Quorn and Judion de la Granja Bean Casserole, with Lemon Zest and Roasted Vegetables…

This is a vegetarian version of an old favourite made with chicken. It was originally a soup but I thought I’d make it as a casserole this time. I’m glad I did as it’s extremely good.

The name of the beans, the Spanish Judion de la Granja, took some tracking down (looking at Google for the meaning of the name brought up lots of entries from my own blog – gratifying but not helpful). Finally found out that “Judion de la Granja” simply means “From the farm in La Granja”.

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Ingredients (see this post for details of the following list):-

Quorn Family Roast This comes in just one flavour, pretend chicken which, in fact, is quite convincing.

High-protein Soup Addendum…

Well, adding fish to my veggie soup boosted the protein content nicely, and tasted very good, too. The downside, pretty obviously, being that the result wasn’t vegetarian.

Not a major problem for me as I’m not really a conviction veggie, it’s more my way of avoiding a dodgy, and contaminated, food chain, meat often being deeply suspect both in terms of quality and, even, species. I do feel, however, that if I’m going to be a veggie, I should adhere to veggie principles if I can, so I set about looking for good sources of veggie protein.

Quorn is out as I simply don’t like the stuff. In fact I don’t like most meat analogues, nor do I really see the point of them, but when I ate meat I’d often add a pack of

Roasted Cauliflower and Potato Soup…

This recipe came about after buying an organic Savoy cabbage and two organic caulies from Tesco – which tasted of bugger all. So, left with one caulie, and always loathe to throw out food, last night I decided to break it down into florets, slice up the stalk, douse it in melted clarified butter, and roast it. In my mini oven, to keep the cost down (if you’re on benefits and, like me, have no gas supply, then a mini oven is vastly cheaper to run than the one in an electric cooker; a good one will set you back close to £100, or even more, but a basic one can be had for around £30).

Once roasted, it was left

Spicy fish in a chilli/cheese sauce with butter beans…

For those missing out on the dubious joys of this informal series, it usually manifests itself as bottom-of-the-fridge soup. This is a tad different – a bottom-of-the-freezer recipe.

You’ll need:-

300g or so of Alaskan pollack, trimmed, pin-boned and

Kitchen therapy…

Felt appallingly ill this morning (and last few days, not helped by no more than 2-3 hours sleep a night). So as moping around feeling sorry for myself clearly hadn’t worked, I bit the bullet and headed for the kitchen. Only 5 feet away but some days a major challenge.

I came across a partial soup recipe I thought I’d like to try, but making it more of a stew – chickpeas (garbanzos in the colonies), potatoes, garlic, rosemary as the base, plus a secret ingredient or two. No idea what, so I’ll have to wing it.

I thought I could do something with that, adding