Jan 01 2010
Hale and hearty!
While I was at work on Hogmanay (so busy that I ended up playing Who’s in the Bag with my boss and the service manager!) D was on holiday, and took the time to rustle up a hearty meal for a wintry night, Chilli Black Bean Stew. This was most definitely needed as the wintry weather (black ice all ower the joint in Edinburgh) and the road closures for the Hogmanay parties resulted in it taking me 1hour40 minutes to get home from work, bah!
This is a recipe I’d torn from a Waitrose magazine last year, from a section entitled Winter Vegetarian. One of my best friends is a veggie but I always feel slightly as if I am letting the side down in my cooking for her. I thought the recipes in this section were without fail promising, yet somehow failed to ever cook any of them!
Dougal had to improvise slightly; no where in Leith sells black beans on Hogmanay (and certainly not tinned ones- there was no time for soaking) so kidney beans sufficed, and tinned plum tomatoes had to substitute for tinned cherry because, frankly, where apart from Waitrose sells tinned cherry tomatoes?!? Fresh chillies were not to be had so he used some jalapeños out of a jar. Oh and he forgot the apricots, even though we had some really good ones left over from the biscotti.
Nevertheless it was blimen wonderful; these concerns do not matter and merely give us an ideal excuse to repeat the recipe, to see how it ’should’ have tasted. I thought the flavour was really interesting- the heat didn’t appear till right on the point of the swallow, so you got real depth of flavour without being hot-bombed. Perhaps with fresh chillies the heat would permeate the whole ‘length’ of the taste?
looks pretty, too. The white stuff is sour cream? (actually it glistens more like greek yog?)
Well spotted that man, yes it is greek yoghurt- in this case specifically called for in the recipe rather than a substitution. Is good, in anycase, because it doesn’t melt from the heat of the chilli so there’s always a blob to go back to and ‘mine’ from.
I had forgotten about this, and thought “yes, this is tomorrow night’s tea sorted”, the fish pie idea going out the window with the knowledge of Paddy’s presence. However, no harissa (actually, will double check that), and no black turtle beans…. but maybe I can substitute black eye beans instead.
Ah, also no greek yogurt (difficult to source this far out east, as you know, sigh)
well we didn’t have the right beans either and it didn’t suffer. We have harissa- but I expect Lizzie bringing it home would be too late and don’t know whether Paddy is with you already. Crunchy Carrot perhaps?
No greek yog? Times are tough in dunbar. We can usually get it in the wee co-op up the hill but never in the supermarket-sized one down the hill, which sells only vodka, crisps and washing machines. And that low fat Total (pink tub). Naturally.
Actually I did have some Harissa…. but it was mouldy (open jar, forgotten, on high shelf. Chilled but not refrigerated)
Crunchy Carrot has come up with it before so I’m hopeful.
You can get fake low-fat greek yog at the Coop… I suppose it’ll have to do, but as you say, proper stuff stays in a good blob. We shall have to be blob free…. and probably with rice, I suspect, or did you feel the tortillas were the biz?
tortillas did not disappoint- you could sort of scoop it up in the warm bread- but rice would have been entirely fitting too. I expect it was tortilla just to give the recipe interest.
tortillas did not disappoint- you could sort of scoop it up in the warm bread- but rice would have been entirely fitting too. I expect it was tortilla just to give the recipe interest for the sake of the magazine.