Reasons to Be Cheerful - Saving Seeds From a Borlotti Bean Harvest and a Recipe for Pochas

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When we were living in the Basque Country, we discovered the bean dish, pochas. It was a kind of bean soup, made with semi-dried beans, from that year’s harvest. I have looked up the recipe for this and it varies widely. Most recipes use a sofrito of finely chopped vegetables, often onion, carrots, peppers and garlic. A quartered tomato is added to this fried reduction and sometimes all of these vegetables are then either strained all pureed . I couldn't be bothered with that and I also wanted to use my borlotti bean and courgette harvest and some home-made chicken stock I had, so this is my interpretation of pochas.

Ingredients For Pochas (for 2 people)    

• A cup or two of beans harvested from dried pods

• 1 carrot

• 1 onion  

• One small courgette for the sofrito (or use a green pepper) and one to add at the end (or a chopped red pepper)

• 2 garlic cloves

• 1 tomato

• 250 ml chicken stock (or use vegetable, or water)

• paprika, salt and pepper

Method

Dice the carrot, onion, courgette and garlic cloves and fry in olive oil on a low heat until soft. Quarter the tomato, add to the sofrito and cook until it begins to break apart. Stir well, or puree if you can be bothered. Add the beans and stock and top up with water until the beans are just covered. Simmer for 45 minutes, or stick in the oven at 180°C degrees centigrade for the same amount of time. Add the other finely-chopped courgette and a teaspoon of paprika (picante or dulce, hot or not) and cook for a further 15 minutes. Add salt and pepper to season before serving with bread and guindillas (mild spicy green peppers). If you have a meat tooth (like the boyf), you can add a few slices of chorizo that have been warmed in a pan.

It wasn’t exactly as I remembered it in the restaurants in Spain, but it was good!

Reasons to Be Cheerful - Seventhwave Wetsuits Are Made-to-Measure

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I tested it out at Taylor’s Mistake (not great surf, but it is always good to go in).

The Seventhwave factory-shop in Ferrymead, Christchurch, NZ

See more of what Seventhwave do here.

Living in New Zealand: Reopening of Sumner Road Over Evans Pass

From last year, when Sumner Road was closed (Click to see options for using the image)

Last Friday Sumner road reopened to traffic, Including cyclists (including me) and walkers (although the road isn't great for walkers as there isn't much room and there are lots of blind corners).

Cars are supposed to be going at 30 km an hour because of the roadworks, but they are going much faster. So are the bicycles going downhill. Except me. I’m a wuss.

The boyfriend and I took our Jack Russell friend in the Land Rover up and over the pass today to go to Sumner . It's great to be able to do that more easily, to go to beach and the bakery and even to pick up some free comfrey plants at the share stand. Score! Hopefully we will be back more often, not just at the beach, but also the Hollywood Cinema and some great local restaurants.

New Zealand Garden Diary: Planting Winter Vegetables

Yesterday was 25 degrees but it plummeted about ten today. And the sun is getting lower and will soon be disappearing behind the crater rim mid-afternoon. Time to get the winter veggies in.

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I’m hoping the purple-sprouting broccoli I also planted does as well as it did last year.