Recipe Tuesday - Mung Bean Curry

Tonight, I cooked something that I haven’t cooked since October:  Mung Bean Curry.  It used to be such a regular in my repertoire that for years I never had to check the recipe before I cooked.  In fact, I’m surprised that I’d never shared it on the blog.  

This is one of those recipes that came off the back of the packet.  I’ve been cooking it for 30+ years.  I don’t remember why we had a packet of mung beans in the cupboard - Dumbo, the long-ago ex, bought them and made something unmemorable with about half the packet -  but, I do remember noticing this recipe on the back and deciding to give it a go.  I saved that plastic packet for years and referred to it regularly.  Sadly, it disappeared after we packed up the kitchen for building works back in 2012.  This is from memory.

Mung Bean Curry (serves 4)

Ingredients

175g/6oz dried mung beans - not split mung dhal, but the whole bean

1L approximately of boiling water

1 tablespoon oil

1 medium sized onion, chopped

1 large clove garlic, garlic

100-150g mushrooms, sliced

2 peppers/capsicums, sliced

1 medium carrot, halved lengthwise and sliced

1 cup plain yoghurt

Spices

1 teaspoon ground chilli (or to taste)

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon ground coriander

1 teaspoon turmeric 

1 teaspoon corn flour

Pinch of salt

Bulgar Wheat (see notes below)

1 cup bulgar wheat

2 cups boiling water

Pinch of salt

Method:

1. Start by cooking your mung beans:  pour them into a sieve and rinse off any dust with cold, running water.  Then place in a saucepan, cover with sufficient boiling water to ensure that there’s 2.5cm/1inch of water to cover the beans, bring to the boil and simmer for approximately 25 minutes or until soft.  Once cooked, drain the beans.  While the beans are cooking, get on with preparing the rest of the dish.
2. In a small ramekin, assemble the spices.  Add a couple of tablespoons of cold water and mix to a paste.
3. Heat the oil in a large saucepan or frying pan.  Gently fry the onion until it is soft and glassy.
4. Add the mushrooms, peppers and garlic.  Fry until soft.
5. Stir in your spice paste.  Fry until the aroma rises and then fold in the yoghurt.  Add the carrot and keep stirring, until heated through.  Switch off until the mung beans are cooked.
6. When the mung beans are cooked and drained, stir them into the curry mixture.  Bring back to the boil and simmer for 20 minutes.
7. Meanwhile, rinse out the saucepan used for the mung beans in hot water.  In it, combine 1 cup of bulgar wheat, with 2 cups of boiling water and a pinch of salt.  Bring back to the boil.  Cover and switch off.  Leave undisturbed for 15 minutes or until all the water is absorbed..
8. Serve.

Notes:

• My favourite “filler” these days is bulgar wheat, instead of rice.  Yes, it’s more expensive BUT it has 3 advantages:  1) it is even easier to cook (see point 7 above); 2) it bulks out to a larger volume than rice, so I only need to use 1 cup instead of 1.5 for 4 portions; 3) it has 8 times the fibre and 4 times the protein of brown rice!
• If you want to serve this curry with rice:  use 1.5 cups of white/basmati rice together with 3 cups of boiling water, cover, boil for 2 minutes, switch off and leave for 15 minutes or until all the water is absorbed.

Enjoy!

- Pam

The little things add up

As every knitter knows, it’s the little things we do that add up to something big.  In the case of knitting, the “little thing” is creating one stitch after another, which eventually add up to a jumper.  It’s incremental.  The British cycling coach, Sir Dave Brailsford, makes a big thing about incremental gains.  It was concentrating on the small things that took British cycling from mediocre to world class.

I was thinking about this incremental effect on Thursday morning, when I put another 700g of dried kidney beans on to soak.  We didn’t need the beans immediately for dinner, but since there were none left in the freezer, there was space available and I had a few seconds to spare, it seemed sensible to put them on to soak.  Thursday evening, I took a minute to drain the beans, spoon them into a recycled bread bag and shove them in the freezer.  I’ll probably cook them next week in the pressure cooker, use a third for dinner then box up the remaining 2/3 and freeze for two more meals.  (700g dried beans gives 3x500g boxes of cooked beans. Approximately the same as 2 cans of beans from the supermarket).

