Kidney Bean and Beetroot Salad

This is very quick and easy and a nice light-ish summer lunch with pitta bread and a leaf salad.

Tin of kidney beans
Cooked beetroot, chopped
Handfull of parsley, chopped
Balsamic vinegar
Olive oil

Mix beans and beetroot together with the parsley. Cover liberally with the vingar & oil (to taste). Simple and very tasty and also very healthy

Vegetable Tagine

This wasn't strictly speaking a tagine, as I don't own a proper tagine anymore (mine sadly was victim to a house moving incident) but I slow cooked in a casserole and it didn't seem to suffer too much for this culinary crime....

Anyway to the recipe, this was fairly random, and I think that is the joy of this sort of meal, just stick what you have to hand in there...

• Selected veg - we had:
• new potatoes (just pulled from the garden today!)
• baby carrots (ditto)
• aubergine
• courgette (also from the garden)
• onion (ditto!)
• tomato
• 2 small preserved lemons, chopped
•  about 3/4 Lt vegetable boullion/stock
• chopped dried apricots
• tin of chickpeas
• 1 tspn smoked paprika (or non-smoked is fine!)
• 1 tspn ground ginger
• 1 tspn mixed spices
• 1 cinnamon stick
• 1 tspsn cumin

 Oil your dish and layer the chopped veg over the bottom of the dish, sprinkle the chopped lemon, apricot and chickpeas on top. Tuck the cinnamon stick in there somewhere (I cut mine in half to better distribute)

Make up the bouillon and add the various spices to it. Pour over the veg and then cover and pop in the oven on a fairly low heat for 3/4 an hour to an hour, until the veg are tender and have absorbed all the flavours. Then serve, we had this with cous cous and a generous blob of harissa.