From our kitchen a simple rustic veg stew

[Bobbi]

A favourite - easy rustic vegetable stew

Easy to make, easy to eat.

Ingredients

Aubergine
Carrot
Celery
Courgette
Onion
Potato
Sweet Pepper

Wash the veg. Leave skins on.
Top and tail the veg.

Rough chop veg into large pieces. Leave potato whole.

Put all into pressure cooker basket. Put about 200ml water into pressure cooker bowl and add basket.

Seasoning

Chilli powder (sprinkle)
Chopped garlic (3-4 cloves)
Cumin ground (teaspoon)
Oregano (teaspoon)
Salted black beans (couple handsful)
Stock cube (chicken)

Add seasoning ingredients on top of veg.
Pressure cook on high for 15 minutes allowing a natural release.

Spirali pasta (Fusilli)
Tinned tomatoes
Butter

Put a couple of handfuls of spirali pasta into a pan of hot salted water. Turn off heat after 15 minutes and leave to stand with lid on for a further fifteen minutes.

Take lid off pressure cooker remove potato and tip contents of basket into pressure cooker pan with liquor in bottom of pan. Drain pasta and add to veg.

Mash potato with butter, then add some of liquor from pan, mix until smooth. Add back to veg. Open tin of tomatoes and combine with other ingredients. Put the whole back on the heat and simmer, stirring to prevent sticking as it thickens.

This makes about 4 servings and lasts us a couple of days. It is tasty and satisfying. Quantities of seasoning can be adjusted to taste. The black beans make an interesting flavour addition.

This is fusion cooking. The black beans a Chinese ingredient, the pasta and tomato Italian. They work well together. You don’t have to be vegetarian to enjoy this.

Hilary said the ‘juice’ could have been thicker.
Maybe simmer longer to reduce before serving or use something as a thickening agent. I reckon it was okay so did none of this.
It is a very adjustable recipe, good for using up bits and pieces.

[axnr911]

That looks really good!!!

[HHilary]

It was really good!! And another good thing about it I didn’t have to make it, only eat it. I have to washup after it tho!

[ManjiB]

Must say that looks yummy!
I have to try to remember the pasta - the secret ingredient when I make this.

Lekker

[wolfie]

That looks really tasty. It’s reminded me about my pressure cooker, which hasn’t be used in donkey’s years. I’ll have to dig it out and give it a go.

[Mrs5K]

That looks really good. I don’t have a pressure cooker but am sure it can be adapted for the hob.

[ManjiB]

I don’t use pressure cookers or microwaves.
Good old fashioned pots and pans and gas hob does the trick.

It takes longer to cook, but I find food cooked on the hob on this way tastes better. There is more flavour.

I wonder @Bobbi if you have noticed any difference in taste if indeed you have cooked without the pressure cooker.

Before you jump up and say, “Hang on a minute, you just said you don’t use pressure cookers or microwaves”, I’ll pre-empt that and say that I have eaten food cooked by others who used pressure cooker (for convenience) and noticed the difference in tastes.

To cut a long story short, cook it however you like, just enjoy it

[Bobbi]

When I said “easy to make” I have to admit being inventive with the truth.

What with getting the ingredients together, taking photos, prepping the ingredients, taking more photos, and so on until the whole thing was complete it had taken six or seven hours. I was worn out in a very satisfying manner. Pleased to have accomplished something, feeling useful, and ready for more, later, much later, after a good long break.

I am slow, I take great efforts, but I need to do it. It is me. God help any who would try to lighten my load. Get yer hands off, it is my load.

Are you driven like this? Or are you sensible and know when enough is enough?

We are having my stew again tonight and I am looking forward to it. This sort of thing always improves at the second sitting.
(Hilary’s doing the washing up, though I have been known to volunteer.)

I’ll have to dream up another recipe to keep my place in the kitchen.

Boiling in a pan the traditional and proven method has to be good. Simply wait until everything is cooked through and tender.

As far as cooking methods go I think pressure cooking or steaming preserves flavour. Boiling creates great stock, keep the cooking liquor it holds lots of the original goodness.

[Rups]

I’m a fan of vegetable stew and soups, meat can dominate the flavour of a stew and sometimes I just crave punchy vegetable flavours.

[Sue1958]

Very nice Bobbie good and nutritious

[Bobbi]

@Rups

I too see great merit in a simple diet, prefer only small quantities of a variety of meats.

I might ramble on at times but there is much yet to learn, yet to discover.

In the East meat, flesh, carrion, as one of my friends would call it, is an expensive item. This is what I have heard.

