Braised beans and tomatoes

My partner has been cooking this vegan dish for years now and I finally decided to steal the recipe from him. Luckily he didn't want to keep it a secret, so I can share it with you. His only condition was that I wouldn't call it a stew, fair enough, it's a dish with slow-cooked green beans in a tomato sauce. I made the addition of broad beans to the dish to add some additional greens. This is great use for the seasonal beans and tomatoes and a good dish for both summer and winter. I could only partly use homegrown tomatoes, as I didn't have enough ripe ones at hand. I served the bean dish with fondant potatoes and salad on the side. Here comes the recipe.

Ingredients

250 g green beans

450 g broad beans (weight with the pods)

1 onion

5 garlic cloves

1 small chilli

Olive oil

300 g tomatoes

Smoked paprika to taste

5 tbsp tomato purée

Method

Chop the onion, garlic and chilli finely.

Add a generous splash of olive oil into a pan and start cooking the onion there. Once the onion is soft, add the garlic and chilli.

Prep the beans and tomatoes. Cut the green beans into about 2 cm long pieces and chop the tomatoes finely.

Add the green beans into the pan, cook for a few minutes and add the tomatoes.

Let simmer under the lid for a couple of hours.

Remove the broad beans from their pods and add them to the mix after a while, maybe about one hour in. Then also add the tomato purée and smoked paprika.

Serve once the beans are cooked and all flavours have blended nicely.

I'm sharing this recipe with this month's Eat Your Greens where it's Shaheen's turn to host. Have a look on her blog Allotment 2 Kitchen and take part with your green vegetable recipes.

I also want to share this dish with My Legume Love Affair challenge hosted this month by Nupur from The Veggie Indian.

Have a good weekend!

Your VegHog

Falafel feast

Finally the weekend is here, and more time can be spent in the kitchen! Why not make a falafel feast for your loved ones like I made recently. Some years ago I'd had enough of falafel. Quite often they were the only, or the best, vegetarian alternative available, and so I thought that I had already eaten more than my share. However now I started thinking that I should give them another chance, and decided to make my own. It turned out that I still like them very much and will definitely have them more often again.

As an inspiration and guideline I read quite a few falafel recipes, but mainly based my own version on the Guardian article How to cook the perfect falafel and a recipe in the wonderful cookbook Veggiestan by Sally Butcher. The making of the falafel is surprisingly simple, and you can combine them with pretty much anything.

So this is how I made mine, and the recipe makes about 15 falafel.

2 cups dried chickpeas

195g broad beans (1 can)

5 garlic cloves

4 spring onions

15g fresh parsley

15g fresh coriander

1tsp salt

1tsp ground cumin

1tsp ground coriander

1tsp baking powder

Vegetable oil for frying

Soak the chickpeas overnight. Many recipes suggested that the chickpeas don't need to be pre-boiled, but I boiled them for 20 minutes anyway. The main reason being that I don't have a good food processor, just my old hand mixer. You can decide which version you prefer.

Chop the garlic and the spring onions and remove any large stalks of the herbs. Then just purée all the ingredients together into a paste that should be easy to shape with your hands.

Heat vegetable oil in a frying pan (or you can deep fry these) and fry the falafel on both sides until crispy.

This is how simple it is!

Serve the falafel with: homemade hummus, tahini, salad with mixed leaves, heirloom tomatoes and shallot rings, char-grilled peppers with harissa coating (chopped peppers first char-grilled on both sides, then brushed with harissa and baked in the oven for 20 minutes), char-grilled halloumi and pitta bread.

Enjoy!

Your VegHog