I love recipes that are endlessly versatile – dips and spreads that can use a variety of vegetables, bread recipes into which you can knead different flours, herbs, and liquids, soups that take almost anything that you have on your kitchen bench. These sorts of dishes are the lifeblood of the kitchen, using up what you have, what has arrived, what you’ve been given, what has ripened.
A great base for a dip is formed from any combination of feta, yoghurt, cream cheese, ricotta, and/or tahini. Into that puree can go some lightly cooked vegetable and flavourings. Nuts can be added to thicken and flavour the mix. It is endlessly malleable.
Here it is roasted red capsicum, feta, yoghurt and walnuts.
Towards the end of the season, broad beans will often grow pods without seeds – the flowers have failed to germinate. I still use these pods – they are great chopped into vegetable fritters or patties, simmered and served with a yoghurt or tomato sauce, or, like today’s recipe, battered and deep fried (SO DELICIOUS). I make a standard batter with plain flour with a little eno or baking soda added to lighten the batter and make it quite crispy.
You don’t have to wait till the end of the broad bean season to make these – they can be made any time you are shelling broad beans. Don’t waste the pods if they are in good condition. If you’ve grown your own beans the pods are likely to be tender during the whole season. If you are buying pods, use your own judgement as to when during the season the pods become too tough. Cut larger pods into smaller pieces.
You will thank me for this idea, it is delicious, and uses parts of the vegetable usually discarded. Always go for no-waste where possible.
And a celebration of Broad Beans... some of our favourite dishes
Broad Bean Burgers/Patties
Chickpea flour is really easy to make at home - toast the chickpeas until they are aromatic – either the small Indian chickpeas or the regular, larger ones – and allow them to cool. Then grind them to a fine powder in a high speed blender. Sometimes you just have to do it when the store-bought flour is running dangerously low.
These fritters come from an #Ottolenghi's #Plenty and I made some adjustments. Firstly the egg is replaced with my chickpea flour+cream+eno mix, as we do not cook with eggs. Then, I replaced fennel seeds with ajwain as we love ajwain and were out of fennel seeds.
We have made this recipe with a fabulous Indian tomato chutney but here I made it with a sour cream sauce. And a little Indian sour and salty mango pickle sets these "burgers" off beautifully (we prefer to call them patties).
I’ve planted poached egg plants around my broad beans to attract hoverflies because their larvae gobble black flies & other aphids. There are no black fly on my broad beans. Poached egg plants also act like a mulch once they grow, so my beans will be less stressed.