I believe a true ‘curry’, if there is such a thing, is a concoction of vegetables with an assortment of flavourings and a variety of textures. All because it is economical and satisfying.

I’ll tell you a horror story.

I don’t want to make you feel queasy but I think it did inform and to a degree enlighten me.

In the swinging sixties I was out of work. Unemployment was high. I was given an address by the Employment Exchange (Job Centre). To get there involved setting off at 6 am. There were no buses, no tube. I had to walk for more than an hour through deserted London streets..

Not horrific but I still wasn’t at my destination.

As I walked I caught a whiff of something pretty rank.
For the next half hour this unpleasant miasma gradually intensified into a solid wall of death stink.
And suddenly I was there. The grey, quiet, misty streets had turned into sharp light, jarring noise, and sickening stench.

I was given wellington boots, a donkey jacket, incongruous in the heat of the summer morning and shown through a huge safe like door into a refrigerated warren of rooms holding all manner of pieces of what had once been living creatures.

There were hooves, heads, tongues, lumps of flesh, cows’ udders, calves heads, tails, intestines, all needing to be man-handled from here to there. The slaughter man’s eyes were black, dark, with a bottomless, never-ending darkness.

I watched a cow, stunned, fall to the floor, hauled up on a hook, and swung into another room with chainsaws and cutting implements tearing it into pieces. Animals, cattle, goats, sheep, in lorries outside, obviously terrified, helpless, hopeless.

I wielded a long knife and slit open cow’s bellies watching the last meal of chewed grass empty out onto the ground, seeing ulcers in those, soon to be tripe, bellies. At a fellow worker’s insistence I tried cooked unbleached tripe and found it was tasty tender meat.

I was becoming used to this horror but inside I cried ‘Enough’. I wanted no more of this horror but I had to earn my keep. Would I, could I, give up being a part of all this?

I would walk home, that stench clinging to me, to my little room and to dream my dreams. I was not a lion, a carnivore nor a beef eater, but as a human being I was that strange thing, an omnivore.

We will try to consume just about anything, whatever is on the menu, when the choice is eat or starve.

Quite often, nearly always, I can choose and so exercise my prerogative.

There is a saying probably at least partly true, a little of what you like is good for you, remembering that, whenever possible, it is sage to partake in moderation.

That’s two sayings and so, for now, that is quite enough of all that.

I think we eat far too much poor quality mass produced meat. There have been attempts to address this but little changes.

[ManjiB]

That is one heck of a horror story!!

Continuing to be inspired by your cooking, I decided to make a dish I used to make but which I haven’t made for a while …

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VEGAN SPANISH OMLETTE

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Ingredients I used were
Jersey Royal New Potatoes (or they were some other baby potatoes)
Red onion, though white is fine
Garlic
Chilli
Salt, Cheyenne pepper, red chilli powder
Gram (Besan, Chick pea) flour
Water

Steamed potatoes over night as I like to benefit from resistant starch (possibly a new health fad)

Diced said potatoes and onion.

Sautéed in olive oil with garlic added cumin and ajwain

Mixed Gram flour with water (2 cups to 1) and cooked to thicken the mix.

Once thickened, folded in the veg and poured into small frying pan coated with olive oil and allowed to cool for a few hours.

To prepare for serving, warmed up and cooked - had a bit of trouble flipping it to get it crispy and ended up losing a bit of shape, but that’s rustic cooking for you.

It tasted super lovely.

[Bobbi]

That is one I must try, i bet it is very tasty.
Thanks @ManjiB for sharing your recipe.

Well done on the layout of your pictures.
Illustration helps to get an idea of what is involved doesn’t it.

As for my horror story, I still eat meat but when shopping I always get a picture of that other side that most never see.
It is a difficult one.
One of my friends has been a life long vegetarian and never eats what he calls corpses and carrion. He seems to lead an ordinary sort of life even managing to have a stroke like everyone else. I admire him for his principles and his tenacity.

Maybe there is no right way, no wrong way, I don’t know.

[Rups]

It certainly is an eye-opener, every year I used to take pigs up to the abattoir, and I recall the first time being in and around that place, I got used to it after a while but stopped doing this after stroke. Couldn’t manage it. These days, I have recently taken up fishing again. It’s a short walk to the river where brown trout can be caught. Haven’t caught anything yet but I enjoy doing it, although, my unsteadiness on the large stones can be unnerving. I maintain a survival diet and I will eat anything, except lamb which I don’t eat due to my own ethical reasons, only eat mutton when I can get it.