A Spanish lentil and green bean stew

Cooking lets us explore the world around us without having to do much more than traipsing down to Sainsbury’s - which is quite handy given that the likelihood of any of us eating a pre-dawn Pret baguette in Stansted ahead a weekend of long, languorous lunches in Paris, Prague, or Porto in the next year or so seems pretty, pretty slim.

With that in mind, our first lockdown recipe whisks us away to the Basque Country in the company of Michelin star-holding super-chef Nieves Barragán Mohacho and her seriously sturdy lentil and green bean stew.

The recipe originally appeared alongside another three Spanish stews - though as you'd expect, the gourmands who populate the comments section of The Guardian's recipes section quibbled about the so-called Spanishness of them - in a newspaper article last year.

It's easy to conjure up images of sizzling, garlic-drenched prawns or village-sized paellas when thinking about Iberian cuisine, but even those sun-soaked Spainards have time for the odd bowl of something that looks more likely to be eaten by a bonfire than by the beach, and this incredibly easy stew uses a healthy dollop of smoked paprika to up the continental ante somewhat.

We’ll likely be returning to Spanish - and Portuguese - shores when it stays nice enough to get the metaphorical barbecue out and all culinary thoughts wander to charred sardines and arroz a banda.

Until then, hunker down with something a bit more homely. The following recipe serves 4 - quite hungry - people.

Ingredients:

400g of potatoes (Nieves suggests new potatoes, I used regular King Edwards and it was fine. In the spirit of adventurousness I can’t see why using sweet potatoes would hurt if that’s what you’ve got sitting around)

A few carrots (These are totally optional but if you've got surpus root vegetables taking up valuable kitchen space get them diced and involved in this dish)

Two fistfuls of kale (Again, an optional addition to the base recipe, a satisfying if surpfulous way of bulking out an already dense meal even further)

40ml extra-virgin olive oil (Having had it drilled into me by various TV cooks over the years, I’m always convinced that the extra-virgin stuff is best saved for drizzling or dipping so used standard Filippo Berio olive oil instead. Use EVO if you have adequate supplies of it and aren’t planning to have a simple bread-and-oil supper anytime soon)

4 garlic cloves (Peeled and finely sliced, Goodfellas style)

250g green beans (Topped and tailed - I’ve previously made this with nearly double the quantity of beans and it worked well, just depends how into them you are. 250g is more than sufficient)

1 tbsp smoked paprika

250g lentils (Green for me)

3 sprigs thyme

2 bay leaves (Nieves’ recipe suggests you use ‘ideally fresh’ but with these proving tricky to find currently, I resorted to pinching a few greying and ancient bay leaves from an old sachet bought when Flying Tiger Copenhagen was happy to simply call itself ‘Tiger’)

1 dried chilli

Salt and black pepper

Method: 

These are pretty simple ingredients for a pretty simple meal which overdelivers flavour-wise on it’s pretty simple premise, and happily the recipe is pretty simple too:

Bring a large pan of salted water to a boil, cook the potatoes (and carrots if using) for 10-12 minutes, then cut each one in half.

Heat the oil in a large saucepan on a medium heat and cook the potato halves (and carrots if using) until golden. Add the garlic, cook until lightly golden, then add the beans and cook for two to three minutes, stirring regularly.

Mix in the smoked paprika, add the lentils plus enough water to cover them by 5cm, then the thyme, bay leaves and chilli. Season, cook on a medium-low heat until the lentils are soft, and season again to taste.

Just before the whole thing is done - which will be when your lentils are just about to give up the fight against mutating into pulse-y mash - add your kale. When it starts to loosen up, turn the hob off, and decant a generous few ladles of stew into each of the serving bowls.

The hungrier amongst you would do well to serve the stew with a loaf of the most crusty, hearty, and rustic bread you can get your hands on. 

Please excuse both the poor lighting and fact that the finished product looks a bit like dog food -  just imagine you've been served it in a low-lit inn atop a craggy mountain outside Bilbao. Burly blokes with busy beards are banging on in Euskadi while their bagpiping companions squirt cider all over the place. That's the atmosphere we're going for with this dish. 

The Playlist

Today’s ten-tracker charts a voyage from the glossy New Age pitter-patter of Friedemann’s jaunty “Bao Lan” to the Blue Nile’s defiantly-downtrodden end-of-the-affair classic “Let’s Go Out Tonight” via Horsebeach’s lush guitar latticework and a particularly lugubrious slice of Van Morrison might in the form of the sax-magic of “Spanish Steps” - and yes, the title did secure the big man’s inclusion in this inaugural playlist. 

We end with one of my favourite musical discoveries of the year so far, “Completed Extract from the Previous 7”” by unheralded Australian group Hydroplane - it’s a gloriously beatless, gauzy thing of wonder, first heard on an incredible compilation of Antipodean obscurities collated by Bayu and Moopie, and if there’s a better song to finish off a steaming bowl of lentil stew to, I’m yet to hear it. 

Ideally you’d serve this dish some time after sunset and with a bottle or two of rough and ready Rioja, hence the playlist’s gradual descent into the sort of pleasantly melancholy fog that tends to accompany a night of heavy food and chewy red.

¡Salud!