Smokey Chipotle Carrot and Butterbean Soup

Isolation time means more cooking and baking (of course), and I got my two children to help me out with this, and served it with some home made cheese scones. It's a relative quick and easy recipe. If you don't have chipotle paste to hand, you can substitute with a mixture of tomato paste and spices (see recipe notes below).

Lemon and Balsamic Roasted Carrots, Goats Cheese and Thyme Quiche

This recipe is a modified version of this one I found on the brilliant Cook Vegetarian website. If you haven't ever seen the Cook Veg website I'd strongly recommend it as it has lots of interesting and unusual recipes. You can create an account and favourite recipes you like the look of for later use; I've been revisiting my 'plan to cook' saved recipe from the site recently, so expect a few appearing on this blog in the near future. This quiche was lovely and quite unusual, and it was also great cold. The goats cheese flavour is very strong in this recipe, so if you'd rather tone it down a bit, you could substitute half for cheddar or other flavoured cheese.

Most of the changes I made to this recipe were quantity based as they were all wrong (in my opinion) on the original website. I also added balsamic vinegar on a whim, and used double cream. I've put instructions for making the pastry from scratch, but if you don't have the time/inclination, just buy ready made shortcrust pastry.

Carrot and Coriander (Cilantro) Soup

Well here in the UK the winter seems to be sticking around for a bit longer and generally overstaying it's welcome. This is a lovely warming soup that is perfect for heating you up on a cold evenings. The nutmeg and lemon juice add a nice edge to the soup, but if you prefer to omit them, please do. Similarly, the cream is simply there for for consistency, so if you'd rather leave it, feel free.

Mushroom, Lentil and Carrot Soup

This soup recipe comes from my first vegetarian cookbook, which I bought when I was still eating meat but wanted to cut down my intake. It has been many years but I still come back to this recipe time and time again. The reason? One word describes this soup: tasty. The addition of red wine and soy sauce gives it a really rich, savoury flavour. An absolute must to get you through the winter!

Carrot Cake with Maple Syrup Butter Icing

I have to confess I was never a big fan of carrot cake.. until I started using this recipe, which I found in one of my old baking books. The butter icing isn't compulsory but it's amazing; if you can get hold of some maple syrup it really adds a bit of extravagance to the cake. The recipe calls for raisins, which is one of the few foods I strongly dislike, so I omitted them; I've included them in the recipe in case anyone wanting to make this has less strong feelings against them. This was actually a recipe for an average sized cake, but my ongoing obsession with fairy cakes meant I just made them instead!