Black bean chili

October 10-14, 2011

On this work trip, I didn't just prepare driving snacks - I planned all our meals for several days. There was muesli, yoghurt and stewed rhubarb for breakfast; mango coconut rice salad for lunch; apricot delights, toast, fruit and nuts for snacking; then this black bean chili with polenta batons for dinner.

A slow cooker and a little chopping assistance from Michael kept the prep on this one to a minimum. All the real cooking happened while we slept; after that it was into a chiller bag for later reheating. It's remarkable how much texture remains in the vegetables after that much time - I always expect slow cooked dishes to turn out sludgy and sweet. Actually, it was mostly just under-seasoned. For some reason I got it into my head that salt during cooking would make the beans tough (maybe I was mixed up with the effect of acidity?). At least there was salt and pepper at the table, and avocado and lime besides.

Over the two nights I managed to perfect my polenta approach too. I'd set it into large flat rectangles and fit it into a lunch box for the ride. On the first evening I fried it in strips and was dismayed to see the outer layer lodge itself firmly to the pan, and the strips remain soft, almost gluggy. Second time round I grilled 'em. This yielded the lightly golden crust I'd been wanted all along, and plenty of soft savoury steaminess inside. It really burned through the baking paper though.

Black bean chili
(based on a recipe in Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker,
by Robin Robertson)

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 small red capsicum, chopped
1 corn cob, kernels shucked
3 small tomatoes, chopped
3 red chiles, finely chopped
4-6 cloves garlic, minced
400g can crushed tomatoes
2 x 400g cans black beans, drained and rinsed
1 cup water
salt
pepper

Heat the oil in a large frypan. Chop the veges in turn and add them to the pan: capsicum, corn kernels, tomatoes, chiles and garlic. Sauté them gently for about 5 minutes. Transfer the sautéed vegetables to a slow cooker and add the remaining ingredients (light on the salt). Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours. Season to taste and serve.

June 13-15, 2010: Maple baked beans

With winter well and truly arrived, it was time to pull out the slow cooker that Michael gave me for my last birthday.  I figured it was also time that I tried cooking dried beans at home - you might have noticed that all of our leguminous recipes use cans.  It turns out that this is really s l o w   c  o  o  k  i  n  g.  First the beans need to be soaked in room temperature water for at least 8 hours.(I was surprised how much they expanded in this one step!)  Then they go into the slow cooker with some garlic and bay leaves for 8-12 hours.  Then after a little rinse they go back into the slow cooker with their sauce ingredients for 6-8 hours more!

Happily, these baked beans were worth the wait. They're actually remarkably similar to how I remember canned baked beans tasting (... I haven't eaten those for years). They are extraordinarily soft and this sauce is very sweet (I guess that's the maple syrup talking).  Michael liked them even more with a little Tabasco sauce.  I reckon I could go for a little more bite, so in future I'd like to try skipping the intermediate slow-cooking step and go straight from soaking to slow-cooking with sauce (while keeping an eye on the moisture levels).  I'd probably add a few chilli flakes to the brew as well.  There's still a half-kilo of dried beans in the cupboard and several months of cold weather ahead - plenty of room to experiment.

Basic beans
(based on a recipe in Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson)

Note that this recipe makes roughly double the beans required for the maple baked bean recipe below.  We threw some of the leftover beans in pasta for dinner later in the week, and made a half-serve of this Veganomicon recipe with the rest.

500g dried Great Northern (or other) beans
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 bay leaves

Place the dried beans in a large contained and cover them with water, with an extra inch or two of water on top.  Leave them to soak for 8 hours or overnight.

Drain the beans and transfer them to a slow cooker, adding the garlic and bay leaves.  Cover them with fresh water, pop on the lid and cook the beans on low for 8-12 hours.

Gently drain and rinse the beans when they're done.

