We start with an utter disaster.
The kind of disaster where we go to Subway instead.
Dan was listening to the Food Programme on Radio 4 (of course he was) and they were doing a special on porridge (of course they were) and Levi Roots came on.
We’re big fans of Levi Roots. He’s responsible for much of our interest in Caribbean food. But his porridge recipe was pretty inedible. More allspice flavour than is at all sensible despite the seemingly meagre half teaspoon.
We then moved onto some much more sensible lunches from Anna Jones – a modern way to eat.
First was the Californian Miso, Avocado and Butter Bean Salad. A glorious fusion of bright green and Asian flavours. Broccoli, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, salad leaves, avocado and butter beans dressed with a miso/yoghurt mix. We used soya yogurt in the spirit of experimentation and were pleasantly surprised. Dan had the left overs on his shreddies (well, malted wheats)
There’s an interesting typo in the dressing recipe where it gave us the choice of ponzu or soy sauce. Since ponzu is a form of citrus, soy sauce seems an unlikely substitution. We suspect it was actually referring to the lime juice on the line below.
We stuck some brown rice on the side to bulk it out.
We followed that with some simple packed lunches of Roasted Squash with Chilli, Dukkah and Lime. Dukkah is a delicious mixture of hazelnuts and spices. Apparently this recipe makes way more than you need to serve four.
Seemed just right to us.
In direct contrast to the simplicity on the squash and dukka we went full on for the next meal.
One of my colleagues is about 75% vegan. His girlfriend, who he lives with, is vegan, so almost everything he eats at home is animal free. He kindly brought in a couple of vegan cookbooks for me. One of them was “My Vegan Travels” by Jackie Kearney, which has some excellent looking recipes in it.
One of which was Punjabi Pie and Gravy.
Better translated as Dal and Samosas.
We’ve never made samasas before. Not sure we have yet as in the interest of health we baked rather than deep fried these. But we made something pretty close, very tasty and very spicy. Like needles on the tongue spicy. It was amazing.
It was also nice to pull some of our less used spices out of the larder. The joys of Bedford means we had methi, asafoetida, ajwain and amchoor already in stock.
We are definitely making the samosas again.
thegreedyguineapig 