Butter bean and chick pea salad with marinaded pork

Weekday nights are some of the hardest things to cook for, I have come to realise. You put in a full day's work. You contend with the evening commute (mine is courtesy of Southeastern rail, and just a cursory check of #southeastern on twitter will tell you EVERYTHING you might want to know about their customer service). Then, tired and careworn, you make it home. Frankly, all you want to do is crack open a bottle of wine and ring out for takeaway. 

But home cooking is a noble and worthwhile art. Even on a "schoolnight" (and to all those people who disapprove of grown ups using that phrase to describe Monday to Thursday evenings, I say this: I work for a university, so I'm ALLOWED to call it a schoolnight!). You will feel more pride from doing it yourself... and if recent revelations from Which and the Food Standards Agency are anything to go by, you are far more likely to know exactly what you are eating too!

I'm always looking for new and fresh ideas for weekday night suppers. Dinners which can be rustled up quickly, but don't suffer from blandness. 

Another prerequisite is full and happy flavours. An area where the gutsy, sunshine flavours of Spain come up trumps. Who doesn't love the fragrance of fresh parsley, the punch of chorizo coupled with lemon and onions? 

My idea was to make a salad influenced by the flavours and typical produce of Spain. Obviously influenced by the Moors and southern or eastern Mediterranean, I wanted to include healthy and protein rich pulses and legumes, herbs and olive oil. Chorizo would add paprika along with its meaty texture and pepper and artichoke some crunch. 

Recently, I followed Nizami Foods on twitter. They are a company producing food products with an Indian twist. Think Chinese Chilli oil with roasted garlic or Thai tamarind chutney with an Indian flourish of cumin and dates. Well, everyone told me that twitter was "a total waste of time". Turns out I was their 100th follower (genuinely) and as a thank you, they wanted to send me some products as a thank you. One of them was a Romesco sauce, which was an Spanish red pepper sauce with an Indian twist. 

The Romesco sauce suggested that it be used as the base for either a pasta sauce or a marinade. Marinading is one of the midweek cook's top tricks. You either start the marinading before you go to work (for those typically long marinaded dishes) and leave the ingredients to work their magic whilst you toil away or you start as soon as you get home and get all your preparation and other tasks done before cooking. It was a no-brainer; marinade was going to be the use.

This dish uses a number of storecupboard ingredients I have recently discovered. One was garlic paste by Garden Gourmet which is very useful for squeezing into salad dressings (as I have done here) but also marinades. The other was artichoke bottoms in brine by Morphakis found in the local Turkish shop. The Romesco sauce I have already mentioned. 

So here is a supper we enjoyed recently. The salad can be enjoyed as a meal on its own or a side dish with grilled meat, possibly a full flavoured fish. I think the salad, if made in excess, would make a wonderful packed lunch for work the next day (cook's prerogative, of course!).

Spanish style chick pea and butter bean salad

Serves 2-4 people, depending how much salad to meat you like. 

You can substitute the red onion with a banana shallot. You don't want to use a white onion, as it won't be sweet flavoured enough.

Ingredients:

For the salad:

1 can chick peas drained and rinsed

1 can butter beans drained and rinsed

1 handful of fresh flat leaf parsley chopped roughly

70-80g chorizo chopped into fine rounds

1 small red onion, halved and sliced finely

2 artichoke bottoms, finely diced

2 peppadew peppers, finely diced

For the salad dressing:

1/2 teaspoon garlic paste

juice of 1 lemon

3-4 tablespoons of olive oil

For the marinaded pork:

2 pork loin steaks

1/2 bottle Romesco sauce by Nizami

Method:

1. Marinade the pork loin steaks in the Romesco sauce for at least 30 minutes. An hour would be better.

2. In the meantime, prepare the salad ingredients as set out above. Get all your ingredients except for the herbs, chorizo and dressing in a bowl.

3. Another task to deal with in the meantime is to heat either your grill or your griddle pan so that it is hot.

4. Put the pork loin on to grill, about 7 minutes each side.

 

5. Fry your chorizo rounds in a little olive oil. Wait until they start to go brown. 

6. Once the chorizo is brown, lift out of the pan with a slotted spoon or spatula onto a plate covered in kitchen paper (to soak up the excess fat and oil).

 

7. Mix up your salad dressing in either a mug (mixed with a spoon) or in a jam jar by closing the jar and shaking vigourously.

 

8. Just before you are ready to serve up, mix all of the salad ingredients with the chorizo and dressing. You want the dressing to coat everything thinly.