What does this have to do with incremental gains?  By planning ahead, not only do I save time but I also save money.  It costs the same to process one can’s worth of dried beans as it does to process 6; about a penny’s worth of gas for 30 minutes in the pressure cooker.  The cheapest tin of kidney beans is 30p in Tesco, whereas they sell 2kg of dried beans for £4, which gives me the equivalent of 17 cans-worth for 24p a can, a saving of 6p.  That 6p/can saved can be utilised elsewhere.  It adds up, quietly, in the background of day to day life*. 

Small things add up.  The principle of incremental gains works whether you’re trying to keep your living costs low or attempting to tread lightly on the earth by keep your petroleum pollution down.  Dried beans aren’t just cheaper, they need less energy to ship and store than the equivalent weight of cooked, canned beans.  Plus there’s the energy saved from not having to manufacture the cans or mine, ship and smelt the metal.  Remember the recycled bread bag?  It’ll be washed out, dried and reused until it starts to fall apart, when it’ll go into the recycling.  (It’s labelled “can be recycled with shopping bags at bigger stores”.  Our council recycles shopping bags, so will recycle the bread bag.).  

“What’s the cost of one bread bag?” you might ask. Not a lot, but that’s not the point.  It all adds up.  Just as you can’t learn and become fluent in a language in a day, so you can’t expect everything you do to create an immediate “Big Bang” impact.  You hear people muttering “why bother? It’s only...” but if everyone does it, then it’ll have a big impact.  

- Pam

* In the UK, there’s at least two, rival television programs that demonstrate how much of an impact these small savings have to your grocery bill,  Eat Well For Less and Eat Shop Save. The participants always look shocked when the savings are added up.  (Schadenfreude TV, I love it.)

Five Frugal Things

We've had guests staying, who were a bit surprised by some of the things I do automatically - not taken aback or grossed out, but surprised in the "Oooohhhh! That's a good idea! I never thought of doing that!" sense. These aren't big, headline frugal activities; rather, they're the little, every day things that save a penny here or a penny there and only cost a few seconds of time.

Since the internet is full of these things anyway, I thought I'd create a new meme: Five Frugal Things.  Feel free to copy the idea in your own blog.

Five Frugal Things I do Automatically

1. Set Asides. When I'm serving up dinner, I'll dish up our lunch-boxes at the same time as I do our meals. That way, lunch is taken care of and I can ensure that there is sufficient food for lunch if someone wants seconds.
2. Batch soaking and cooking dried beans and chickpeas. I have a pressure cooker; it takes virtually no more time to cook 1kg of kidney beans than it takes to cook 200g. I'll then bag, tag and freeze the excess.
3. Decant shampoo, conditioner, body wash and body lotion into pump action soap dispensers, so that you get standardised quantities each time you wash. This extended the life of a bottle of shampoo by more than double.
4. Using the bread-maker to bake bread. It takes 5 minutes to weigh out all the ingredients and costs less than 25p for a loaf of wholemeal bread. When I set up the bread-maker before going to bed on Monday night, my guests were a little stunned at how quick, easy and cheap it is. The bread was ready when we got up in the morning.
5. Washing and re-using bread bags/freezer bags. It takes me less than 30 seconds to wash out a bread bag when I'm doing the dishes (turn inside out, give a quick swish through clean-ish washing up water - scrubbing any sticky bits - and position over the cutlery drainer to dry). Re-using a plastic bag only saves me a fraction of a penny a time but they all add up. For food safety's sake, I do not re-use bags that have held raw meat or fish, although I do put those into a previously recycled bag that's looking like it's seen better days (that way, I can bin the bag afterwards with a clean conscience).

 What about you? What are your Five Frugal Things?

- Pam

Frugal Friday: Freezer Tetris

One day, in the near future, I am probably going to lose at Freezer Tetris.

