Personal Blogs

For the penultimate blog in this series, let’s visit the chicken of the vegan world! No, I’m not talking about tofu. That’s eggs. I’m talking: white beans!

If you’re vegan, sooner or later you will be forced to encounter beans. Down a blind alleyway you’ll be cornered by a thuggish cannellini, rangy and thick-skinned, insisting you get your protein from more diverse sources than the great mono-crops of rice, corn, soya and almond. You might be met by the intimidating, necromantic eyes of black-eyed beans, chanting incantations and disappearing into pasta sauces as if they were never there (although you know they’re there because their eyes were left behind!) The friendliest bean of the lot is the butter bean, which has the flavour of butter and the smoothest texture of any legume that isn’t a chickpea cooked to death. I make beans sound quite frightening, but they’re actually by far the most versatile protein source for a vegan, because they have the starchy blandness you would expect from a potato, but with the added benefits of having nutritional benefits.

So far, I’ve only mentioned white beans. This is no accident, because although kidney beans are the highest in protein and borlotti beans the most beautiful, white beans are the best option for feeding bean-sceptics. You may not believe me, but they are out there, people who think beans make you fart and don’t do anything else for you. And as farting is unacceptable in polite society, they don’t eat beans. We must overturn this stereotype: farting is just farting and it should be accommodated in polite society to avoid trapped wind on a population-wide level. Also, beans don’t make you fart. I’ve checked.

Most people only eat beans if they’re baked beans as part of breakfast – and herein lies the persuasive power of the white bean, because baked beans are white. I believe they’re haricots, which is really just the French word for ‘bean’. If you wash off the (sickly-sweet, regurgitation-worthy) baked-bean sauce, you will discover that they are white.

The thing with white beans is that they soak up flavour. One recipe from Diana Henry is essentially white beans poached in bay-inflected extra virgin olive oil and that’s a side dish! (To pork poached in olive oil. It was something of a theme for this menu.) Therefore, if you’re making a bean broth like the one I’m recommending below, you need to make sure you choose really nice stock and really nice herbs. Like all soups, it’s not so much a recipe as a template, so you can change the ingredients to suit the contents of your fridge. Celeriac, chilli, ginger, coriander, tomato, potato, lemongrass, parsley, turnip, radish, sweetcorn, mange tout – all can go in. You just need the courage – you need to bite the bean.

Bean broth – to serve 2 because I have a very small casserole

1. So this is how I like to make it. In a 2l casserole or saucepan with a lid, heat up 2-3 tbsp olive oil (the grassier the better) then add 1 peeled and sliced onion and sauté for 5 minutes.
2. Whilst this is frying, dice 1 broccoli or celery stalk, slice the hardy leaves of 1 cauliflower, and chop 2 carrots and 1/4 - 1/2 swede. Add these to the pot as you go, giving a firm stir to make sure nothing catches. There’s no reason it should, but it could, and that’s the point.
3. Peel and chop 2 big garlic cloves. Don’t cut them too small because then you won’t have small morsels of deliciousness floating in your soup – and that would be a tragedy. Add these to the pan along with 5 peppercorns, 1-2 tbsp dried herbs of your choice and enough vegetable stock to cover. I measure out boiling water with a measuring cup and then add the relevant amount of stock powder. I am not Melissa Hemsley. Bring to the boil, then put the lid on and simmer for up to 10 minutes.
4. Add 80g wholegrain couscous and the drained and rinsed contents of 400g tin of beans (butter for preference), replace the lid and simmer for up to 5 minutes. You don’t need to worry if they don’t get submerged, because couscous steams too.
5. Turn off the heat and chuck in 1-2 balls of frozen spinach, then put the lid back on so they defrost. Serve with a range of toppings on the side – balsamic glaze, pesto, gremolata, toasted flaked almonds, croutons, chilli oil, nutritional yeast flakes, fresh herbs – but I must warn you against adding something acidic like mustard, because swallowing acidic liquid is uncomfortably reminiscent of hangovers. I don’t remove the whole peppercorns, preferring to chew on them, but if you can be arsed to fish them out, they’re not hard to spot.

Notes: Obviously, vary the vegetables to suit what you have, and chop them up so everything cooks at the same speed. Vary the herbs as well and add spices if you so desire: you could use coriander seeds and mint, paprika and nutmeg, lemon zest and tarragon, dill and turmeric, wine and juniper. A world of flavours is open to you. Adding dried fruits with the stock will mean they plump up deliciously.

