Pressure cooker black beans, spinach and cheese pitta wraps

A live(ish) blog of how to set up a post

The image quality is horrible reduced to this size. Maybe just view with our reading glasses and it’ll be fine.

How do you reduce the size of images to get them to work? In preview but its really clunky. This was 27 pixels per inch resize on preview. I found I need to drop pictures onto the desktop for easy finding and opening in preview. The effort of finding then in hundreds of thousands of images is too slow.

Anyway, after much faffing I have a typeable-on page and a picture. And I wonder why I have given up on this so many times before. This is where I tell you about my granny’s recipe or my exotic travels resulting in the above recipe but really I have neither. I just have hundreds of cookbooks.

So, guys, the cost of living crisis is upon us and armed with a random voucher from Hertz for messing up car hire I bought an instant pot and Modern Pressure Cooking by Catherine Phipps. This may be life changing, I was resistant to the cult of the Instant pot as, you know, I don’t join cults but the truth is its flipping amazing. I had a pressure cooker back in the day when I was an earnest young vegetarian student but:

A. I was a bit scared of it

B. how many beans does a single person realistically get through and

C. it got burnt to hell by a housemate making popcorn in it

So, a few (ahem) years later and now being fully the type of cook who labels things in her freezer and the planet being on fire it seemed time to give the pressure cooker another go. But enough pre-amble, I need to learn to use the recipe plug in. Wish me luck.

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Pressure cooker black beans pittas with spinach, cheddar and hot sauce

Speedy weekday lunch

Course Sandwich

Cuisine Mexican

Keyword Vegetarian

Servings 2

Ingredients

• 2 Pittas
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 spring onion, chopped
• 250g Pressure cooked black beans
• 4 blocks Frozen spinach, defrosted and drained thoroughly
• 50g Cheese, grated
• Hot sauce to finish

Instructions

• Split the pittas into 2 halves so they can be used as wraps. They may fall to bits
• heat the olive oil in a pan and add the chopped spring onion.
• When the onion has softened add the black beans and mash a few times to make the beginning of a puree.
• Add the spinach and heat through.
• Tip the bean mixture onto the bread, add cheese and hot sauce

Well, that wasn’t quite as bad as I thought it would be. I confess the quantities are somewhat guesswork but hey, you know how many beans you want and there are quite a lot available from the pressure cooking. I think the amount here is slightly more than a tin. I added 2 tablespoons of the bean cooking water to the mashed beans to make a runnier texture but it could take double this. It also could take twice as much cheese.

I suppose I also need the pressure cooker instructions. I followed the quick soak then cook method in Modern Pressure Cooking which is 2 minutes soak and 5 minutes cook. This gave beans that are cooked though but completely intact. I thought they might be resistant to mashing but they were OK. The flavouring are straight from Meat Free Mexican by Thomasina Miers using bay, star anise, garlic and onion plus salt and oil as recommended by Catherine. Honestly the pressure seems to infuse the beans with a savoury taste quite beyond the basic spices used so I’m impressed. And I’m not easily impressed.

The spacing of these recipe blocks is really quite ugly isn’t it. Hopefully next time I will dive further into the menus to fix this.