Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Recipes don't matter: Meat and Beans for winter

I love winter cooking. And one of the favourite things I had during winter was what my Nana would call Goulash. In what was probably one of the first examples of cultural appropriation in my family Nana would fry up some mince and put all sorts of other things in it and call it Goulash.

Now, I have had Hungarian Goulash and it is fantastic, but it's nothing like what we cook here.

So welcome to meat and beans.

One day I might be able to call it "Nana's Goulash" but for now:

I fried off onions
I fried off beef mince
I put granulate garlic on it
I put in some frozen bolognese sauce that just made sense
I put in about a litre of V8 vegetable juice
I put in 1/2 a cup of pearl barley
I put in a half a cup of pearl couscous
And as those two previous ingredients soften I will progressively put in chickpeas, corn, kidney beans, Borlotti beans and butter beans.

And so we have meat and beans. Or Goulash. Or whatever. I never got a recipe - I just got a feel for it. Because cooking can be a form of love.

And when the cooking is love, recipes don't matter.

And as you look at the finished product you might ask "is it pretty" but basically I don't care. It's home food.