You may have noticed that tomatoes have cropped up in a few other recipes in this blog. You may have also noticed that almost the entirety of exported Italian cuisine has something to do with tomatoes. Well, in all fairness to tomatoes, they’re quite versatile, like the black pepper of the vegetable world. They can take on salty and bitter flavours in eye-wincing quantities whilst providing sweet, sour and umami tastes themselves. On top of that, you can get them all year round (tins are brilliant), grow them easily in Britain and they’re usually a jolly red colour which is always seasonally appropriate. You could equally hang them off your earlobes or a Christmas tree. Happy times!

What’s also incredible is the fact that nobody actually hates them. A person could be the most anxious eater on the planet and find tomatoes’ uncontrollable juiciness terrifying – all that uncontainedness! – but they probably like ketchup. Or baked beans. Or sun-dried tomatoes. Tomatoes have been so thoroughly deployed in recipes that we probably all eat them at some point or another, whether we like the fresh ones or not. 

The difficulty with the tomato is their tendency to a peculiar taste. Rather like melons, tomatoes can develop a watery metallic flavour not unlike lipstick – a bit like jasmine but less appealing. Others can taste like the sky in midsummer, or the promise of a flower meadow, or tomato. The sheer unpredictability of tomatoes mean that it is always worth knowing how to cook them in case they have contrived to be slightly inedible. Often a substandard or melon-like tomato can be improved by a dousing of balsamic vinegar with pinches of fine salt and dried basil, or wrapping the tomato in a fresh basil leaf like a birthday present, but otherwise you will have to roast them, fry them or make sorbet. (Weird idea, I know, but apparently tomatoes and strawberries are essentially interchangeable. Eat strawberries with mozzarella and you’ll see what I mean.)

Another brilliant thing about tomatoes is how tasty they are when they go a bit manky. Hear me out. It’s not that you simply eat a manky tomato – and heaven forfend you eat a gone-off tomato – but tomatoes which have begun to get a bit withered and old respond to cooking so well it’s almost worth buying a trugful and then waiting for them to sag like a parable for the futility of fighting time. (Almost. I still want some bouncing-ball fresh ones for my pesto panini.)

How to rescue manky tomatoes whilst still being the star of the show, serves 2

1. Preheat the oven to 200ºC fan. Drain and chop 1 block of firm tofu, weighing approximately 250-300g, then put into a big mixing bowl along with 2-4 peeled garlic cloves. In a small jam jar with a lid, pour 2 tbsp olive oil, 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar, 1 heaped tsp wholegrain mustard, 1 tsp dried rosemary and a grind of black pepper, then put the lid on, shake it and pour this over the tofu.
2. Peel and cut 2 onions into eighths and add to the tofu. Wash and halve or quarter 200g baby potatoes (up to you) and add those to the tofu. Wash what remains of your tomatoes and add these too. Toss everything in the big mixing bowl together so everything is coated in the salad dressing.
3. Empty the contents of the mixing bowl onto as many roasting or baking trays as required for everything to fit in a single layer (it should be one, unless you are cooking vast quantities of tomatoes, in which case why not just boil them down to a concentrated pasta sauce with sautéed onions and celery?) Roast the lot for 30-35 minutes, by which point everything, even the tofu, will be crispy and delicious. Sprinkle with a pinch of salt.
4. Serve with your usual suite of condiments – and a salad dressing to evoke the flavours of the tofu-soaking earlier. 

Notes: The reason I sprinkle with salt at the end and not the beginning is I find that salting potatoes before you roast them draws out their moisture and makes them damp and crispless. Which is a terrible shame, if still completely edible.

Look, I know nuts aren’t technically vegetables! But name me a vegetable that begins with ‘N’ and I will show you a seaweed. There’s nothing wrong with eating seaweed – it’s a way to get some iodine into your diet if you’re vegan – but it’s not something I use much. I get my iodine from choice plant milks and tofu. So with that established, let’s talk nuts.

As is right, most people first encounter nuts in the rather enticing coating of chocolate – be that Nutella, the Brazil in Quality Street, Toblerone or, if you’re really fancy, gâteau d’opéra, that multilayered French confection of almond, coffee and chocolate. Yes, I have done my research. And no, I’m not counting Snickers because a ‘peanut be not a nut’ (try saying that after a glass of Frangelico).

But once you have grown up and moved on from an overwhelming obsession with chocolate (when is that supposed to happen, by the way?), you begin to mix nuts in more savoury contexts – which is just as well, because the relatively restricted range of proteins available to a vegan requires forays into the worlds of nuts and seeds – and we can’t eat chocolate morning, noon and night. Even if the little voice inside us tells us it would be a lovely idea. 

One of the most useful things to know is that nuts don’t all taste similar. Those big bags of mixed nuts are a trick to lead the hapless connoisseur astray, even if they are fantastic value for money. I do not consider it beyond the realms of decency to sift patiently through the bag to differentiate the nuts into ornamental bowls. If you’re including nuts in a meal, you have to check that their flavours complement what you’re cooking.

