Baked beans - and tajine
What a saddo, eh ?
The thing about baked beans is that they are such a good, cheap, nutritious meal. Except when they are £1.20 a tin, that is ! Some friends who will remain nameless but lived in Provence until recently used to import beans from Britain, and once when we stayed at their house we were warned off the beans !
There is a French version that is about 60p a tin or less - haricots blancs à la tomate. What you have to do is add 1/2 teaspoon of sugar per tin, and tomato ketchup to taste. Some people add a spoonful of vinegar.
The beans are a bit big, but a nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse, as they say.
I'm reading a book I should have read at the DEFLE but I dropped the course - it is called "Une enquête au pays" by Driss Chraïbi and it introduces a Moroccan detective called l'Inspecteur Ali, who stars in the next book too. Anyway, it's very entertaining, and they have just eaten a glorious meal of mutton tajine - mutton cooked slowly with figs and olives. You can eat this kind of stuff in the Moroccan restaurants in Bordeaux, and Joy waxes lyrical about it in her blog (click on the title above).
Anyway, I reckon that with a slowcooker you could do a tajine-alike, so at the supermarket I got a big pack of stewing beef (it should be lamb or chicken, but hey...), some dried apricots and lots of garlic. I forgot the olives.
I found a recipe for lamb and apricot tajine on the internet, but the instructions started "combine the first 15 ingredients". hmmm.
The thing about baked beans is that they are such a good, cheap, nutritious meal. Except when they are £1.20 a tin, that is ! Some friends who will remain nameless but lived in Provence until recently used to import beans from Britain, and once when we stayed at their house we were warned off the beans !
There is a French version that is about 60p a tin or less - haricots blancs à la tomate. What you have to do is add 1/2 teaspoon of sugar per tin, and tomato ketchup to taste. Some people add a spoonful of vinegar.
The beans are a bit big, but a nod's as good as a wink to a blind horse, as they say.
I'm reading a book I should have read at the DEFLE but I dropped the course - it is called "Une enquête au pays" by Driss Chraïbi and it introduces a Moroccan detective called l'Inspecteur Ali, who stars in the next book too. Anyway, it's very entertaining, and they have just eaten a glorious meal of mutton tajine - mutton cooked slowly with figs and olives. You can eat this kind of stuff in the Moroccan restaurants in Bordeaux, and Joy waxes lyrical about it in her blog (click on the title above).
Anyway, I reckon that with a slowcooker you could do a tajine-alike, so at the supermarket I got a big pack of stewing beef (it should be lamb or chicken, but hey...), some dried apricots and lots of garlic. I forgot the olives.
I found a recipe for lamb and apricot tajine on the internet, but the instructions started "combine the first 15 ingredients". hmmm.
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