This is a great recipe for using up those tins of beans you’re not sure what to do with and often find collecting dust at the back of the pantry. I used tinned Mixed Beans because that’s what I had in the pantry, but you could use tinned Kidney Beans or Cannellini Beans and it would work just fine.
Cooking at home in this season of empty supermarket shelves and limits on purchases means we need to be a little flexible with our recipes – don’t be afraid to substitute and get creative. Worst case, it won’t turn out that nice and you won’t do that again. I didn’t have chicken stock when making this, used water instead and found it to work perfectly. I didn’t have passatta, so used a jar of pasta sauce + 1 tin of crushed tomatoes and you would never know the difference.
We served ours on top of jacket sweet potatoes, layered with baby spinach and cheese. But your options are endless – serve on toasted sourdough with poached eggs for breakfast or simply enjoy a bowl of it on its own for a quick healthy lunch.
I wasn’t sure if this would be a hit with the boys – but they really loved it!
The original recipe is from ‘Slow Cooking’ by the Australian Women’s Weekly.
It made enough for dinner for the 5 of us and we had leftovers for breakfast/lunch the next day for 2 or 3.
Ingredients
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 6 pieces of rindless bacon, roughly chopped (leave out to make it vegetarian)
- 1 green capsicum, seeds removed, roughly chopped OR 1 stick of celery, trimmed and roughly chopped
- 1 onion, chopped finely
- 2 carrots, unpeeled, roughly chopped
- 1/4 cup tomato paste
- 1/2 teaspoon dried chilli flakes – this gave it a nice heat but still tolerable for the kids. Put in more if you like it hotter. You can use a fresh chilli, deseeded, if you have one.
- 1 jar of passatta OR 1 jar of pasta sauce + 1 tin tomatoes
- 2 x 400gm tinned beans – whatever you have on hand, rinsed and drained.
Method
- If you have a searing slow cooker, heat the oil in the slow cooker on the searing function and then add the bacon, celery or capscicum, onion, carrot and chilli and fry until onion softens. Add tomato paste and cook for a further minute. This step can also be done in a frying pan over medium heat.
- Add remaining ingredients. Fill the empty tin of tomatoes about half way with water and add to the slow cooker. Do the same again with the empty jar of pasta sauce or passatta.
- Give it all a big stir, put the lid on and cook on LOW for 8 hours.
- Serving Suggestion – to make jacket potatoes, scrub potatoes or sweet potato till clean, wrap them individually in foil and place on a baking tray. Cook for an hour in a 200 degree oven, until soft when pierced with a knife.
- Remove the foil, split the potatoes in half, scatter with baby spinach leaves, top with Chilli Beans and sprinkle with grated cheese.
