Friday Feast: Olive and Butter Bean Spread

The basis for this recipe comes from a  cookbook my ex-colleagues got me when I left my previous job. You know you’re leaving friends when they give you a book called Vegan Italiano as a goodbye present. What champs. 🙂

We initially made this hoping it would be an acceptable substitute for Yankee Elv’s old favourite, cream cheese and green olive sandwich. It’s not the same (you can’t really mimic cream cheese with beans), but I like it better. The cream cheese used to be quite heavy, whereas this is light and perfect for warm days, especially straight out of the fridge. I’ve kept this in the fridge for a week without it going bad. It might keep longer than that, but I’m not sure as it’s never lasted that long!

This recipe is nearly the same as what’s in the book, but we increased the lemon juice, onion and olives. I’m not a lemon-y kind of person, but the addition of a little extra lemon gives this spread a really fresh flavour. We also usually use kalamata olives (the original recipe calls for green or black olives), but I think we tried green ones once and they were nice too. Plus we mix the onions and olives in – the recipe says they should be used as a garnish. Weird.

I especially like it spread on sourdough or grainy quinoa and flaxseed toast. Yum!

Olive and Butter Bean Spread

Ingredients

• 425g (16oz) can butter beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 tab extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tab lemon juice
• salt and pepper, to taste
• 2 to 3 tabs diced red onion
• 2 to 3 tabs chopped kalamata olives
• toast, whatever kind you like

Method

1. Place the beans, olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper in a food processor and whiz until smooth.
2. Mix in the onion and olives. (You can process them if you want, but personally I think the flavour gets a bit lost without the little pieces.)
3. Spread on toast and eat it all up!