Meat-eating

[igenlode]

I've been much less vegetarian this week, for a change :-)

I got 32p worth of liver and 82p worth of lamb bones and made two delicious meals out of the former, and four helpings of tasty casserole out of the latter -- with the aid of buckwheat, butter beans, breadcrumbs, celery, and lots and LOTS of onions!

Comments

[watervole]

I don't really count offal as being non-veggie (though it depends on your reasons for being veggie). They have minimal impact (as they aren't where the money in meat really is - they wouldn't make farming viable without the steaks) and it reduces waste.

[igenlode]

I don't really count offal as being non-veggie (though it depends on your reasons for being veggie). They have minimal impact (as they aren't where the money in meat really is - they wouldn't make farming viable without the steaks) and it reduces waste.

Oh, I'm not at all vegetarian by conviction -- merely by circumstance and convenience. (Not only are steaks beyond my budget, but they're rather expensive to learn how to cook on; I roasted my first-ever chicken last month with great trepidation, and used the last of the resulting stock from boiling up the carcase a couple of days ago. But if something on that scale goes wrong, you've got an awful lot of waste.)

But buying offal means that it has to be cooked right now (I ended up eating liver two meals running, though fortunately they were both good ones), whereas dried beans, etc. sit in the cupboard for ages.

I strongly suspect that the lamb bones were being marketed for dog treats, but they made a very adequate substitute for the "scrag end of mutton" suggested in the (1960s) recipe!

[watervole]

Tinned beans are so much easier than dried. But some dried beans are very good for making bean sprouts and it's worth experimenting.

[igenlode]

Tinned beans are so much easier than dried. But some dried beans are very good for making bean sprouts and it's worth experimenting.

Tinned beans take up an awful lot more space than dried, as well as being far more expensive! What I usually do is soak and cook an entire packet at a time (or half one of the big 1kg packets) and freeze the cooked beans in approximately one-tin portions so that I have them reasonably readily accessible. When I put it like that I suppose I'm simply transferring the storage issue from the cupboard to the freezer, but they're not quite as bulky in bags as in tins -- and I can store them dried in order to have them ready to soak when the freezer supply gets low.

The main problem is that I rarely have much of a selection available, since I never have more than two kinds going at once and generally only one kind actually prepared. At the moment, I've got half a bag of dried chickpeas, half a bag of dried butterbeans, and only cooked butterbeans in the freezer. As a result, I generally treat all varieties of bean as interchangeable for recipe purposes, which would no doubt give a dedicated bean-eater the horrors; I'll happily put butter beans in a kidney bean recipe (although it does make things like three-bean salad a bit tricky!)

I've tried sprouting most varieties, up to and including butter beans (dried peas don't work but just go soggy and rot), but I only bother with mung beans nowadays. They produce much the most useful and reliable shoots -- you really don't want to eat a sprouted butter bean, which is rock hard with spiky, leathery roots ;-p And having a separate packet of mung beans stored for sprouting purposes is handy for nothing-in-the-freezer emergencies, since they're small enough to cook without pre-soaking.

I did splash out on a packet of alfalfa seed from the bean-sprouter section of the health food shop to celebrate the end of lockdown, and have successfully sprouted one batch of those. But it costs more than an entire bag of mung beans to buy an alfalfa packet a fraction of the size, so that's very much a luxury item.