Creamy Mushroom and Butterbean Pie

This was an experimental pie filling of mine which turned out really well; in fact exactly as I imagined, which is always a bonus when cooking something without a recipe for the first time! Not many pictures of the final product as I served this when we had guests round for dinner, but suffice to say it was yummy. This uses pre-made puff pastry isn't actually that complicated to cook.

White Chocolate, Apricot and Oat Cookies

I had some dried apricots to use up and felt like doing something a bit different. I came across this recipe on Martha Stewart's website and it was fantastic. So good, in fact, that I made two batches in one week - the first were a bit large so I adjusted to make them smaller, but if you'd rather large cookies then just double the amount of mix per cookie. I haven't really adjusted the recipe much, except for translating it into weight (rather than volume) and British English rather than American English (i.e. oats vs. oatmeal). These are more like 'American style' chewy cookies than what I would view as 'English' biscuits. Because these are 'drop' cookies and spread during cooking, you will likely need to do them in a couple of batches.

 

Fennel Pasta with Peas, Lemon and Basil

I've never cooked with fennel before, but it recently came in a vegetable box and I needed to find a use for it. Luckily, I found this lovely recipe in one of my random vegetarian cook books. I was quite apprehensive about cooking this as the smell of fennel is very overwhelming and like aniseed, which I am not keen on. However, when cooked it loses much of it's pungency and instead just gives a nice flavour.

Potatoes, Green Beans and Olives

So we're coming up to the end of what I like to call 'the warm weather recipes'. Autumn is beginning to kick in now in the UK and so my attention turns to soups and stews. However, I wanted to share this lovely one pot recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall. Nothing fancy here really - just potatoes for carb, beans for veg, and olives and garlic for flavour. You could also add halloumi if you wanted a bit of protein/a heavier dish.