Almonds are easily the most versatile. They are almost the only nut which can pair with tomato harmoniously, and I can recommend flaked almonds sprinkled on top of risotto or pasta sauces if you want a slightly cheesy edge – although Tom Hunt also suggests grating walnuts. Almonds are also incredibly cheap and can be grown in Europe, so you don’t need to support ecologically devastating mono-crops of almonds in California if you want organic Portuguese ones instead.

Pecans are one of the least versatile. They’re slightly peculiar in flavour, rather like maple syrup, sawdust and shoes, and they’re almost inevitably stale when you buy them. I wonder if I'm going to list all the nuts there are?

Oh hang on! There is a nut which is a vegetable! Butternut! Awesome – here’s a recipe for a hot lunch if you’re home alone in autumn. It uses lentils; sorry. What do you mean a butternut is a squash?

Roasted butternut lunch with miso lentils, serves 1

1. Preheat oven to 200ºC fan and get out a small roasting tray. An ovenproof dish for soufflés and crèmes brûlée will also do the trick.
2. Wash and chop 150g butternut squash and 1 stick of celery (use cauli leaves if allergic or phobic) into 2cm cubes and tumble into the designated roasting tray. You don’t have to peel butternut because the skin is edible, which is an enormous relief because peeling those bastards is really difficult. 
3. (Sidebar: those butternut seeds are edible – remove the frondy bits and simmer for 10 mins, then roast for 10 mins with a piece of greaseproof paper on top of the seeds so they don't pop over into the darkest recesses of your oven. Stick in a jar once cooled and sprinkle with abandon. They taste like popcorn.)
4. Anyway, back to the squash and celery. Sprinkle over 1 tsp dried or chopped fresh rosemary and 1 tbsp olive oil, and toss to mix, then roast for 30 minutes.
5. Drain and rinse one 400g tin green lentils. Stir together 1 tbsp brown miso, 2 tbsp water and 1 tsp your favourite vinegar or citrus juice into a runny paste. When the butternut is ready, pour the lentils in and around the veg in the tray and pour over the miso dressing and roast for another 5 minutes. It is a lot of lentils, but it’s supposed to be a meal in its own right.
6. Time to eat! Sprinkle over some nutritional yeast flakes (optional) and tuck in! If you’ve chosen a decorative enough roasting dish, you could just eat straight from that and cut down on washing up. It’s not slobbishness, it’s economy. If it's good enough for brûlées, it's good enough for butternut.

Notes: If you can’t bear lentils, small tinned beans like haricot or black-eyed would be good too.

I have a feeling that these are trademarked but OH MY GOD have you tried Kalettes? They’re so good! Steam them whole, roll them in a salty salad dressing and pull them into your mouth with a croupier stick. They’re Brussels sprouts in a ra-ra skirt, they’re kale in manageable sizes, they’re lettuces for the Borrowers, they are the most glamorous green you can put on a plate. Also, they’re expensive. Not break-the-bank-to-buy-beef expensive, a bag is only £2, but I mean – come on. They’re leaves. I could just harbour nettles from the park and eat those. But I won’t because Kalettes are THAT EXCITING!

I am not an impulse buyer. I can walk past countless displays of beautiful things that I could spend my hard-earned cash on – luxury chocolates, limited edition outfits, gadgets and gizmos galore – but I don’t, because I need that money for things like saving. But. Vegetables. Sometimes you feel the urge to buy them and you do not even know what they will taste like, so you have to cook them and offer them to your flatmate to eat them first, just in case you’re allergic to it so you want to check that they’re not allergic first, so if you are allergic, they can take you to hospital. Just me? Anyway.

The lovely thing about Kalettes is that I have never actually cooked them in my life. When I’ve been very good and not allowed any flatmate to starve (or poisoned them with questionable vegetables), I’m treated to somebody else’s cooking and it’s always a thrilling moment when the side dish is a steaming pile of Kalettes, shrieking out to be eaten and enjoyed like vegetal flapper girls.

If you’ve never had a Kalette, I imagine that you are absolutely dying to know what the flavour is. And if I have judged that completely incorrectly, it’s my column so I’m going to tell you anyway. You know how cavolo Nero or the dark bits of broccoli have this extraordinary saline, mineral flavour, like the outside of a multivitamin pill? Imagine this, but tempered into a husky floweriness which is entirely appropriate to the petticoat-like vegetable. I keep comparing this vegetable to sexy clothing in spite of the fact that I've never found clothes diverting in my life.

But. Vegetables.

