Sunday Soup Sessions: South Beach Black Bean Soup

Sundays are the best days. I like Saturday, for sure, with its catch ups and outings and, more often than not, evening derring-do (last night a girlfriend and I took in some theatre. The show was called Naked Boys Singing. One does so love to support the arts).

Saturdays, though, carry the weight, or, more accurately, the burden, of expectation. They are, after all, the first day of the weekend, and weekends so often are hampered with great expectations for fitting in all the extra curriculars, pleasant or otherwise, that didn’t happen during the week.

Sundays are free from these expectations because, by Sunday morning, expectations have either been fulfilled or dashed (that genius outfit you spent all week planning either debuted spectacularly, or sits on the bedroom floor, a reject and a flop).

This gives the more highly evolved among us the opportunity to Be In The Moment (whatever that means, I am yet to find out). For those of us less evolved, Sundays present an irresistible invitation to undertake pleasurable little busy-nesses that didn’t quite warrant top Saturday billing, but are, nonetheless, important.

This, for me, usually involves making soup, the beauties of which are manifold.

Firstly, soup makes fantastic lunch food, and if you cook and portion it out on Sunday, you can have lunches ready made in your freezer for the rest of the week.

Secondly, soups are time consuming but low maintenance. You do need to be around (ish) for an hour or so to keep an eye on the stove, but you are free to engage in other busy-nesses that make Sundays so lovely (painting BOTH finger and toenails. Cleaning the shower while listening to Prince. Re reading Truman Capote. Trialing new eyeliner techniques in front of your freshly cleaned bathroom mirror – I finally got the knack of lining the inner rim. Subtle, yet effective. It’s my new favourite trick).

Thirdly, and finally, your neighbours are more likely to be home on Sunday, all the better to tease with the tantalising smells coming from your apartment. No, I’m not mean, but it is sometimes satisfying to know that that delicious garlic-onion-spices smell the whole neighbourhood is salivating over is all for me.

Bwahaha.

Today, I made South Beach Black Bean soup, adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat. I made this soup last year for Kitty Gillfeather and I to share one night, and, whilst it was Okay, it was not Omazing.

Never one to be defeated by a recipe, and with complete faith in the kitchen gospel according to Nigella, I attempted it again, this time with a couple of modifications.
I’m pleased to report that my faith in Nigella’s inherent rightness was rewarded, after a couple of hours of simmering, by a dark, deeply spiced, lime-spiky soup. The best kind.

Given its Cuban heritage, I feel it’s only appropriate that you eat a bowl of this with something rum-based to drink: a Cuba Libre, perhaps, or, if you’re a little out-of-left-field, like me, sarsaparilla and Bacardi over ice with a squeeze of lime.

Yet another reason why Sundays are the best day: they’re the only day when lunchtime drinking (infinitely more satisfying than evening drinking) is de rigueur. After all, we’ve got work in the morning…


South Beach Black Bean Soup (Adapted from Nigella Lawson’s How To Eat)

(Makes three large portions)

200g black turtle beans
1 bay leaf
Olive Oil
1 red capsicum, finely chopped
1 onion, finely chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1 tablespoon dried oregano
Zest of one lime, plus extra limes to serve (allow one per person for citrus fiends like me)
Sugar, salt, pepper, to season
1 tablespoon dry sherry
Sour cream, sliced avocado, dried chilli flakes and/or spring onions and coriander, to serve.

