Potato and Pesto Pasta

Another recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. This is a relatively easy, one-pot dish that tastes fabulous.  Hugh suggests you make your own pesto; personally I just can't be bothered and tend to use store bought, but bear in mind (strictly) vegetarian pesto is hard to come by (I can only find organic veggie pesto) so you might want to make your own if you're a strict vegetarian who won't eat non-veggie cheese, like I am. The dish works well without olives (I had to omit them as I didn't have any when cooking this) but I would highly recommend them as they add a lovely final touch to the dish.

Minted Mushy Peas

This recipe comes from Hugh Fearnley-Whittenstall's excellent book 'River Cottage Veg Everyday!' which has the honour of currently being my favourite cook-book (thanks go to my awesome sister for the excellent Christmas present). I used a red onion in this, and also added some dried mint, but other than that it follows his recipe pretty closely. Due to the onions, you need to blend the peas; if you don't have a blender or don't want to use onions, you could omit the onion and just mash the peas up instead. Either way, this is a guaranteed winner, and I very much enjoyed this with some pie and chips.

Slutty Spaghetti (aka Puttanesca)

This is one of my favourite recipes of all time. There are recipes for this all over the place, but I first came across it in one of my favourite vegetarian cookbooks - Linda McCartney's 'Recipes from around the world' which I found in a charity shop a few years ago and was one of the best £1.99 I've ever spent. It's quick and takes around 15 minutes from frying the garlic to serving with pasta. It also happens to taste amazing; not for the faint hearted, it's full of very strong flavours, and I always go massively over the top with the garlic and the chili. Words can't do it justice. This recipe serves 2, but I'll happily admit when I'm home alone and cooking for one, I often just have the whole sauce with my pasta because I can't get enough of it. It's my ultimate comfort food!

Mushroom and Butter Bean Sandwich Filling

As a vegetarian, I too often fall back on the cheese or hummus when it comes to sandwich fillers for lunch. Granted, I vary the cheese/hummus I eat, but you get my drift - it's easy to get stuck in a rut. So I started experimenting with using beans as a low-fat, high-protein sandwich filling. This is one of my favourite creations. It's tasty both hot and cold, and you can even eat it hot as a side for your dinner. I had this in a home made wholemeal roll for my lunch, and it was delicious!

Paprika and Mustard Potato Salad

This is a very easy, tasty, potato salad to make. Beware - I used raw onion in this and the flavour packs quite a punch. If you are less keen on onion and/or have to be out somewhere around people(!), you can easily omit it from the recipe. Or, as Google once again reliably informs me, you can soak the onions in very cold water for around 10 mins before draining and adding to the recipe.

Lemon and Blue Cheese Pasta Sauce

I recently acquired some lemon thyme from my foster mum Jose, who had been growing some in her garden. It smelled amazing but I had no idea what to do with it so I just made something up. I have no idea where you would buy lemon thyme, but google reliably informs me that you can substitute it for regular thyme and lemon juice. This recipe is already pretty lemon-y so if you do substitute just use normal thyme instead and don't increase the amount of lemon juice. If you aren't that fond of lemon you may want to just use the juice or the rind and not both. This recipe give an easy, cheesy pasta sauce. I find that often blue cheese pasta sauce recipes contain heavy cream, which is awesome in taste, but which makes me feel bloated and a bit ill. So I decided to try and make a pasta sauce without cream but with enough liquid. I was very pleased with how this turned out. I used mushrooms but you could easily substitute for some other vegetable such as spinach.

Blueberry Jam Vanilla Cake

Cake, in all it's various forms, is one of my diet weaknesses. I cannot resist a lovely slice of cake with a hot, sweet, cup of tea. Heavenly. 

This particular recipe gives a lovely, sticky and moist cake. I've haven't tried to put jam in a cake before and I wasn't quite sure how it would turn out, but I thought I'd give it a go and wasn't disappointed with the results. The jam flavour doesn't come through so much, but it did give it a lovely consistency, and you could always try to put more jam in if you want (though you might want to reduce the sugar levels accordingly). The cake came out quite small and it doesn't rise that much, so if you want a larger cake you might want to double up the quantities. On the other hand, you could easily make fairy cakes (or cupcakes as they are otherwise known) out of the mixture instead.

Wholemeal Bread Machine Bagels

It is no exaggeration to say that when I bought my bread maker 4 years ago, it revolutionised my life. No. Exaggeration. Seriously. This bagel recipe is very simple, and borrows heavily from this BBC recipe; the only modification I made was that I made these wholemeal rather than plain. The use of a bread machine also greatly simplifies things as it will do most of the hard work. If you don't have a bread making machine, I'd suggesting heading over to the BBC recipe and following those instructions instead. I always thought bagels would be too 'hard' or difficult to make, since they are briefly boiled before oven baked, but in fact I found them incredibly easy to make (though yes, they take a bit more time). These were not quite as dense as I like bagels, so I've reduced the quantity of water slightly in this recipe (from 300ml to 275ml).

If you aren't eating them all at once, they can be frozen. I recommend this highly as they lose their freshness pretty quickly if left out for a day or two; if frozen you get that 'just baked' taste every time.