, who is teaching me to cook Nigerian food.

Yam pottage with spinach. Left over from last night.

Jollof rice. Roughly following instructions from African Food TV, though I left out the bell peppers, and I substituted garam masala for the curry powder since I didn’t have any.

Fried plantain. Ripe (but not too ripe) plantains, sliced diagonally and fried in sunflower oil.

Slow-cooked pork belly with flageolet beans. Leftovers from Tuesday. I still have a couple more portions in the freezer.

Roasted cauliflower. Break cauliflower into small florets, toss with olive oil, roast in the oven at 180˚C until browned.

Vermicelli rice. I finished the cooking in the rice cooker, rather than on the stove. It worked fine.

Slow-cooked pork belly with flageolet beans. Skin-on pork belly, blanched and cut into chunks; dried flageolet beans, soaked overnight; onions, sliced and sautéed in olive oil; smoked garlic, thinly sliced; a sprinkling of fennel seeds; a half-litre bottle of applewood cider; a generous quantity of vegetable stock. In the slow cooker for 8 hours.

Served with some cornbread I had in the freezer.

bob went to the market as usual, and then cooked dinner. I did an extra dish to go with it, a bean purée based on one I had at a Romanian restaurant the other week.

Pork sausages cooked in the oven, boiled new potatoes with mint, courgettes and garlic scapes fried up together in butter.

Borlotti bean purée was my addition; I drained and rinsed a can of borlotti beans, then simmered them in water with diced carrot, sliced leek, and thickly-sliced garlic until the vegetables were cooked. I drained this (saving the liquid to use in soup or something) and puréed it with a drizzle of olive oil, then seasoned with salt. It wasn’t quite savoury or garlicky enough, so I added garlic purée (from a tube) and some Touch of Taste vegetable stock. I’ll make this again.

We had some horseradish mustard with it too, also from the market. bob had Branston pickle, which he claims is a vegetable.