Me, myself, my thoughts. Oh, and bacon. You gotta have bacon.

Passport & Plate - Sour bean & carrot stew

Croatia | Friday, March 14, 2014 | 1 photos

Ingredients
3 large cups of half-cooked bean (bean of your choice, fresh or dried)
3 large carrots
1 small onion
chicken stock (or vegetable, beef, the one you prefer)
3 tbsp of sour cream
4 tbsp of vinegar
1 tbsp of ground red bell pepper
salt
black pepper
oil or lard for cooking

 

How to prepare this recipe
Finely chop onion and saute on few tablespoons of oil. Traditionally we use lard to make this stew but if you don't like it or don't have it, use oil (sunflower or the one you use). If you want to make it with lard, take one rich tablespoon of it.

When onion gets nice yellow color, add chopped carrots. After 5 to 10 minutes (depending on how you chopped the carrots, 5 minutes if they're finely chopped) add half-cooked bean. If you're going to use dried bean, leave it in a bowl of water for at least 5 hours and then cook it. It's best to leave it overnight and forget about it until you have to prepare it. If you're using fresh bean, go ahead and cook it whenever you have time.

When you've added bean, let it cook for another 10 minutes. After that, add salt and black pepper (season it to suit your own taste), ground red bell pepper and pour stock over it, enough to cover everything.

Simmer for 30 minutes or until carrots and bean are cooked. Add more stock if necessary. When carrots and bean are cooked, add sour cream and vinegar. Cook 5 more minutes and serve.

 

The story behind this recipe
Your only duty as a human being is to be good and do good. Live by that premise and everything else will somehow someday fall in the right place. I learned that from my Grandmother. Quiet, stoic woman. In 95 years of her life she survived things that would break average person into thousand pieces. She wasn’t average. She was everything.

She loved watching me in the kitchen. She introduced me to it. One of my earliest memories is standing next to her while she made egg noodles for the soup, little me with her big apron on, covered in flour from head to toe because flour is too fluffy to just stay on the table.

I made my first meal under her surveillance. Well, you can hardly call scrambled eggs and onion salad a meal, but when you make it at the gentle age of 8 it’s pretty much a gourmet festival.
She would observe my every move among bowls and plates, and say I’m” fletna”. The sweetest word. I can’t properly translate it because the word itself is jargon, but it means you are quick, capable and efficient, all in one.
She didn’t chop, sauté, poach. She just cooked, and what she cooked could best be described as poor peasants’ food. If heaven has a taste, it probably tastes like Grandma’s sour bean and carrot stew. Back then, I wasn’t a fan of it. Probably because we ate it at least 2 times a week during winter season.

Fire crackling in the wood stove, red bowl with white polka dots sitting on it, carrots and beans swimming in the small warm sea of water and minced red pepper. I’d come back from school, eat a plate of it and after that “rudely”, like only kids can, interrupted Grandma from doing whatever she was doing by sticking my small head into her lap.

I realized how much I actually love that freakin’ bean carrot sea first time I made it myself, maybe month or two after she died. That day, there was something very bitter in the sour taste of vinegar that goes into the stew.

Probably the realization that she will never make it for me again.