Chilli

Makes.... enough for 6. Roughly. Or 8 if you're not so hungry.

I used:

1 onion, diced
3 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
4 celery sticks, roughly chopped
1 red pepper (or 3 fresh red chillies) (or a combination, or both), deseeded and roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, halved
500g lean minced beef
1 tin chopped tomatoes
2 tins chickpeas, drained
1 tin red kidney beans in chilli sauce
marmite
dried oregano
worcestershire sauce
dark/plain chocolate (a couple of squares)
salt
lemon juice
olive oil

(I also fried sausages for my lunch and used the fat from cooking them instead of olive oil. Very unhealthy. But it made the frying onions smell FABULOUS.)

Gently fry the finely diced onions, seasoned with salt and lemon juice, in the fat or oil for about 10 minutes while you peel, chop and pulse the carrots, celery, chillies, red pepper and garlic in a food processor. Add the pulverised vegetables to the pan and cook gently for another 15 minutes or so.

Turn up the heat and add the minced beef. Season with oregano, marmite, worcestershire sauce, chocolate, salt and pepper and brown the mince off quickly.

Add the tomatoes, chickpeas and kidney beans and mix well. Reduce the heat to its lowest, cover, and simmer gently while you cook some rice.



This recipe freezes well and is a great way of making 500g mince go a long way. It's also low-GI from the inclusion of all those vegetables and the chickpeas and kidney beans.

Serve with brown rice and grated cheese.

Chocolate chip and banana cake

Previous Recipe......

•  
• 190 g plain flour
• 135 g white sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 225 g mashed bananas
• 1 egg
• 115 g unsalted butter, melted
• 60 ml milk
• 125 g plain chocolate chips (I used a bar of plain cooking chocolate, chopped up)

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour a 9x13 inch pan.
2. In a large bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking powder and salt.
3. In a separate bowl, combine bananas, egg, melted butter and milk.
4. Stir banana mixture into flour mixture until blended. Be careful not to over mix.
5. Stir in chocolate chips.
6. Pour batter into 9x13 inch pan. Bake at 350 degrees F (175 degrees C) 30 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into center of cake comes out clean. (It will have some melted chocolate, but no crumbs.)

I followed this recipe (taken from here) last night to use up a couple of ageing bananas. In the end it took all night to cook it: I cooked it with the oven on for nearly an hour, then just turned the oven off and left it in there overnight. Pretty easy recipe to follow, and manageable in an evening.

Yummy :)