How To Make Vegetarian Paella

I'm now going to show you a really exciting and simple dish to do, a Vegetarian Paella and it's a twist on the traditional Valencian Paella that was invented many many years ago and this is a nice, easy, vegetarian version. So what we're going to need first of all, these are obviously already chopped ups so it's much easier, are a couple of medium onions, some chopped up garlic, a whole pepper: red and green, some mixed beans we've got here red kidney beans and some black beans, I've also got a small amount of artichokes, and a couple of chopped up tomatoes. Now, I always find that it's healthier and tastier when you get as many organic ingredients as you possibly can, so most of these are organic.

The rice we have actual Paella rice, you can use different rice just try and see what you prefer and also with that we have got some paprika that we add in and also some saffron and you'll only need a tiny little bit of that and that is really the essence of a good paella, is to have the saffron in there. So, first of all, we have been warming our pan, we have a traditional paella pan. We'll cook this on a very low, very low heat.

First of all, we pop in our olive oil and make sure that you get a good amount and that it does cover all of the pan. In go, next of all, your garlic, now I'm quite a fan of cheating versions of things so we actually have some ready chopped garlic in with fresh garlic it just stays a little bit of time. In next of all, we have our organic onions and mix them all over the pan.

We can cook these for a couple of minutes if you prefer, however, today I like to add in the peppers as well into the mix. Now it's looking and even smelling lovely already. We're just going to leave that to cook for maybe a good five minutes.

So after your lovely peppers and onions and garlic have been cooking for about five minutes, they're going to look nice and shiny and then we can simply add in our mixed beans, they all goes a little bit more quite as the cold beans mix in. I kind of like to use chunky vegetables, you can chop them up finely if you'd like to but I like the individual flavors really of the chunky vegetables. Adding your tomatoes and also another cheat we've got here, we just pop those in on top, and these are already cooked so it doesn't matter so much, they can just lie on top.

And then all the flavours are going to make sense together. So when all the vegetables have been cooking for maybe for another five minutes or so, have a look, make sure they look not to overdone but they're nice, they've got a sheen and you can smell that gorgeous smell as well. I then pop in the rice, we've got here about 250 grams for this big size paella dish.

Make sure you get all of the rice out of your bowl and then that can be fried lightly without adding the stock. You can just fry that rice nicely in with all of your vegetables and let the rice soak up some flavour again only for the next five minutes. The next step is simply to add in your vegetable stock, this is one that we just made a few minutes ago and just let it sit there and simmer and then we pour this gently and easily all over and try to make sure that all of the rice is covered and then on top of that we can add in our saffron, we need a good pinch of saffron, sprinkle that all over and that gives the paella it's lovely yellow colour and also paprika; a dash of that over the top and again it's up to you how much or how less will you put in, I always think it's a good idea to start of with not to much because then you can add more, however, if you add in too much to start with then you can ruin your dish.

So with used a pint of stock with 250 grams of rice, I kept a little bit over just in case it needs topping up. We are going to let that simmer now for about 2o minutes, do keep your eye on it of course as well. So our lovely vegetarian paella has been simmering away for 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes and as you can see it's looking and sm