Tuscan inspired bean & lentil stew with aubergine

Jens' new online course Cook With Confidence is designed to help participants cook healthy, delicious, plant-rich meals with ease — using vegetables, pulses, grains, seeds and nuts as your foundation, and meat or dairy as optional add-ons. Whether you’re new to cooking or already comfortable in the kitchen, this course will take your skills — and your understanding of flavour — to a deeper level. You’ll learn how to trust your palate, and create meals that work without needing to follow recipes.

In the below recipe, Jens has provided ingredient quantities. In the course material, practice recipes come without quantities. This is because Cook With Confidence is designed to teach you the fundamental principles of great flavour, so that you learn to trust your palate and intuition. You will also note that the recipe is broken in its constituent elements. Again, this is done so you can start to use the principle to make your own creations with freedom and confidence.

Tip: When you make a pulse-based stew, curry, dhal, etc. you always want approximately the same quantity by weight of flavour base ingredients as the weight of dried pulses that you are using. So, for example, if you are using 300 grams of dried pulses and your flavour base contain celery, carrot and onion, you want about 300 grams of those ingredients. Also, when it comes to the flavour-base, making sure that you spend time carefully caramelising particularly the onions is essential for a tasty result. I always keep a jug of water handy, so I can bring down the temperature if it starts to catch.

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