Celery Salad with Jamaican Beans

Celery Salad with Jamaican Beans

Staying with my grandparents food wise is exactly how I expected it to be. So far dinner had been veggie sausages and scrabbled egg on toast and then quorn bolanase…Veggiefree meals. So I’m making lunches as vegetable packed as possible. This isn’t easy considering all I have are bags of beans, lentils some celery and spinach.   I’m finding it a bit stressful, making my lunches like this is helping-but then my grandma keeps trying to be helpful and make my lunches-cheese on toast is not what I want, but today that’s what I had to have. Great. And dinner will be vegetable less too. It makes me not want to eat.  To top it all off she said ‘are you stuffing your face again?’ when I had a snack of orange and rice pudding. I know she was joking, but I threw it away and its made me over think again. Really finding it hard right now.

This lunch is the left overs of my celery and some black beans I boiled up.Not everyone likes celery, raw and stringy I can kinda see why. This is a really different way of having celery- the spices make this lovely and frying gets rid of some of the water, but keeps the celery crunchy. The beans add protein and are always good.

Celery Salad
1/2 tbsp olive oil
2 sticks of celery
1/2 bell pepper
1/4 tsp ground black pepper

Method

1. Heat up the oil in a pan, whilst chopping the celery and pepper.
2. Add the veg to the pan and heat through. The celery wont exactly go crispy, but frying evaporates some of the water off.
3. Add the ground pepper and stir for around 5 mins.
4. Put into a bowl, and keep the frying pan

Black beans

1/2 can (120g) black beans or dried beans

1/2 tsp Jamaican jerk spice (or 1/4 tsp each chili powder, cinnamon and thyme).

Method

1. Boil up the dried beans, boil for 10 mins then simmer for 30-40 mins.
2. Drain the boiled beans or the can.
3. Add the beans and spices to the pan, stir through to coat the beans.
4. Top the celery mixture with the beans