Category: Beans

Carrot and Fennel ‘Beanotto’ with carrot top pesto

Carrot and fennel make a wonderfully unexpected pairing — sweet, aromatic, and earthy all at once. In this “beanotto,” creamy white beans take the place of rice, creating a silky, comforting base that soaks up the vegetables’ gentle warmth. The fennel brings it’s aniseed aroma and the carrots bring their natural sweetness, and together they create a bowl that feels both rustic and refined.

What really lifts the dish is the carrot‑top pesto: bright, herbaceous, and just a little wild. It turns what could be a simple recipe into something vibrant and full of life, celebrating the whole vegetable from root to leaf. This is thrifty cooking at its most elegant — nourishing, colourful, and quietly impressive.

Bahamian peas and rice

Bahamian peas and rice is one of those dishes that instantly tells you where it comes from — warm, savoury, and deeply tied to island home‑cooking. It’s a staple across the Bahamas, built on pigeon peas, aromatic vegetables, and a gentle smokiness from bacon or salted meat. Everything simmers together with thyme, tomato, and a touch of heat, creating a pot of rice that’s richly seasoned, comforting, and full of character.

Flemish hutsepot with potatoes and white beans

Flemish refers to the a specific group of Dutch dialects native to Flanders a northern Dutch speaking region of Belgium. Hutsepot means ‘mixed pot, and that’s exactly the spirit of the dish: simple ingredients cooked together so their flavours meld into something greater. My hutsepot with potatoes and white beans has a warm, golden colour, dotted with chunks of vegetables. It’s thick enough to mound on a spoon, but still brothy enough to feel like a stew.

Courgette and chickpeas with preserved lemon and mint

Courgettes and chickpeas with preserved lemon and mint, a dish that feels both refreshing and deeply satisfying, it can me used as a side, part of a mezze or simply eaten on it’s own. Mediterranean at heart with a north African edge.

KAFERBOHNEN SALAD

A simple and delicious traditional recipe from the state of Styria in Austria. Scarlet runner beans are used and cooked from dried, but they can easily be substituted for butter beans. This basic recipe can easily be enhanced by adding tomatoes, sweetcorn, green beans or boiled egg.

Antiguan Spiced Black Bean Cakes

This is the first recipe from my first ever series where I’m making a bean recipe from every country I have visited so far in my life.

First up and we are off to the sunny Caribbean to enjoy some Antiguan Spiced Black Bean cakes.

Dreamy, creamy, mushroom, miso and bean soup

I put together this soup predominantly by a few ingredients I had left over in the fridge and I needed too use them up. I had bought some yellow sticker mushrooms and very kindly been sent some amazing oat miso to finish this soup off, but you can use any miso you have.

Laal Maas beans

Laal Mass beans is a fiery dish, traditionally made with lamb or mutton and translates to red meat, ‘laal’ is red, for the red fiery sauce made with dried red chillies and ‘mass’ for meat.

I wanted to create a sauce using all the traditional spices and ingredients to which I could simply add some beans, in this case some meaty butterbeans and some green beans which are perfectly happy being braised until soft.

Spanish Chicken, Chorizo and Chickpea Stew

Happily serves 4

This stew brings all the Spanish flavours and typical Spanish ingredients into one pot for you to enjoy any time of year, all that’s required is a bowl and a spoon and some chunky bread for dunking.

Spicy Southwestern Garbanzo Beans or Chickpeas to us

This was a recipe from an old American cook book that I have adapted to suit my taste which is for it to be more spicy and less sweet, this dish is quite addictive and can be served hot or room temperature, serve with rice, pickles, flatbreads, on toast or just on their own with a spoon