1) Cover the beans and the bay leaf with a generous amount of water in a medium sized saucepan. Bring to the boil and keep at the boil, topping up with more water as needed, until beans are beginning to tenderise, but, still have quite a bit of bite.
2) Meanwhile, in your largest saucepan, heat the oil and add your finely chopped onion and capsicum. Cook over medium heat until translucent, which should take about ten minutes.
3) Add the garlic, cumin and oregano to the onion and capsicum and cook a further five minutes. The mixture should be starting to colour, which is good. You want this mixture caramelised, almost to the brink of burnt, for depth of flavour.
4) Hopefully, your beans will be crunchy-tender by this stage. If so, add them, and their cooking liquid, to the large pot, and bring to the boil. If your beans are not quite ready, remove the onion-capsicum mixture from the heat. Return to the stove when the beans are just about ready.
5) Cook at a high simmer until the beans are completely tender. Add in the sherry and lime zest, and season to taste. Nigella’s original recipe suggests using a whole tablespoon of salt (admittedly for a larger quantity of soup than my specifications), which sounds like a lot, but bean dishes do tend to need a lot of seasoning to taste of anything at all, so taste test thoroughly and often and salt accordingly.
6) Locate rum, chill glasses.
7) Spoon soup into bowls and serve, sprinkled with any, none, or all of the following: sour cream, sliced avocado, dried chilli flakes, finely sliced spring onions, coriander, and lime wedges to squeeze over the soup on the side.
8) Viva Nigella, Viva Soup Sessions, Viva Sundays.

Recipes That Keep On Giving: Fusion Dahl

Fusion cooking, a blending of two culturally diverse cuisines, was an early noughties fad. Like many fads, the concept was good, the execution problematic, and the adoption by plebs too high to sustain lasting chic. See leggings, chai, flares and boho anything.

However, when fusion works, you find yourself in a land of culinary world peace, ebony and ivory living in perfect harmony on your plate. Or, in the case of the recipe I’m about to share with you, Anglo stodge and Indian spice combining in one of the best, cheapest and easiest dinners going.

The quickest way to take you on this journey is to get you to do the following. Imagine a full English breakfast. Imagine a bowl of dahl. Imagine if we merged the two. What would you get? East meets West. Stodge meets Spice. Fusion dahl.

The basic concept of replacing the beans component of a full English breakfast with lentil dahl was one that A Bite To Eat, a Canberra institution, trialled a number of years ago. (A full English, for the uninitiated, consists of bacon, sausage, egg, beans, toast, and some sort of fried vegetable, usually tomato, mushroom, or spinach, or all three. In my opinion, a full English is not a patch on a full Scottish, the latter being superior on account of the sheer amount and type of sausage on offer, but let’s leave that simmering ethnic tension for another post). On an evening when I was at the buy-the-two-cents-a-tin-cheaper-tin-of-tomatoes end of a pay cycle, I decided to turn my favourite poor-girl supper of red lentil dahl into an experimental cross cultural peasent feast, by adding crispy bacon, sausage, egg and toast. And that’s when I blew my mind.

Something about the combination of salty spicy dahl, salty meaty bacon and sausage, gooey egg, crisp toast, and sweet butter speaks of the best of multiple culinary worlds. Indeed, it was the dish I cooked, in a fit of Rule (Modern, Multicultural) Britannia, to eat whilst watching the royal wedding earlier this year. It has been on high rotation ever since.

Last night, I played with the formula some more. Conscious of the looming Christmas meatfest (and sugar fest, and grog fest, and general fest fest), I decided to replace the sausages with green veg, the toast with mashed home grown parsnips from PapaK’s garden, and loose the egg altogether. The result was incredible, all the more so for being a virtuous cousin to the nutritionally cheeky salt and carb overload of the original.

Recipes for the cheeky and the virtuous are supplied below. Pick according to need.

Cheeky Fusion Dahl

Serves 2 hungry people

1 cup red lentils, soaked in hot water
Butter, oil, for frying
3 cloves crushed garlic
2cm knob ginger, grated
Teaspoon garam marsala
Teaspoon tumeric
1 teaspoon massell vegetable stock powder
1 teaspoon massell chicken stock power
Hot water
6 Rashes bacon, rind trimmed
6 sausages
4 slices toast
2 eggs

Heat oil and butter in a medium saucepan until butter is frothy. Fry garlic and ginger, with a pinch of salt, until softened. Add spices, stir till aromatic. Drain lentils and add to pan, turning down heat to prevent catching. Sprinkle over stock powder, cover with hot water, and simmer over low heat until lentils are tender and dahl is at a dahl like consistency (if I were Nigella, I’d ladle in a couple of innuendos here, but I’m not, so I’ll go tautological instead).

