Here are four of my favourite “food hacks”, easy ways to make an average food awesome …
Pimped Beans
Baked beans … meh …
Arizona strawberries, bullets, whistleberries, the musical fruit – a simple instant food that never quite shed school dinner associations until I decided to posh them up with fried onions and stuff.
- Fine chop a medium onion and fry in a saucepan with half a tablespoon of oil until golden
- Grind some black pepper and drop a pinch of mixed herbs and a sprinkling of paprika over the top of the onions and stir them in
- For extra awesomeness, add a couple of teaspoons of bouillon powder if you have some
- Add the beans from a tin and heat through, stirring all the while
- If you want them HOT, this is the moment when a couple of drops of Tabasco wouldn’t go amiss
- Ladle onto hot toast and enjoy
Hacked Hummus
As a vegan, I eat a lot hummus. Supermarkets sell their fancy red pepper, caramelised onion, carrot and coriander and morrocan-style variations, but any one of these stirred into bog-standard hummus will blow your tastebuds:
- A heaped teaspoon of lime pickle – with lumps of lime in it
- Mango chutney
- Two drops of Tabasco
- A tablespoon of salsa dip
- A teaspoon of curry powder
Biscwiches
A biscwich is that particular kind of a biscuit where you do have two biscuits and something to spread between them. Here are a few of my favourites:
- Hobnobs and marmalade – oaty orangey
- Ginger nuts and peanut butter – go nuts: add a few raisins, too
- The Oreo club biscwich – two Oreos with peanut butter between them
- Ryvita and hacked hummus
Garlicky Pea Rice
Don’t just boil your fairtrade basmati: add two cloves of chopped garlic and a fist full of frozen peas while it is bubbling on the hob.
Go and hack your food and let me know if you come up with any more awesome combos …