Garlic and Rosemary Cannellini (white kidney) Beans

A simple, quick recipe for tasty beans. You could serve these as a side dish or - as I did - as a sandwich filling, a bit like a very simple hummus. I ate them by themselves in a sandwich with a little mayonnaise, but you could accompany them with a leafy vegetable such as baby spinach if you wished.

 

Channa (chickpea) masala

In the past I found it hard to make 'proper' curry but with lots of practice I have gotten a lot better at it. My biggest tip for authentic tasting curry is to use fresh tomatoes, not tinned. Sounds simple (and may be obvious to some?), but it really makes a difference. That and cook your curry for as long as possible. This recipe was cobbled together from several I found online; I used cream because I had some in the fridge which needed using up, but you can omit if you'd like or substitute with yoghurt  You can use any vegetables you want in this curry (you could even omit them entirely) - I used sweet potato and a courgette and the sweet potato took a long time to cook, so if you're in a rush substitute for a vegetable that takes less time to cook. 

Apricot, Almond and Blackberry Cake

Last weekend was the wedding of a good friend of mine from secondary school and one of the requests was that guests bring a cake and the challenge was to have a slice of each cake at the reception (I don't think anyone managed this!). Rather than do the sensible thing and cook my tried and tested wholewheat banana cake, I decided to do that risky thing of trying out a new recipe the night before. I felt like doing something with apricots and scoured the internet until I came across this recipe. Then I decided to substitute some of the apricots for blackberries. The resulting cake turned out really nicely, and the two fruits complimented each other quite well.

I also made two cup cakes with this recipe mix, since of course me and Pete had to try the cake before taking it to the wedding, so if you wanted to you could make individual cup cakes instead. In this case, slice the apricots into quarters rather than halves and use one blackberry per cake.

 

Mediterranean Vegetable Rice with Cannellini (white kidney) beans

One of mine and Pete's favourite dishes to make is something we call 'blue cheese rice thing' (as in 'what should we have. I've been meaning to blog it for a while, but never got round to it, and now I'm pregnant (32 weeks!) blue cheese has been off the menu for the last seven months. Which makes me very sad, and as soon as I've had the baby (sometime in November) I plan to practically eat my own weight in blue cheese, so expect a lot of recipes containing it then!

Moving on to this recipe, it has a similar base (rice + cannellini beans) but no cheese. It was one of my 'I'll just throw some ingredients together and see how it turns out' recipe. Thankfully, it worked really well. The olives are entirely optional but do really add to the dish, so I'd recommend keeping them in, unless you dislike them, in which case go ahead and omit them. I've found in the past that dill can be a really over powering flavour, so if you want to omit it (or don't have it in your store cupboard) then go ahead; I added only half a teaspoon to add to the flavour of the dish without being too dominant.

The dish is sort of like a risotto but using basmati rice instead of risotto rice because risotto rice is a) expensive and b) a bit too much effort. I cook this using the 'reduction method' of rice cooking which basically means adding twice as much liquid as rice (in volume), putting a lid on the pan and leaving it to cook.