One Pot Pasta with Sun-dried Tomato Pesto, Peas and Cannellini Beans

A quick one pot weeknight dinner recipe which I threw together one evening when I was short on time. I added some extra sun dried tomatoes for texture and flavour.

Minty Cannellini Bean Dip

This is a super easy, super quick alternative to houmous with no tahini, so great if you have a nut allergy or just want to try something a bit different. The only thing which takes time is the roasting of the garlic, which can be done in advance and you can freeze the garlic until needed. The cannellini beans give a really smooth dip and you could vary the flavours as you want. As with houmous this dip is great in sandwiches.

Blue Cheese Rice with Cannellini Beans

This is another long-standing recipe cooked in my house, and pre-dates my conversion to vegetarianism (5 years and counting!). It's from a very old Readers Digest recipe book (the same one that my pasta with black beans and kale recipe came from) and its title in that is 'Italian cheese and rice' because it uses Gorgonzola, but in my house, this is known as 'blue cheese rice thing' because we use any blue cheese we fancy. I have no idea why Pete and I feel the need to call it 'thing' but the name seems to have stuck. Soft blue cheeses such as danish blue or gorgonzola work very well, but we usually use Stilton which is cheaper and more pungent, and what can I say? We're cheapskates who like strong tasting cheese...

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.

 

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.

Leek and Cannellini Bean Soup

This is a light, simple and tasty soup, perfect for the spring weather (which has unfortunately yet to arrive in the UK yet). It's a relatively hassle free recipe which takes very little effort. This is another Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe which I've adjusted slightly - he used fresh herbs but I substituted dried, and he also suggested using chilli oil, but since I didn't have any, I just used olive oil instead.