Black eyed beans and mushrooms with coconut greens

I really love all pulses but for some reason I very rarely eat black eyed beans. I just don’t see many recipes for them and they seem not to be as popular as chickpeas, black beans and other pulses. So I was delighted to stumble across this recipe, which came from a very helpful contributor to the BBC Food message boards, IaninFrance (I’ve mentioned his dal recipe before which is a favourite of mine).

I presoaked the beans so that I didn’t need to let the beans sit in the boiling water for an hour. Whilst doing this I messed up how much water I was using so I got a little confused at the end, but I simply drained the cooked beans, reserved the liquor and added it until I got the texture I wanted. If you’re not an idiot like me you won’t have that trouble. The only other change I used was to use tinned tomatoes as the ones I can get here at this time of year are not worth any effort skinning.

For a midweek Indian meal I really love brown rice + a pulse dish + some kind of green vegetable dish. So I served this bean dish with some brown rice and some greens! I love greens and they’re locally grown and cheap (just 79p for quite a big bag in Sainsburys). I didn’t follow a recipe but I just stuck the shredded greens in a hot pan with some sliced green chillis, mustard seeds, salt and shredded coconut, and stuck a lid on, stirring regularly until the greens were nicely wilted.

We both really liked this black eyed bean curry. It’s a lovely texture with not too much spice but a good depth of flavour. I think you could probably use tinned beans if you wanted but I think the texture of the final dish may suffer a bit. In any case if you remember to presoak they’re not one of the pulses that take hours and hours to cook.

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