I usually do this with lentil soup. The trick of pureeing some of the beans in a food processor and then putting them back in is a little bit messy but it adds so much.
I usually use bacon grease or lard in the cast iron skillet and preheat it, so when I pour in the batter, it immediately starts sizzling. This makes the bottom crispy and delicious.
I think I might have made some kind of lentil soup tonight. Not sure what it is. Perhaps a stew? I'm a foodie nincompoop!
You decide.
I'm heading off to my folks in a little while for Christmas and had some stuff left over to use. I do this every year before Christmas, I always have too much shit left over. It usually works out pretty well. It did tonight as well, but it took a good few hours. It tasted like shit right to the end.
Recipe:
I cut up a whole sweetheart cabbage in to small pieces. I boiled a kettle and I just about covered the cabbage with hot water, with a little bit of oil already in the wok. I added a bit of salt to taste.
I then cut up a couple of very old peppers that were going soft. One red, one green.
I then put in half an onion finely chopped.
2 large cloves of garlic chopped.
I added some mixed herbs and sage, some whole ground black pepper and some more sea salt.
I then added some beetroot which I also chopped up. This was of the pickled variety. No juice this time.
I let it cook a while. I tasted it. Not very nice at all. Mmmmm.... needs a bit more sea salt.
I also added a few decent sprinkles of Paprika at this point as well. Didn't help much.
I then added some Red Wine Vinegar. Nothing left to lose at this point. The seasoning was really off. In fact it almost tasted a bit fishy.
I was wondering if my wok had gone off, it was a bit rusty though that usually doesn't hurt. I wipe it down a couple of times with oil.
I looked around the kitchen for anything else ready to go off that I could put in. I found a whole tomato, and I sliced that in fairly big chunks so it doesn't get lost. I also sliced up my last courgette. I halfed it then quartered it. It was in pretty good nick. Courgettes last ages - one of my fave veggies.
Once this started boiling, I decided to throw in some peas and sweetcorn (frozen) to calm it down a bit. I also decided to boil some lentils.
I put the lentils in pan of boiling water and semi-boiled them, in fact. I drained them and I put them in last to the soup/stew mix.
It still wasn't tasting great. So I added some more sea salt. Not a lot more I could do. The consistency was more runny than I anticipated.
This is why I'm wondering if this is a stew or a soup kind of thing. It was fairly runny until I cooked it down some more. By this point it was done.
I came back to it later after slowly cooking it on my small hob to make sure it didn't burn. I was pleasantly surprised about how delicious it tasted.
For some reason the salt seemed to concentrate as it was cooked. Not overly so, but it's quite a rich taste.
The sweetheart cabbage was cooked to perfection. Still a little crunchy in places. I like to cut it up all the way down to the 'heart' as much as I can. Some bits will cook more than others and that is part of the charm. I could even see some of the bits of the single tomato I put in. The garlic was almost unheard of, but certainly imparted some flavour.
I've portioned off about 4 containers for the freezer for me to have when I get back after Christmas/New year. I already have Chili and Curry and I'm about to cook a proper old fashioned Welsh Cawl just like granny used to make. I won't be putting any lamb or meat in there as I'm a vegetarian, and even though I follow a very strict diet of no 'meat' I do eat fish and dairy products. It's more for health reasons than anything else. I cook meat for friends when they come around. Some veggies are insufferable, and certainly a lot of vegans are, but some people just roll like that and don't give a shit what you do. Some of us even see the inherent hypocrisy in going fishing and hunting and killing a wild animal, so we don't stick our noses too far above the parapet of morality.
Anyway, I'll enjoy this just as it is tonight. A proper result! The other portions I have left, I will unfreeze and enjoy with perhaps some nice rice, or maybe cous cous, perhaps even pasta (probably not) and who knows, maybe just some potatoes?
Some portions are a bit bigger than others. I do this on purpose. For the smaller portions, I will then add perhaps an egg, or who knows, maybe a tin of mackerel?
This isn't gourmet cooking. It's shit anyone can do that is cheap and nutritious. It's a vitamin bomb of goodness that soothes the soul. Soul food my brother!
Most of the time this is the situation for me:
But when I do have people around, they are usally pretty impressed. I always make sure to give them the best of what I have in my larder.
So yeah,
@AnOminous, would you say this is a 'soup' or a 'stew' or just a hot mess?
It's kinda runny!
I've looked up definitions myself but can't get a straight answer. Genuine question.
Also this is the sort of meal that would have benefited again with maybe some nice Pinto or Black Eye beans added to it. Pureeing seems like a good idea. I don't have a food processor at the moment. I guess that gets added to the top of the list of things to get next for the kitchen.
The magic of this kind of food when made is that you really can just eat it by itself or enjoy it with some other staple. I'm thinking just a little good quality rice might do the job here.
No photos I'm afraid; while it tastes exquisite it looks like a bloody dog's dinner.
