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

Butter Bean and Swede salad

Bean and Swede salad

Happy Mothers day to all mothers in the UK!! and A lovely day to everyone else elsewhere too.

This is my Friday lunch. Fridays tend to be one of two things; a bit of a left overs mix, or Dahl day!  Only I couldn't be bothered to boil up any lentils and had no left over beans. I’d left it too late to do more beans (they have to soak for 8 hours and that takes forward planning).  So I splashed out and used canned. And not just any canned beans-butter beans! They were so lovely I ate the other half of the can that night… good job they are healthy! (I make my lunch the night before-mornings never have enough time in them). Not many people like swede but its so sweet and cheap! Mine had been in the fridge too long and was looking a little sad. But dicing and frying the swede but frying brought it back to an edible state. I think that when fried it tastes rather like pumpkin! (and unlike pumpkin, cheap and in season here).

I paired with some chopped pepper and mixed nuts as a snack.

Recipe:

·         100g swede

·         ½ tsp chilli powder

·         ½ tbsp olive oil

·         ½ can butter beans (or boil up 1/3 cup dried)

·         Couple of handful salad leaves

Method

1. Dice the swede into small pieces so it will cook nicely, heat up the oil in a frying pan.
2. Add the swede and chili powder and fry the swede until golden brown and smelling lovely. Then remove from heat.
3. Drain the butter beans and add to the cooling swede (the heat will remove the excess water which can make your salad limp).
4. Wash the salad and put in to bowl/container then top with the bean/swede mix once it has cooled.