Magic Beans

There is a foodstuff which has the capacity to bring luck to people. When eaten on New Year’s Day by Italians and Americans, it is thought to generate tiny molecules of good fortune inside their stomachs. On the other side of the world, Japanese priests hold an annual ceremony to pelt their congregations with handfuls of this food,  in order to wish their parishioners a happy and fruitful year. What am I on about? What is this miraculous, lucky ingredient? Beans.

Beans are a January food, not only because of the immense luck they bring to the people who come into contact with them, but because they are cheap –a godsend at a time of year when many people are feeling the pinch.

January is also a popular time for the vain and insecure to harp on about health and weight and detoxing and other joyless, narcissistic subjects. But beans seem to be something that even these neurotics will consume, during the sparest, most ascetic month of the year.  Beans can make a feast for fasters.  So what better recipe to choose for January than a cheap, healthy and incredibly lucky bean salad? What is more, this health giving, luck-inducing dish can be made with stuff from the store cupboard –so if, like me,  you live in a place, where cruel winds race unchecked across vast, dank fen skies, ready to snatch the warm breath from your lungs and replace it with choking, icy air –this recipe will save you from having to go out to the shops. Bonus.

Because I use tinned beans (by all means spend hours soaking and boiling beans, or experimenting with pressure cookers -you will save money that way and feel very noble indeed) this recipe makes a large amount of salad. But, it is delicious, so you can eat a lot of it. It transports very well –so is great for packed lunches. It keeps for a couple of days in the fridge – the flavours improve with time.  You can’t freeze it, sadly as it would become a revolting, mealy, compost-like mulch. But, if you get bored of eating bean salad as a  salad, then simply turn the leftovers into veggie burgers and keep the luck going.

The more types of bean, generally the better the salad. I think three ‘pulses’ and one fresh crunchy green bean makes the perfect combination. Sweetcorn can be added for a sugary, juicy hit and to vary the texture. My friend Ottilie makes a dreadful fuss if she finds corn in a salad, as she finds it slightly common, unless served on a cob. But I think she is wrong – tinned sweetcorn is a marvellous thing, and this salad is a good venue for it.

The most important thing to remember, when working with beans and pulses, is acidity. These small beads of plant potential are of the earth and they really taste like earth too, unless you lift them up with a well placed douche of vinegar or citrus juice. I tend to match chick peas with lemon juice, red kidney beans (and other darker pulses) with red wine vinegar. Don’t be shy with it, taste and add more if the salad still has a slightly floury taste. Don’t be frightened of sugar either. There are too many killjoys out there, whining and bitching about how dreadful sugar is for you. A small sprinkle into a wonderfully worthy salad of fibrous, natural nutrients is just going to make it more delicious. My favourite cuisines (Chinese and Thai) both lob sugar into dishes fairly liberally and the levels of obesity in those countries are far lower than ours in the West. And their food tastes a whole load better too.

Lucky Salad

1 can each of red kidney beans, chick peas, black beans (you can use any tinned bean/lentil really, except for baked beans in tomato sauce. If you do that –I will find out and come and get you)

1 good handful French haricot beans chopped into one inch length or frozen edamame (the peas only –not the pods)

1 can sweetcorn (unless you are Ottilie)

1 small onion finely chopped

Juice of one lemon/1 tbsp. vinegar (red wine or white wine is best –balsamic is a bit girly for this)

a squirt of tomato puree

2 tbsps olive oil

Sea salt

Pepper

Brown sugar

Pinch dried mustard

Bunch of fresh parsley, finely chopped.

Begin by cooking the French/edamame beans lightly, until they retain a little crunch. Drain and rinse the canned beans well and the sweetcorn if using.

In the bottom of a large bowl combine the oil, vinegar/juice, salt, sugar, pepper, mustard and tomato puree. Give it a good whisk with a fork until it is a pleasantly frothy emulsion.

Add the rest of the ingredients to the bowl and stir well. Leave for a few hours before eating for the flavours to combine. Then bask in your good fortune.

Cicero’s Soup

Cicero was a very boring orator who droned on and on about awful legal things. He had a couple of natty tricks with language: making points in threes and inventing neologisms. It actually makes me feel slightly teenage and angry to think about it, because I loathed studying him at school. The most interesting thing I learned about him was that he was named Cicero, because his nose looked like a chickpea. (Cicer is Latin for chickpea).

I don’t believe anyone’s nose actually could look like a chickpea. Chickpeas are round with strange nodules. If I had to pick a body part to correspond with a chickpea, it would not be a nose. You  might have a facial wart like a chickpea (it would be awfully unfortunate, but possible). A belly button could look like a chickpea, just, if the midwife had been a bit ham-fisted. But noses, even darling little button ones, never look like chickpeas. They could look like a pear, or a mushroom or a rather malformed sausage. I think Cicero was one of those truly dreadful people who desperately wanted a nickname so he could sound popular and came up with something really stupid, off the top of his head.

I have made chickpeas into a very delicious soup, not very subtly adapted from Jamie Oliver’s early book.I have added white wine and lemon to the original recipe, simply because the soup was too mealy and Welsh without it. Leeks and pulses on their own are good and warming and filling, but they do make me feel like a sheep with a big soggy fleece, wandering about in the fog on the Brecon Beacons. The addition of a bit of vino and lemon makes the whole thing feel more Mediterranean and sunny. Cicero himself would approve

Cicero Soup

5 leeks

1 can chick peas rinsed and drained. Or cook them yourself from dried little pellets if you are insane.

A couple of cloves of garlic

2 tbps butter and 1 tbsp olive oil (replace the butter with equal amount olive oil for non-dairy)

1 huge glass white wine

4 cups of vegetable or chicken stock

The juice of 1 lemon

salt and pepper to taste

finely chopped parsley to sprinkle

Wash the leeks by slicing them lengthways and rinsing until all the sandy and gritty bits are gone. Slice into rounds. You are going to blitz this, so don’t worry too much about how the slices look. Cut them reasonably thinly though. Crush the garlic.

Melt butter with the oil in a large pan over a low heat. Add the leeks and garlic and fry gently until they smell lovely (about ten to fifteen minutes). Add the chickpeas and stir gently making sure they do not stick. Add the wine so it sizzles a bit, then add the stock, cover and turn down to a low simmer.  If you like a really thick soup, don’t put all the stock in. You can always water it down later. Cook for another ten minutes, turn off the heat and puree  the soup roughly in a blender.

Return to the pan, season and add the lemon and parsley. Reheat and serve