We also fell in love with Gigantes in Athens; big white kidney beans baked in tomato sauce, so I found some online and, along with chickpeas and other beans, we eat more beans than the average Brit.
It’s really worth a listen: health, environment, and just really nice food if we move away from tins to jars, or even better (and cheaper), dried ones: BBC Radio 4 - The Food Programme, Beans Part 1: Are Legumes the Answer?"
The second programme is specifically about how Spain uses them Part 2: How Spain does beans". We use dried beans just because they taste better than tinned ones. Jarred ones are better than tinned and not as good as dried (I won’t repeat the programmes, it’s just worth listening to them, but the way beans are cooked in tins means they have to have specific properties like thick skins).
A new report has just stated that Spain is the healthiest country on earth. There are a lot of reasons for that, but diet is key. People talk about the Mediterranean diet: I saw a huge fish counter and really nice meat counter in a supermarket today; there was a queue at the fish counter and not at the butchers’. Although what they can’t do with a pig ain’t worth knowing.
I hired a car a few days ago and it’s going well so far – I got in the passenger seat this morning while quite a few Spaniards assumed my carer would turn up imminently to drive me away. I took out the full insurance and the lovely woman behind the counter said “well, you can’t control what others do”. As I sat in the passenger seat hoping nobody was watching I thought “Yeah, it’s all the others that are the problem”
It means I can go shopping in proper places though. I ended up in Lidl where I bought a fantastic looking piece of tuna. I am cooking with beans (so far mostly chickpeas) most days now and I’ll post the recipes on the main part of the site (click on the picture below to go to the tuna recipe – all of this stuff is available in our own supermarkets and/or online in the UK – it’s worth spending money on beans, by which I mean a very small number of pounds rather than a small number of pennies, either way you get a lot for the money).
Give it a whirl! (click on the picture to see the recipe).
The picture at the top of this post shows some chickpeas that I cooked for another dish and didn’t use so they were in the fridge. I tossed them in a bit of cumin, black pepper and salt, olive oil and a bit of lemon juice. They were beautiful. The other things are tinned white anchovies, olives stuffed with anchoves (might need to rename this to the Anchovy Family Cookbook) and lovely smoked tuna in oil and herbs. Not a bad little lunch.
Legumes can reduce your carb intake too, for those that care about that, because the beans can replace the pasta or potatoes with a bit of protein and a lot of fibre, although God knows the Spaniards love a spud or a paella!