warm salad of broad beans, tuna, bacon and potato

Apologies for the quality of the photo - not sure what happened there!

Using up: broad beans, (old) new potatoes. bacon

This one really was off the top of my head - Pete wasn’t sure about the tuna and bacon together, but he is now :)

I cooked maybe 750g of new potatoes that were looking a bit weary, and steamed some fresh broad beans over them for about 6 minutes.  While that was going on, I fried 3 thin rashers of bacon, chopped into strips, then drained it on kitchen paper; I kept the olive oil I cooked the bacon in.

Chopped up some herbs from the garden (Pete got them, I think there were chives, fennel, flat leaf parsley, rosemary and savory), and a green onion.  Opened a can of tuna in sunflower oil - tuna and bacon go really well together.

Combined all that in a bowl, and made a dressing from the baconified olive oil (plus a bit more), a teaspoon of grain mustard, and some white wine vinegar. Added the potatoes and beans, stirred it all together, ate from bowls.  It was very very nice.

Oh - we didn’t eat all those spuds, for that would be piggy indeed.  About half of them are in a bowl in the fridge, and they are going to be eaten tonight, fried up, to accompany some venison sossidges which came out of the freezer this morning.  YUM.  We like sossidge.

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broad bean enchiladas

Using up: almost everything left in the fridge!  Carrots, broad beans, potatoes, salad leaves, wheat wraps

I said this week would be weird meals … emptying the fridge can make odd but pleasing concoctions.

Boiled the remaining new potatoes, and 6 minutes before the end, put some broad beans, and the very, very last of the now fairly soft carrots in a steamer basket on top.  Waited till the timer went, then drained the spuds and veg.

Chopped up a red onion and some garlic, and started to sauté it in some olive oil.  Chopped up two chorizo sausages into small bits and added them to the pan.  (We buy these from Costco and keep them in the freezer - they’re very useful for jazzing up vegetables.)

Added the broad beans and carrots, and some thyme and savory from the herb garden.  Looked at the potatoes and realised there were way too many, so put some in a bowl.  They’ll be fried up and scoffed with sossidge later in the week.  Chopped up the rest and added them to the pan.

Got out a tin of tomatoes and realised it would be too much, so got a small tin of tomato purée out of the tin cupboard and hurled that in instead.

Then Pete distributed the filling across the last of the wheat wraps; we’d thought there were three, but there were only two, so they were quite … plump, and had to be held together with cocktail sticks.  I made a quick cheese sauce with gruyere and Red Leicester, and we poured it over the enchiladas, topped it with more mixed cheese, and baked for 30 minutes at gas 6.

Eaten with a bag of salad leaves dressed with walnut oil and lemon, and accompanied by random music from the Roku and, in my case, too much wine.  Perfect.

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broad bean wrap

Using up: broad beans, cashews in salt and black pepper, salad leaves, roast chicken

Riverford brought us broad beans last week (I think these are fava beans in the US).  They’re not something we get excited about, and so they languished in the bottom of the fridge.  Last night I fetched them out and podded them; they took me instantly back to my childhood - the pods are filled with a sort of woolly stuff, and I spent hours podding broad beans with my grandmother, ready for her to salt down into kilner jars (no freezers in domestic houses in those days).  She did the same with runner beans.

So today, we had them for lunch.

In a bowl went the beans (I should mention that I steamed them for about five minutes first), a finely chopped shallot, some chopped herbs from the garden (mint, lemon balm, chives and flat parsley), some shredded chicken, some cashews, diced cucumber.

Also in went a dessert spoon of mayo, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, a good sloosh of lime juice, and a grating of black pepper.  Mix ‘em all up, and place into wheat tortila wraps, with some salad leaves on the top.

You can see the finished wraps here.

Made a very nice change from our usual cheese and crispbread!

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