What to do with Kalettes, if you happen to have bought a bag

1. Wash the Kalettes, if the sack instructs you to do so. Simply waterboard them in a mixing bowl, then shake excess water at encroaching pets. They’re trying to get at your Kalettes.
2. Put them in a steamer basket on top of a pan shallowly filled with boiling water. When steaming vegetables, you never want to use lots of water in the base – otherwise you might as well be boiling the vegetables. The point about steaming is it cooks vegetables ever so gently, preserving their flavour, structure and nutrient levels. And a vegetable this pretty is surely very healthy.
3. Cook them until the bases yield to the point of a knife (I don’t know how long this takes, but they’re so diaphanous I’d be amazed if they took much more than 5 minutes). Tumble them onto a serving dish and give them the merest hint of a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil and a decisive spritz of lime juice. Sprinkle over some optional breadcrumbs if you’re somebody who needs to hear crunch when you’re chewing, then take yourself off to a secluded corner to eat them. Well, Nigella Lawson would approve.

What’s that? You want a herb which smells like disinfectant and looks like a feather duster? Yes please.

Dill is such a ludicrous herb. Unlike the rest of the culinary soft herbs (basil, parsley, mint, tarragon etc.) it doesn’t even have any leaves! It opts instead for fronds which, if planted in a herbaceous border, make it look like something Alice would find in Wonderland, with a label saying ‘Eat me, I’m a turnip’. It's one of the most improbable vegetables I've ever seen, and if you try to chop it, it goes everywhere. Imagine the culinary equivalent of a dog shredding a down-filled pillow, and you're not far off.

Dill tastes so clean that it’s like taking your mouth to the car wash – garlic in reverse (and both garlic and dill go nicely in tzatziki). But don’t let this stop you. Whilst I wouldn’t necessarily recommend eating it on its own (which I do anyway, because yum), its nasal-cleansing properties make it incredibly useful in a range of dishes – either for giving the sprightliness you would except from, say, lemon juice, or for scaring small children. I am massively keen on putting cucumber in every sandwich because its ability to blandly cut through fatty/salty/tart flavours, and dill does something similarly without making your bread wet. And as we all know from picnics, nothing is sadder than a wettened sandwich.

On flexitarian days, few sandwiches are more satisfying than ones made with dill, cucumber, vermilion Scottish smoked salmon and the sort of German rye bread which looks like it’s used for building houses instead of sandwiches. Whilst this black bread is historically ‘peasant bread’, this sandwich tastes luxurious and, in the grand scheme of animal products, cheap. Unless you have an allergy to salicylates, fish or gluten, you have no excuse not to try it.

Nevertheless, in keeping with the veganism of this blog, I shall share a risotto recipe with you. I credit the combination of tomato and dill as a flavour bomb to Rukmini Iyer and The Green Roasting Tin cookbook, but I have edited the recipe to reflect my own preferences – not least because I don’t like the chewiness of pearl barley. If I wanted to sit at the table chewing until my fillings fall out, I’d eat the placemat. Eating pearl barley is satisfying in its way (like all exercise), but if I’m eating a huge bowl of grains, I really want them to be more yielding.

Tomato and dill risotto, which tastes nicer than it sounds. To serve 2

1. Set the oven to 160ºC fan and make sure you have some laundry hung up to dry near the oven. You have two options: use a pan and a foil-topped roasting tin, or make life easier and use a lidded casserole throughout. I prefer the casserole option.
2. Boil 750ml water in the kettle. Heat up 1 tbsp olive oil in the casserole (or pan) and sauté 2 sliced onions with a pinch of salt for 5 minutes until softening and glassier. Easy peasy. Next, add 2 minced or sliced garlic cloves and 150g risotto rice to the pan and stir until the rice grains are all slicked. This is so easy! Sprinkle over a bit of your favourite vinegar and stir that in.
3. Turn off the heat and, if using sauté pan instead of casserole, empty the sauté pan into the roasting tin. Add the following to the casserole/roasting tin: 200g tomatoes (no need to chop and small ones are ideal), the 750ml boiling water, 1¹/₂ stock cubes or 3 tsp stock powder and 1 tsp dried mixed herbs. Dot the top of it all with 1 tsp vegan butter or margarine, then cover with the lid/foil and bung in the oven for 40 minutes. Make sure the washing is drying near the oven!
4. Take out the risotto, add 100g frozen sweetcorn, put the lid back on and roast for another 10 minutes.
5. Wash and chop about 15g fresh dill. Add this to the risotto along with some lemon juice if desired and serve.

Notes: If you have leftover supermarket dill, wash and chop it then freeze it in ice cubes. Add frozen dill to this recipe as you would the sweetcorn.