Fassolia / Greek Bean Stew

This is one of my favourite dishes from back home in Cyprus.
Fassolia, is a tomato based bean stew with carrots, potatoes, celery and herbs.
A rich dish, perfect for these cooler nights.
serve it hot with some crusty bread and raw onion.
it smells and tastes delicious. 😋

Music: Fugetta
Musician: Ilya Truhanov
URL: https://icons8.com/music/

Good afternoon. So, today in Maria’s kitchen, we are making fasogy, which I have made before on my old channel on my old van life channel, but when I downloaded my videos, I deleted it by accident. So, we’re going to make it again. Um, I’m making it I’m doing the cheat sheet and I’m making it with canned beans, but to make it traditionally you’d use the dried uh cantalini, I think like these ones, canolini beans, but the giant the bigger ones. Um, and then you would soak them overnight with a little bit of bicarbonate soda. Change the water, put clean water, boil it, change the water, boil it. Do that a couple of times. skim off the froth and then start adding your stuff. But because I’m uh doing these quick ones, I’m going to use these. And I don’t have any dried ones left. So, you’re going to need some uh celery, head of celery. This is uh carrot leaves from my organic carrots from my garden. And we’ve got garlic from my garden. One large onion. Traditionally, you use white, but I only had a red one today, so it doesn’t really matter. The red ones are actually healthier for you. Some tomato paste. These are my organic tomatoes. I’m going to blitz in a m moment to make a juice. Uh, coriander. That’s all I’ve got left from my garden. Parsley. A little bit of cumin, not too much. um potatoes and beans. So, I’m going to use butter beans today cuz I prefer the butter beans. I like the butter beans and olive oil, which I forgot to bring out. So, let’s just blitz these tomatoes first. And hope it doesn’t go everywhere. Okay. So, I might need a little bit more of that. You need about 2 tablebspoon of puree. I like to add a little bit of lemon juice. Not too much, just a little splash. And stirring as well. So, we’ve added cumin, parsley, and coriander. I’m just going to let that do slowly for 5 minutes and then we’ll add the juices. At this stage, you can add a little bit of juice from the can just to stop it sticking at the bottom. And then drain drain the rest of the water out of your beans um before you put them in. Cooking for about 5 minutes. We’re going to add the tomato that we’ve just blitzed. Might need some more of this. We’ll see. And we’re going to add two tablespoons of tomato puree mixed in water. And we’re going to use this to mix it in to get all the tomato tomato goodness out. I’m going do about two tablespoons tomato puree. So that’s mixed. Two tablespoons tomato puree with some water and add that into there. I’m going to turn the heat up now. Turn the heat up and put the lid on and just let that come to a boil. And then we’ll taste test it and put the beans and everything else in. Once it comes to a boil, just turn it down until the vegetables, the potatoes, and the carrots are almost cooked through. Because we’re using canned beans that are already cooked, they don’t need long, 5 10 minutes to warm through. And then we add the celery and the we add the celery and the carrot tops in sort of 5 minutes before the end. So once your potatoes and carrots are almost cooked through, you can add your beans. Give it a good stir. At this point, you can give it a taste test as well. See how it’s going. See if you need anything else. Oh my gosh, the difference it makes making it with fresh tomatoes is amazing. Yeah, do with a little bit more salt and pepper. So, I’m going to let them cook for a couple of minutes and then we’re going to add the last components of this recipe. Okay, so I’ve added some more salt and some more pepper and it’s been about 5 minutes. So now we’re going to add in the celery and the carrot leaves. Give it a good stir and just leave it for another 5 minutes and then it’s ready to serve. And so one can of canalini beans or uh butter beans like these ones will feed two people easily. Some crusty bread and traditionally we would eat raw onion with it as well. So you dip the raw onion in and your bread and eat it all together and it’s scrum. It’s a very beautiful dish for the winter time. Well, for any time, but especially in the winter, it’s it’s a hearty dish. So, we’ll leave that for another five minutes and then it’s ready to serve. I’ll show you once it’s in the dish. Here we are. We’ve served it up. I’m just going to add a dribble of olive oil on top. And it’s ready to go with some crusty bread, some raw onion. Yum, yum, yum. Give it a try. And if anybody would like me to do it with the dried beans, just let me know below and I shall get some dried beans and show you the process cuz it’s slightly different. Anyway, this is pasoya criate meal, Greek meal. You’ll find it in different variations across the world really across the Mediterranean. So, you know, some have it spicy. You can also add meat to it. Just brown your meat off uh before you put it in. And it’s nice with meat in it as well. Enjoy.