Courgette, Rosemary and Goats Cheese Quiche

One of the things I love about quiche is you can put whatever you fancy in it as a filling. For example, my previous quiche recipe involved beetroot and feta, but I mixed things up a bit here by using courgettes, goats cheese, and rosemary. This recipe comes from one of my many generic 'vegetarian kitchen' cookbooks and is a lovely balance of flavours. As ever, if you don't want to make the pastry, just use packaged stuff. 

For some reason I see quiche as very much a spring/summer dish, so this is probably the last quiche I'll feature on the blog for a while, as my attention turns to soup in the coming months.

French Onion Soup

Another busy week, so squeezing in a blog post before I head off to work (yes I'm working on a Saturday, not for the first time this month, nor, sadly, the last). It's getting colder now and as autumn/winter rolls around  I find myself gravitating towards soup more and more, so expect to see plenty of soup recipes in the coming months. This is a  very straightforward and cheap soup that tastes delicious. It takes a bit of time because the onions are best cooked slowly on a low heat. I had some shallots lurking in the garden I used for this, which gave it an extra special tastyness.

Paneer and Butternut Squash Curry

Mmmm curry. Indian food is my favourite of all cuisine. I could literally just live off curry. As I've said before, I don't pretend to know what I'm doing when it comes to curry. Rather, I experiment with flavours and see if they work. I did this from scratch, but as ever if you don't want to, just use curry paste. My friend Yusuf once gave me an invaluable tip when it comes to making curry: don't use tinned tomatoes, this isn't a rich Italian tomato sauce. You want to use fresh tomatoes and cook for a long time to get the sauce thick. It might sound obvious, but it wasn't ever something I'd thought about, and my curries are so much better for it. 

The peas in this dish are optional; I made this dish twice, once with peas, and once without, and I preferred without, but the peas were a nice variation. Of course, if you don't have the time to use butternut squash or can't get hold of it, sweet potato or carrots will do just fine. You can buy paneer cheese in most supermarkets. It is pretty flavourless by itself, so if you can be bothered, marinate it before hand. I didn't and it still turned out fine.

Note: if you want to print the recipe without pictures, just click 'print friendly' and 'remove images'.

Mushroom and Olive Pizza

Ordinarily, I make pizza dough in my bread maker, but for the purposes of this blog and my dear readers out there who don't have a bread maker, I made the dough by hand and include instructions for this. Obviously, if you have a bread maker, just use that, as it is slightly easier. I borrowed the dough recipe from Delia Smith, but I didn't like her method so I made it the way I used to make pizza dough back in the days when I didn't have a bread maker to do it for me.

One of the (many) great things about pizza is that with one recipe (pizza dough) you can get a lot of variation in your meals out of it, just by changing the toppings. I went for a relatively straightforward pizza topping here but there are so many you could choose from - the only limit is your imagination and budget. I am a big fan of quite saucy pizzas so this has rather a lot of tomato sauce on it and you might want to adjust it to your tastes. 

A final tip: when using mushrooms on pizza you must precook them or when they cook in the oven, they will lose water which will make the pizza soggy, or at best will mean when you serve it up you have liquid all over the place - not ideal. What I did in this recipe was to fry the mushrooms in garlic, and then use the mushroom juice in the tomato sauce, so nothing goes to waste (and you get great tasting sauce).

ALSO: If you want to use this recipe (or any on this site) but don't want the photos - click 'print friendly' at the bottom of the post and 'remove images'. There are a LOT of photos on this post, so you might want to do that...