Category: Spices

Mushroom and chickpea soup 🍄 🥣

This soup didn’t actually start off as soup. I’d thrown a ton of stuff in my slow cooker the night before, and after realising how good it tasted I thought I’d turn the rest into the aforementioned soup.

It’s cooled right down after that fucking horrible heatwave, so now I can use my slow cooker to create soup experiments to my heart’s content.

Shit you’ll need:

  • A punnet of mushrooms, sliced (300g).
  • A can of chickpeas (400g).
  • 1tsp rosemary.
  • 1tsp basil purée or dried basil.
  • 1tsp salt.
  • 1 vegetable stock cube.
  • 2tsp cracked black pepper.
  • 2tblspns pesto.
  • 1tblsp lime juice.
  • 1tsp garlic purée or powdered garlic.
  • 1tblsp mushroom ketchup.
  • 100g of butter, or equivalent.
  • 1 pint of water.

All you do – is dump the lot into a slow cooker, give it a stir, and let it do its thing on the ‘auto’ setting for a couple of hours. Now, before putting the leftovers of this into the blender for soup, I had the first half with some steamed rice. I don’t have a photo of that, because I was HANGRY, and I was too busy shoving it in me gob. Here’s what it looked like after I whizzed the fuck out of in my blender for two minutes:

Whizzed.

Yes I KNOW it LOOKS like explosive baby poo, but it tastes bloody fantastic I promise you. I put it back in the slow cooker and let it heat up for an hour.

I also roasted some chopped vegetables sprayed with olive oil in the oven to go with it, so here is my obligatory fancy photo with the veg:

FANCY.

You can serve it with whatever you like obviously.

Spicy black bean nachos

  • Lightly salted tortilla chips.
  • One can of black beans, drained and rinsed.
  • One can of sweet corn.
  • One jar of tomato passata (mine was 680g).
  • One cup of chopped onions.
  • Crushed chilli to taste.
  • Salt and pepper to taste.
  • 250g grated cheese of your choice.
  • Sour cream to finish.

It is currently too fucking hot in the United Kingdom. We are SHIT at summer. Our infrastructure cannot cope – it is actively melting in parts of the country, train lines warping in the heat with signal failures causing massive train delays, especially in London where I hear the underground is like walking into a furnace. One poor bastard got his LEG STUCK IN TARMAC, amongst various grass fires dotted about the country, along with a veritable smorgasbord of stupid sunburnt racist gammons who are currently over celebrating the World Cup. 🙄

We Britons traditionally only get about three days of summer at a time, over several periods during June to September. We may get three or four of these periods, before we miss autumn entirely, and descend straight into the dark and wonderful winters I am currently missing so fucking much because I fucking hate summer. I am photosensitive, and my relationship with bright lights and hot weather is not one of love. This makes summer even more shit for me, and since we have been experiencing an ACTUAL SUMMER, the entire country has collectively shit itself because we do not know what to do with it.

I currently have a visitor with me – who like me loathes the burny thing in the sky. Prior to her visit, we had expected this warm period to have finished by now BUT NO. It bloody isn’t. It’s still going. These nachos were the closest I was getting to cooking because I was in no way going to stand in front of a hot stove and sweat my body weight off in half an hour. Thank fuck for my slow cooker!

I chucked the passata, onions, salt, pepper, crushed chilli, sweet corn, and black beans into the pot, stirred it up to fuck and left it to cook itself into oblivion slowly for about an hour. Like I said, fuck standing in front of a hot stove when my slow cooker can do the work for me. I dumped the bag of tortilla chips in a deep Pyrex dish, sprinkling some of the cheese through them. Once the slow cooker had worked it’s magic, I poured the contents over the chips, and covered the top with the remaining cheese, shoved it in the oven, and let it bake its arse off for twenty minutes.

After twenty minutes, I put two generous portions on top of mixed bagged salad that you bet I absolutely cheated with because I have sod all energy, and finished off with a healthy blob of sour cream. I amazingly managed to scoff my portion WITHOUT dropping any down my front, so I was quite proud of myself on all counts really.