Summery Courgette and Ricotta Pasta

A simple and quick pasta dish! I recommend slicing the courgettes thickly so they retain some bite and don't fall apart when mixing into the pasta dish.

Sun-dried Tomato and Basil Houmous

I have been a bit faily on the blogging front recently, due to a combination of work spilling over to the evenings and weekends (lunchbreaks are now a thing of the past), lack of sleep due to a 15 month old child who likes to wake up pre-dawn, and winter nights leading to poor lighting for food photography. Hopefully though in the next couple of months things will ease up and I'll be able to return to the heady days of 4 blog posts a month! In the meantime, here is an awesome houmous recipe for you...

Depending on how good your blender is, you might want to pre chop the sun-dried tomatoes. Other than that this is a pretty basic houmous recipe in which you throw all of your ingredients in the blender and press go.

Olive and Basil Feta Cheese Spread

A lovely and quick dip/sandwich filling which is super easy to make. The original recipe was double the quantity but I halved it. If you are using as a dip for a gathering, you could double the quantities below. The original recipe called for Kalamata olives but I used black olives because I am cheap, so just use any colour olive you prefer.

Goats Cheese and Basil Bread Sticks

These bread sticks are super tasty and very easy to make. I made mini bread sticks for my daughter to eat, so I have no idea how many full sized bread sticks this would make, but I would guess around 12. 

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.

Goats Cheese, Courgette (Zucchini) and Cherry Tomato Pasta

This month will see a drop in the frequency of my blog posts as I wait for my house purchase to go through and live in temporary accommodation for the foreseeable future, but I'm hoping to be back on track with one blog post a week by the time August rolls around...

This is a relatively straightforward and quick pasta recipe; the vegetables are cooked at the same time as the pasta is cooking, so the whole thing only takes around half an hour. Soft goats cheese which has the consistency of cream cheese is best for this as it coats the pasta more evenly than goats cheese with a rind.

Courgette (Zucchini) and Basil Risotto

It's been a long time since I've cooked a proper risotto, as I never buy risotto rice and usually substitute for normal rice (which gives a very different consistency). I came across this recipe in one of my many vegetarian cookbooks and felt like giving it a try. I was worried about the difficulty of making risotto and of having to stir it constantly for 20 minutes, but I found this wasn't necessary and I simply stirred it every few minutes whilst doing other things in the kitchen, and the consistency turned out lovely and creamy. The recipe itself called for dry vermouth, but I didn't have any vermouth or dry white wine (which you could substitute for) so I used half the amount in gin and it turned out well.