Raise your pulse rate with our healthy soups, salads and dips

Lentils and pulses are sexy. You saw it here first. So before you read on, throw those preconceptions about sandal-wearing hippies and worthier-than-thou lentil bakes on the compost heap.

First, a few rules:

1. Pulses – all of them, without exception – need slow cooking or they will turn into hard pellets. Worse still, they’ll go mushy on the inside, with tough outer skins.
2. All, except lentils, need soaking; overnight is the least arduous way – you sleep, they work. An alternative for those who can’t or won’t plan ahead is to boil the beans for 2 minutes, remove them from the heat and cover for an hour, then rinse, return to a pan, cover with 5cm water, then proceed with a couple of hours of slow cooking – an hour will do in a pressure cooker, but make sure you check their progress.
3. Cooks from the Middle East, who know more about these things than anyone else, say that a chickpeas has to break down easily when pressed against the palate with the tip of the tongue. So, they should be neither hard, nor ‘al dente’.
4. Remember not to add salt – no bouillon powder, no soy sauce, no seasoning at all – until the pulses are suitably tender. You can, however, add bay leaves to the cooking water, whole peeled garlic cloves, a chopped up carrot or two, a chopped onion, a lemon cut in half (remember this when you come to making the Puy Lentil Salad, below), or, should you have such a strange thing handy, a big piece of Kombu seaweed (macrobiotics swear it speeds up the cooking process and eases the digestion).
5. Once the pulses are cooked, go wild, absolutely wild with the aromatics and the olive oil and the fresh herbs.

Some good news…

• To put it bluntly, pulses get a bad press for giving you – ahem – wind. The truth is, the more often you eat them, the more your gut accustoms itself. Try my delicious suggestions, and soon it will feel like eating baby food.
• If you have high cholesterol, adding 100g of any pulse to your diet on a daily basis will reduce your level by close to 20%.

Next page: soup and salad recipes

Simple Brown or Green Lentil Soup
Serves 4-6

100ml light olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2 sticks celery, chopped
1 medium carrot, chopped
6 garlic cloves (3 chopped, 3 left whole)
500g lentils
1 or 2 bay leaves
30g dried porcini, soaked in water
2 tomatoes, quartered
1 tsp tamari or soy sauce
handful finely chopped parsley

1. Heat the olive oil, add the onion, celery, carrot, and the 3 chopped garlic cloves, and sauté for about 5 minutes.
2. Add the lentils, the 3 whole garlic cloves and the bay leaf or leaves. Toss to coat in the oil and cover amply with water (about 2 litres). Cover the pan and bring to the boil, then simmer for 45-50 minutes (once again, don’t believe anyone who tells you less).
3. Drain the porcini mushrooms and add them 5 minutes before the end of the cooking time.
4. Stir in the tomatoes, the tamari or soy sauce and the finely chopped parsley. The soup should be like a very sloppy stew.

Harira (Cheat’s Version)
This is the most extraordinary Moroccan chickpea soup. Eat it with fiery Harissa (you can buy this in most good supermarkets). Just before serving, beat an egg with lemon juice and pour it from a height into the soup as you stir, for a traditional finishing touch.

Serves 4

2 tbsp olive oil, plus extra for serving
1 onion, roughly chopped
3 garlic cloves, finely sliced
1 stick celery, chopped
2 tsp ground cumin
3 x 400g cans chickpeas, liquid included
generous pinch of saffron strands
1 dark vegetable stock cube
400g tomatoes, deseeded and roughly chopped
half a large bunch of coriander, chopped
dash of Tabasco
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
juice of half a lemon
1 egg, beaten

1. Heat the olive oil in a large saucepan and fry the onion until browned. Add the garlic, the celery and the cumin and fry for another minute.
2. Add 1 can of chickpeas and the saffron, crumble in the stock cube and heat until bubbling gently, stirring to dissolve the stock cube – about 5 minutes.
3. Now add the remaining chickpeas with all their liquid, together with an extra 250ml water. Leave on a gentle heat to cook for 15 minutes or so.
4. Add the chopped tomatoes and, a minute later, half the coriander, Tabasco, salt and pepper. Stir for a minute and reduce the heat.
5. Mix the lemon juice and beaten egg and pour into the soup from a height in a thin trickle, swirling gently with a fork till the egg is just set. Then remove from heat and serve with extra olive oil swirled in, and the rest of the coriander.

N.B. 325g dried beans, uncooked weight is roughly equivalent to 3 x 400g cans beans, drained.

Next page:
Chickpea Salad
Puy Lentil Salad
Houmous

Chickpea salad
This is absolutely my most favourite bean salad. You can adjust the quantities according to taste.

Serves 2

1 x 400g tin of chickpeas
olive oil
juice of 1 organic lemon
2 plump garlic cloves, very finely chopped
handful very fresh coriander, leaves picked off the stalks
tamari
tabasco
1 packet (250g) Haloumi cheese, sliced
baby spinach or wild rocket

1. Drain the chickpeas into a bowl, add olive oil to your heart’s content, the lemon juice, the chopped garlic cloves, coriander leaves, a glug of tamari and a dash of Tabasco. Stir gently and set aside.
2. Grill, griddle or roast the Haloumi slices to the colour of burnished copper.
3. Serve the chickpeas on a bed of baby spinach or wild rocket and top with the Haloumi cheese.

Puy Lentil Salad
Cook some lentils slowly for 40 minutes. When they’re nearly ready, chargrill a pepper or two and grill some slices of goat’s cheese till gently oozing. Drain the lentils, then tip into a warmed serving dish. Dress with olive oil and a dash of balsamic vinegar, and stir in the pepper, peeled and cut into strips, and some slithers of sun-dried tomatoes. Top with the goat’s cheese.

Houmous
A more than acceptable houmous – with none of the unnatural sharpness of shop-bought varieties – can be made using tinned chickpeas. Drain the chickpeas, reserving a couple of tablespoons of their liquid, and blitz in a processor with the liquid, as much olive oil as can be absorbed, as much garlic as you like, 1 or 2 tbsp tahini, and salt and pepper to taste.