You don't know about Freezer Tetris?  You remember the early computer game, Tetris, don't you?  Where you had to fit shapes into a finite space, without leaving any gaps?  Well, Freezer Tetris is a real-life version of the game, where you have to fit more and more food into a freezer that is already full.  This was my freezer two weeks ago, at the tail end of Easter:

Hard to believe that I'd taken an 18lb turkey out of it to roast for Good Friday. I took that photo after I successfully managed to shoe-horn in 6 x 600ml containers of turkey stock, as well as over 2kg of cubed leftover turkey.   In the interim week after removing and defrosting said turkey, I also added 800g home-wilted spinach and 1.5kg cooked chickpeas.  

With the exception of a couple of lunch-boxes of leftovers (and four haggis plus a whole black pudding), the contents of the freezer  remained static until I decided we needed more kidney beans, so I soaked a 1kg of dried beans overnight, bagged them, then shoved them into the freezer.  Somehow. (Freezing causes ice to form in the re-hydrated cells, which damages the cell walls and shortens cooking time.)  How I got them into the freezer, I don't know.

Last night, I couldn't resist the big bag of frozen hash-browns at Costco, so the beans came out of the freezer and I cooked them this morning.  1kg of dried beans cooked became 2.35kg.

 Half an hour ago, I stood staring at the freezer wondering how I was going to fit that lot in.  Last night's hash browns had been difficult enough.

Hmmm.... If I take these out and rearrange that......

 Victory!

Pam 3 :  Freezer 0

 - Pam



PS:  There is a serious point I want to make here.  One of the things that keeps our food bill low is the way we utilise the freezer.  Leftovers get frozen.  Before we went on holiday, all our remaining fresh veg was chopped up and frozen.  I batch cooked dried pulses, portion them up and freeze anything that won't be eaten that day.  At Easter, we nabbed a bargain on fresh spinach - an 800g bag marked down to 75p from £3, so I wilted it, portioned it into 4 and froze it.  We don't go supermarket shopping for dinner, we go to re-stock our stores.  When I think about cooking a meal, I start by considering what is in my fridge, my freezer and my larder.

PPS:  I heard a great quote yesterday from either episode 5 or episode 6 of A History of the World in 100 Objects:  "If the larder is full, the mind has time to focus on other things".  The presenter was explaining why art appeared after early man became farmers.  Previously, all their time was taken up with hunting and gathering food, but once they started farming, they developed surpluses of food which they could store.  Suddenly, there was time to do other things: become craftsmen, worry about gods, etc.

Scrummy with a touch of spinach

Several months ago while surfing the "condemned food counter" at Tesco, I scored the final four inches of a chorizo sausage discarded from the deli.  like many such prizes, it went into the freezer until I decided what to do with it.  I was really tempted to try Kale and Chickpea Stew a la Crazy Aunt Purl but DH doesn't like cooked kale or many of its relatives (cabbage, etc).  He'll eat them raw, but not cooked.

Saturday, when we were grocery shopping, I hit on making it with spinach.  Thanks to an offer, I could pick up a large bunch of spinach for 60p.  DH will eat spinach raw in salads and cooked in Sophie Dahl's Dhal so I rationalised that maybe, just maybe, he'd eat it in this.  The original recipe is here.  This is my version.

Chickpea and Chorizo Stew

Serves 4 to 6


Ingredients

1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 red jalapeno chillies sliced
100g/4oz chorizo, diced
450g cooked chickpeas (drained weight)
1 large bunch of spinach roughly chopped
1 bay leaf
500ml chicken stock
500g potatoes, peeled and cut into 1 inch dice (preferably use a boiling potato)
2 tablespoons olive oil

Method

1.  Heat the oil in a large saucepan/stew pot.  Fry the onion and chorizo together until the fat starts running from the chorizo (it will be red-ish).
2. Add the garlic and chillies.  Fry for two or three more minutes.
3. Add the stock, chickpeas, potato, spinach and bay leaf.  Bring to the boil and simmer for at least 20 minutes or until the the potato is cooked and at least half of the liquid has evaporated.  The dish should look stew-like not soupy.
4. Season with salt and pepper.
5. Serve in deep soup plates.

This goes well over couscous or with good bread for dunking.  It is even better when left to be eaten on the second day.

And the verdict?  DH declared it "Scrummy", went back for seconds, and then demanded that I make it again soon.  Even the dreaded spinach got the thumbs up.

- Pam