Maple baked beans

(from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 onion, finely chopped

3 cups Great Northern beans, cooked as above

1/2 cup maple syrup

1 teaspoon mustard powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/4 cup tomato paste

1 1/4 cups hot water

Saute the onion in the oil in a frypan over medium heat, for about 5 minutes or until softened.  Transfer the onion to a slow cooker and add the beans, maple syrup, mustard, salt and pepper.  Dissolve the tomato paste into the hot water and pour it over the beans.  Place the lid on the slow cooker and cook the beans on low for 6-8 hours.

January 7, 2010: Slow faux pho

Well, I didn't go through all that seitan kneading with no idea of what I'd make with it! I had my eye on the slow pho, another recipe from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker. It has its own stock that takes a solid 6 hours to infuse - star anise and cinnamon ensure it's an aromatic brew, but I couldn't actually detect any heat from the chilli or ginger. It soaked into the seitan strips just as I'd anticipated but all up it wasn't quite as vibrant as I'd hoped.

Even so, this bowl o' broth had something to teach me - the comfort of noodle soups. Any number of food bloggers have described their nourishing, consoling and healing properties but I've always preferred the heavier European potatoes and pastry for this role. Now I think I get it. I'm not sure whether I'll come back to this recipe again, but my one experience with it has me keen to explore this corner of cuisine further.

Slow faux pho
(based on Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson)

1 onion, roughly chopped
1 large red chilli, roughly chopped
1 tablespoon mince ginger
2 whole anise stars
1 cinnamon stick
3 tablespoons soy sauce
5 cups vegetable stock
200g rice vermicelli
1 tablespoon peanut oil
125g seitan, sliced into strips
2 tablespoons miso paste
3 tablespoons vegetarian oyster sauce
juice of 1 lime
To garnish: bean sprouts, coriander leaves, basil leaves, more chilli, ...

Place the onion, chilli, ginger, anise, cinnamon, soy sauce and stock in a slow cooker; cook them on Low for 6 hours.

Place the rice vermicelli in a bowl and cover them with water, allowing them to soak for 15 minutes to soften. Fry the seitan strips in the peanut oil until they're lightly browned on both sides. In a small bowl, dissolve the miso paste in a small amount of boiling water. Whisk in the oyster sauce and lime juice.

When the slow cooked stock is ready, strain the liquid and return it to the slow cooker. Strain the vermicelli and stir them into the stock. Mix in the seitan and the miso mixture. Cook the pho for a further 10 minutes, before ladling it into bowls and topping with your chosen garnish.

January 4-7, 2010: Seitan from scratch

Impatient to use my slow cooker again, even in the heat, I thought I'd try my hand at seitan. Gluten flour has become increasingly accessible in the past few years and with this it's easy to make raw seitan. However the recipe in Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker takes the more traditional route; here you make a dough of flour and water, knead it under running water to rinse out the starch, and then simmer the glutinous dough in stock.

As a first-timer, it was the rinsing that was most nerve-wracking. Robertson merely instructs us to knead the dough in water until the water goes milky, then drain and replace the water, repeating until the water is clear. By the time I was up to my sixth rinse the water was as opaque as ever, my dough was getting slippery and difficult to handle, and I was losing small sludgy fragments of the dough down the sink.

I had better luck when I changed my technique. Transferring the dough to a colander, I set the tap at a trickle and got a little more aggressive with my kneading. Instead of my bread-making fold-and-turn I really dug my fingers into the dough, scrunching and probing it for starch. Meanwhile the milky water escaped through the colander, giving me a drier dough and better view of my progress. It takes a while and the dough shrinks a lot but this is as it should be. I might have been less concerned if I'd just read this site before beginning.

Once the dough had the texture of chewed gum (ewwww), I divided it into four blobs and plonked them into the slow cooking stock.

Six hours later, I assumed that my seitan was ready and scooped it out to dry. It smelled like roast chicken! Must be the bay leaves. The stock got bottled up and stashed it in the freezer for future meals.