While dahl is simmering, cook bacon and sausages until crispy, keep warm on a plate in the oven. Fry eggs in bacon and sausage pan, at the same time toast your toast until toasted (tautology, again!).

Assemble as you see fit. My preference is: toast, buttered, topped with steaming mound of dahl, topped with runny-yolked fried egg, sausage to the side, bacon balanced delicately on top. And a sprig of coriander, for a token bow to greenery.

Virtuous fusion dahl

One quantity of dahl, as above
Good handful of parsnips, peeled, chopped roughly
Butter, pepper, salt
Green vegetables for two (I like kale and French beans)
4 rashers bacon

Make dahl as above, but place parsnips in a pot with water and set over high heat as soon as you start the dahl. Cook parsnips until tender. Drain, add a knob of butter to the pan, along with salt and pepper to taste, and mash until smooth. This improves if allowed to sit for five minutes. Cook bacon, as above, and toss your greens off in the bacon fat immediately before serving.

Again, preferences for assemblage vary, but I like a mountain of parsnip, foothills of greens, a volcanic flow of dahl on top and some precariously balanced bacon.

Of course, you could veganise this concept, if that’s your thing, by replacing the egg, bacon and sausage component with crispy fried tofu cubes, avocado, or oven baked mushrooms. Vegetarians can substitute haloumi for the bacon, or jut throw on some extra eggs. Whatever you do, it’ll be a brilliant, spicy, stodgy harmony.

Cups Runneth Over.

I feel bad filing this post under the ‘recipe’ tag, because it isn’t. But, after evangelizing about the merits of oven roasted ‘shrooms, and happily discovering a high quality supplier of particularly awesome ‘shrooms at my local shops, I feel compelled to share my recipe, or, borrowing a Nigellaism, my ‘enthusiastic suggestion’ for preparing mushrooms.

(As an aside, I’ve recently been reading Nigella’s ‘How to Eat’ and ‘How to Be A Domestic Goddess’ not for the recipes, but for the writing. I love her stories, and I love the warmth that emanates from her prose. Give me Nigella over some of the more lauded novelists of our generation any day of the week!).

To begin your ‘shrooming, preheat your oven to 200 degrees. You don’t really need to preheat, and, as I often make these as a super fast lunch or dinner, I often don’t have time to, but it makes good sense to get your oven heating whilst you undertake the two minutes of preparation required.
Place your mushrooms, cup side up, on a baking-paper lined tray. I would allow about 5 palm-sized mushrooms per person, but then I tend to err on the side of gluttony so you may want to revise downwards. You should also consider size when selecting your ‘shrooms at the grocery store – you want mushrooms that have enough of a cup to catch the roasting juices, so buttons and the more exotic varieties are probably out. I usually stick to medium-large field mushrooms, which seem to be the tastiest.

Remove the stem from each of your mushrooms, being sure to keep the cup intact. Now it’s time to get creative. The basic rule here is that you need salt, pepper, and a little bit of fat – butter or olive oil – to give you that rich, delicious juice. However, if you are feeling fancy and have a good supply of fresh herbs to raid, pick a couple of the following and add them to the cups along with you basic seasoning: garlic, thyme, rosemary, sage, paprika, chilli, oregano, anchovies, capers.

Put the tray of ‘shrooms in the oven, and leave them for ten minutes. I find that cooking time varies wildly with these, depending on the size and freshness of your ‘shrooms, the amount of time your oven had been preheating, and the planets rotating through your sun sign (kidding). Basically, though, what you want to see, when you open the oven door, is a wrinkly brown mushroom with a pool of dark, richly scented juice in the cup. The visual, I’ll admit, is not appealing, but it’s honest. Your ‘shrooms will, and ought to, look manky at this stage.

At this point, you can proceed to the eating, but, if you are feeling really really fancy, or you’re just showing off, add some cheese (feta, mozzarella, and parmesan are favorites) and give your ‘shrroms another 2-3 minutes so your cheese begins to bubble.

Serve with a tossed together salad, or some wilted greens, and polenta or bread to soak up the juices. So now you know – you’re only ever 20 minutes, tops, away from complete culinary satisfaction. And if that isn’t a comfort in these troubled times, I don’t know what is.