9. Serve the salad with the cooked pork loin steaks. 

 

Snigdha was sent a bottle of Romesco sauce by Nizami who did not expect any coverage to result. It was sent on account of my being their 100th follower on twitter.

Spanish Chorizo Stew with Butter Beans and Chick Peas (Slow Cooker or Oven)

The days are getting colder and shorter. Summer is truly over. All dreams and fantasies we may have had for an 'Indian Summer' ended when we had to tear off the calendar page for September and stare October squarely in the face. As a result, thoughts start to turn to Autumnal food; typically for me, hot food which is warming and filling. 

So on a particularly grey and wet London day, I wanted to recall the heat and sunshine of Spain. I decided to pull the slow cooker out of its Summer semi-retirement and enlist it into action. Slow cookers are versatile, inexpensive to buy and cheap to run. You can put them on first thing in the morning and be greeted to a cooked meal when you get in, tired and exhausted at the end of the day. All it demands in return is a small amount of effort in preparation and set-up first thing in the morning. They are very popular in the USA where they are often called by their most famous brand name, 'Crockpot'. However, they appear to be less commonplace in the UK, which is a shame given that you can now get controllable models with more than one temperature setting, offering greater versatility than when I acquired my trusty Morphy Richards racing green model.

If you don't have a slow cooker, you could use a flameproof casserole dish (such as the French cast iron style ones). You will have to put the oven on, and the cooking time will be far less. I would guess at a temperature of 180°C, gas mark 4, and instead of putting on the slow cooker base, cook in the oven with the lid on for about an hour and a half to 2 hours (but don't quote me on this, since I didn't test it). Or if your slow cooker does not have a removable heatproof pan like mine, you may have to start the early cooking stages in a saucepan or frying pan on the hob. 

Your beans need to be soaked for at least 7 hours before you try making this recipe. Unless you have a pressure cooker! Or you could use a tin of chick peas and a tin of butter beans. I use tins for convenience fairly often, but the taste and texture of pulses is, to my palate, a little more satisfying if done yourself by soaking then boiling. But do whatever you have the time to do, because remembering to do the soaking and then having the time to do the boiling in the morning is quite a big ask. Especially if you have to make it into work at a sensible time! I made this on my 'preparation day' when I was preparing my civil litigation class at home. 

Spanish Chorizo Stew with Butter Beans and Chick Peas

Serves 4

Ingredients:

150g Butter beans, soaked overnight in a non-metallic bowl

150g chick peas, soaked overnight in a non-metallic bowl

2-3 tbsp olive oil

2 onions, finely diced

1 red pepper diced into 1cm dice

6 cloves garlic, very finely diced

Chorizo, sliced into 5mm thick rounds

1 Fennel bulb, halved lengthways and then sliced

2 chilis, halved along their length leaving the stalk attached

2 heaped tsp rosemary, very finely chopped

1 heaped tsp sage (6-7 leaves), very finely chopped

300-400ml chicken stock

2 tins chopped tomatoes

1 tbsp flat leaf parley, chopped

Method:

Soak the chick peas and butter beans separately in 2 non-metallic bowls overnight - at least 7 hours.

Drain and rinse the soaked beans and chick peas separately. 

Put the beans and chick peas into separate pans, covering generously in cold water. Put on the heat. When boiling, set a timer and boil for 20 minutes. Drain and rinse with cold water.

Start by heating the oil in the bottom of your slow cooker pan frying the onion and pepper for 5 minutes. 

Add the garlic and fry for another 3-5 minutes.

Now add the chorizo in a flameproof casserole over a low heat until the oil is released. 

This is what the contents of the pan will look like when you first add the chorizo:

This is what it will look like when the chorizo starts to release the paprika-infused oils and fats contained within it:

Add the fennel and fry for 5 minutes until it begins to soften. 

Add the beans, chick peas and tinned tomatoes, keeping on the heat so that you bring them from room temperature to the same temperature as the rest of the dish. Top up with the stock until all the ingredients are covered. Add the rosemary and sage. 

Now put onto the slow cooker base and cook for 7 hours on the main slow cooking setting. 

If you are cooking in the oven, place in the oven with the lid on. I think it will need about an hour, but it may need more. Test every now and then.

When the beans and chick peas are soft and tender, the dish is done. Serve in bowls topped with lots of freshly chopped flat leaf parsley.

Tuck in with some crusty bread.