Beans!

A brand new recipe

Thank you for your lovely responses to my recent interview with Kimberley Wilson! Following on from our conversation, with brain health in mind, this week I’m spotlighting beans. As Kimberley says, beans and pulses are great “brain food”.

Not only are beans are an affordable, easy way to add more goodness to our meals, growing beans is also great for biodiversity and soil health. Plus, they can help us eat less meat which also benefits the planet. I’m a big fan of going ‘half and half’, that is, swapping half of the meat in a recipe for beans or pulses. It works especially well for recipes like bolognese and Shepherds pie - throw in a tin of kidney beans or some lentils to stretch the meat further.

Put simply, beans are good for us and good for the planet so here is some recipe inspiration to encourage us to eat more of them. Bean puttanesca uses all the delicious ingredients that we know and love in a classic spaghetti puttanesca (olives, capers and anchovies) but uses butterbeans and/or cannellini beans in place of the pasta. Let me know what bean recipes you would like to see soon in the comments below.

P.S. My fave bean brands are Bold Bean Co for jars, Biona Organic for tins and Hodmedods for dried.

Bean puttanesca