Rustic baked beans

I still have ham left over from Christmas.

In a characteristically excessive move, I procured a 9.7 kilo leg of beautifully cured ham for our very small Christmas gathering*, which I glazed with quince paste and cardamom and green ginger wine and lovingly studded with approximately twelve million cloves. We ate ham everyday for two weeks. And then I carved up the remaining five kilos, and packaged the slices and chunks and bones away in the freezer, dreaming of mid-winter pea-and-ham soups and ham and leek soufflés.

I don’t like waste. I ferret away kitchen scapes and old bones for stock. My freezer contains little zip lock bags of everything from stale bread crumbs to off cuts of potato and kohlrabi to a chicken carcass to prawn heads. You never know what you might need. Of course it’s frugal: throwing away food is the same as throwing away money. It’s also partly a political stance: when we waste food we are saying that the time and effort put into growing and rearing our food is disposable**. And it is so satisfying to make something delicious out of food that would otherwise be assigned to the trash.

Think of it as 3D Tetris for your tastebuds.

Ham. Diced carrot off-cuts. The first of this year’s tomato passata. Half an onion in the fridge. Celery. Celery powder. Half a bulb of fennel. Stolen rosemary. Tinned cannellini beans. Now I love baked beans. Not the sticky sweet navy-beans-in-tomato-sauce you can buy in a tin (although, to be fair, those bad boys are pretty healthy, providing you buy the low salt/low sugar brands). The old-school home-made kind, chunky and spicy and packed full of vegetables. It is my measure of a good breakfast cafe, the calibre of their ‘house-made beans’. And baked beans are precisely what the contents of my freezer suggests. All it needs it a little time to braise.

Best Christmas present ever.

* In addition to a two kilo turkey buff, and two chickens. Not to mention potato salad and zucchini and green bean salad with pangratto, and steamed carrots and four loaves of bread and roasted baby beatroots. For eight people. I have issues.

** You could argue that rather than saving money by not wasting food, we should just buy more food so that farmers are better recompensed. I say, let’s pay more money for food, thus better remunerating farmers and incentivising us consumers not to waste it. Food is way too cheap.

Rustic baked beans

1 tbsp olive oil

1 small red onion, diced

2 cloves garlic, minced 2 red chillies, minced (optional)

2 medium carrots, diced

2 stalks celery, diced

½ tsp fennel seeds

½ tsp coriander seeds

¼ ground all spice

3 cloves

2 tsp sweet paprika

6 very ripe tomatoes, diced (or 2 cups passata or 2 tins crushed tomatoes)

Sprig rosemary. Or thyme. Or oregano. Whatever you grow/can steal.

300 gm thick chunks ham (or a bit of ham bone or smoked pork hock or similar. Or leave out, just as good).

2 tins cannellini beans (or your favourite beans, butter beans are good. So are kidney beans.)

Saute the onions, garlic and vegetables (except tomatoes) in a large heavy based saucepan until soft, this will take about ten minutes. Add the spices, toast for about 1 minute, then add the tomatoes, fresh herbs and ham.

Bring to a simmer (add as little water if a bit dry) and cook for about half an hour to an hour, until thick and all the flavours are infused. Taste, and add salt if necessary.

Gently stir through the drained tinned beans (feel free to soak dried ones over night, I just love the convenience of tinned ones) and heat through.

Finish off with masses of fresh chopped parsley and a teaspoon of powdered celery leaves.

Serve over grilled polenta or thick sourdough toast. Soft yolked organic poached egg makes this transcendent.

This porridge is just right. Food that your grandmamma would recognise

Porridge is immensely satisfying. Warming, sweet, sticky and filling: it is busting with the goodness of whole grains and fibre and yet it tastes like gooey breakfast pudding.

With dried and fresh fruit and nuts and natural yoghurt and honey and nutmeg and cinnamon - it is decadent and over the top and basically just really, really good for you. Unlike eggs and bacon or waffles or pancakes or coffee and a croissant, eating porridge for breakfast entitles me to walk around with a smug, self-satisfied look on my face. It’s ridiculously healthy and pretty basic yet in no way hints at any kind of deprivation.

Food doesn’t need to be complicated or sugary or buttery to taste good.

And food shouldn’t be boring or uninteresting or restrictively-limited in order to be good for us.

So, in the words of Michael Pollan, lets “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”.

Like most things that are truly healthy, porridge is not overly processed (for rolled oats the oat-groats are hulled and rolled flat. ‘Quick oats’ are then also pre-steamed to hasten the cooking process). My deluxe version incorporates lots of fresh fruits. It has a variety of ingredients, all of which are pretty basic (that is, in or very close to their natural form). It is low in fat. Low in sugar, and most of the sugars are in their most natural, unprocessed form. It’s good and it’s good for you.

So when Pollan offers the nutritionally and environmentally sound advice that we “don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognise” this porridge rises to the challenge. It’s food that looks like food. But more than that – it’s food that conveys a certain sense of nourishment beyond the sustenance it offer. It’s nurturing, wholesome, culturally centring food.

It’s food that looks like home. Even if you’ve never seen a farmhouse, you know that this is what you’d have for breakfast there. It’s the food of childhood stories and winter mornings and the countryside. Even if, like me, you don’t have a grandmother to make it for you and share it with you, it’s food that the archetypal grandmamma would make.

This porridge is just right.

Porridge that is just right

For each serving:

½ cup rolled oats
1 cup water
½ tsp brown sugar
1 tbsp sultanas or chopped dried fruit
¼ tsp each of nutmeg and cinnamon. Ground ginger is also lovely.
1 cup chopped fresh fruit (or mix in with frozen berries) – ie, pear, apple, passionfruit (banana and mango is delicious in summer)
1 tbsp low fat natural yoghurt
1 tbsp nuts (ie, walnuts, hazelnuts, almonds, pecans)
1 tsp honey
¼ cup low fat milk

Bring oats and water to a simmer in a small saucepan and cook until the porridge is thick and the oats are cooked (usually about 10 - 15 minutes).

Pour into a bowl. Sprinkle with sugar and dried fruit. Top with fresh fruit, then yoghurt and nuts. Drizzle the honey over, and pour milk around the edge of the bowl.