How many beans make five?

The first weekend in February was a good one; it really got going on the Saturday evening with a trip to a local beer festival with some good mates, top quality local beer, a free tankard and a welcome reunion with someone from my past. After the festival the Sunday morning involved sweating out a slight hangover by walking the dog and cooking a Tuscan Bean Casserole for lunch.

The music on the player was suitably mellow as I still had a slightly sore head and today's album of choice was the Moody Blues' 1967 offering Days of Future Passed which is a concept album about the day in the life of an ordinary person. The orchestral backing coupled with healthy doses of mellotron organ and songwriting that takes in a number of styles make this album something special. Also the cover is so intricate you could spend several hours just staring at it.

I first covered the bottom of my Le Cresceut dish with olive oil and then topped, tailed and peeled three carrots. I sliced the carrots length-ways thinly enough that they were two or three milometers thick. I then cut each strip of carrot in half and fried them gently in the dish. The way the cook the carrots quickly is to cut them into thin strips otherwise they remain tough to eat properly. Once the carrots began to brown round the edges I added the leaves from four fresh Thyme Sprigs together with three diced red onions and two diced garlic cloves.

While these ingredients cooked I took on the task of preparing two sticks of celery. As those of you who cook with celery will know, preparing it can be a little tedious. The first job was to scrub away the dirt from the sticks and then top and tail them. Once I had completed this task I cut the celery into one centimeter wide pieces and ensured that any string was pulled off the sticks and discarded. When this tedious task was completed I added the celery pieces to the dish with two bay leaves and cooked the ingredients on a medium light on the hob until the onions became translucent and the celery soft.

When the ingredients had softened I opened a can of Borlotti Beans and poured them into the dish with three teaspoons of red wine vinegar and a packet of Creative Cooks Tuscan Beans best found in Sainsburys. I also poured half a pint of water into the dish and let it stew on a low heat for about forty five minutes. So as to stop the food from drying up I periodically added water and red wine vinegar and stirred the dish until the forty-five minute period was up.

Bubbling away which allowed the flavours to infuse

The vegetarian sausages made a perfect accompaniment to this dish 

This dish can be served with a variety of side orders as a main meal including mashed potato and mashed parsnip. On this occasion I opted to serve it with some fried vegetarian sausages made using some Marjoram.  Despite not having any meat this meal is extremely substantial with the beans giving plenty of protein and a red wine vinegar providing a strong but not overpowering flavour. It certainly helped fortify me for the first indoor cricket practice of the season later that evening where I troubled the batters with some aggressive bowling.