It was when I decided to behave, just before a week-end which was supposed to be wild. Before my trip to Tangier I wanted to go green, at least for a day.

I bought those moong beans (or mung beans) a while ago and hadn’t tried it till now. My friend Kim who took me for this Indian gallivanting in London (visiting an Hindi temple and food shopping) told me about those beans, how to cook and eat them.

Native of the Indian subcontinent, it’s cultivated today in India and China, and used in both sweet and savoury dishes.

Multiple ways of using it : germinated (bean sprouts), as salad, stew, starch to make transparent noodles, as pancakes, falafel kind of…

Packed with vitamins and carbohydrates, it’s delicious and a bit sweeter than lentils. Broad beans are in season now and if you cannot find those little beauties of purple artichokes that we eat raw in Italy and South of France, you can still buy artichokes in a tin, that will do.

Moong beans, purple artichokes and broad beans salad, serves 2

Ingredients :

• 250g of moong beans
• 4 little purple artichokes raw
• 200g of broad beans
• Olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and black pepper

Method :

Rince the moong beans, boil them in salted water till they are soft (around 30min)

While it’s boiling, take the broad beans off the pod, for the artichokes, take off the first leaves leaving the most tender part still attached to the heart, cut the leaves to 2 thirds and then cut the heart in half and remove the beard.

When the moong beans are cooked, rince them with cold water to cool them and mix them with all the ingredients.