I sliced and fried the first seitan blob for dinner; the rest followed the stock into the freezer for future enjoyment. While the straight-up seitan is soft and spongy, it didn't take much frying to achieve a crisp golden skin - pleasant to chew, though without further adornment its flavour is bland and bready. That spongy texture is just begging to slurp up some marinade so I'm looking forward to tinkering with the taste of these gluten globs.

Seitan from scratch
(recipe from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson)

1 carrot, chopped into large chunks
1 onion, quartered
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1/2 cup soy sauce
2 bay leaves
~3L water
6 cups wholemeal flour

Place the carrot, onion, garlic, soy sauce, bay leaves and 2.25L of the water in a slow cooker set to High.

In a large bowl stir together the wholemeal flour and remaining 3 cups of water to make a dough. I thought mine was too dry and added another 1/2 cup of water but I'd discourage you from doing this unless absolutely necessary! The next step is to knead the dough on a flat surface for 10 minutes and this is difficult if the dough's too sticky. After kneading the dough, put it back in the bowl, cover it with warm water and allow it to rest for 20 minutes.

Once the dough has rested, shift the bowl to sit in your kitchen sink. Knead the dough until the water goes white. Drain the water and transfer the dough to a colander. Under a slow stream of running water, continue squishing the dough until it reduces in volume (I think mine halved, roughly) and becomes stretchy like chewing gum. Continue until the water draining through the colander is almost clear.

Divide the raw seitan into four balls and drop them into the slow cooking stock. Turn the setting down to Low and cook the seitan for 4-6 hours.

Scoop the seitan out and let it cool on a baking tray. To store the seitan, keep it in the fridge for a few days submerged in some of the stock or freeze it without the stock. Any leftover stock can be used for other recipes.

December 15, 2009: Slow-cooked summer chili

At 3:30am on my birthday, when I couldn't sleep, Michael gave me a slow cooker. Until now, my knowledge of slow cookers has extended to stews and dried beans - the stuff of winter. (But, as Michael observed, "your birthday's not likely to fall in winter anytime soon".) Michael also supplied me with Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker by Robin Robertson, author of Vegan Planet and 1000 Vegan Recipes. This book quickly set me straight - as well as the chapters on stews and beans that I expected, there are also sections devoted to appetisers, breakfasts, desserts and beverages! Sitting on my bed at that early hour, I got a little over-excited as I scanned a dessert section with multiple vegan-friendly cheesecake recipes and a beverage section featuring warming winter punches. If this slow cooker were a little more cycle-friendly, I could see myself taking it to every vegan potluck for the next year.

In the later morning light, I scaled back my ambitions and focussed on making something we could enjoy during a week full of social activities. I returned to the more conventional sections on stews and vegetables, finding several chili recipes and settling on one that emphasised summer vegetables. Chopping and sauteing all the veges took some time, so the slow cooker wasn't a labour-saver in this instance. (In particular I found the eggplant peeling and corn-cob shucking a real drag.) However it did produce a chili different from any I've eaten before. While the vegetables were gorgeously tender after 8 hours of cooking, I was amazed that they hadn't disintegrated - the eggplant cubes and corn kernels still retained their own structures and textures.

Chili like this is wonderfully versatile: we ate it on rice, slathered it over corn chips to make nachos, and stuffed it into toasted sandwiches.

Slow-cooked summer chili
(based on Farm Stand Chili with Chickpeas from Fresh from the Vegetarian Slow Cooker)

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 stick celery, finely chopped
2 small eggplants, peeled and chopped
1 green capsicum, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 generous teaspoon chilli powder
1 1/2 cups water
400g can crushed tomatoes
400g can chickpeas, drained and rinsed
1 cup corn kernels
salt and pepper

Heat the oil in a large frypan and gently saute the onion, celery, eggplant, capsicum and garlic for 5 minutes. Stir through the chilli powder and take it all off the heat.

Tranfer the sauteed veges to a slow cooker and add the remaining ingredients, seasoning to taste. Cover and cook on low for 6-8 hours.