Chickpea and Feta Tomato Pasta Sauce

I recently saw an interesting recipe for chicken and feta tomato pasta sauce and decided to modify it to be vegetarian. I'm not a fan of fake meat substitutes so I tend to substitute pulses for meat; I use chickpeas here, which I'm not normally in the habit of eating with pasta, and it worked really well.

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.

Roasted Garlic and Smoked Paprika Houmous

I haven't made my own houmous in years, but decided to make some on a bit of a whim recently. Wow had I forgotten how much better it tastes home made! I used roasted garlic in this but if you can't be bothered, just grate fresh garlic directly into the houmous before blending.

Channa (chickpea) masala

In the past I found it hard to make 'proper' curry but with lots of practice I have gotten a lot better at it. My biggest tip for authentic tasting curry is to use fresh tomatoes, not tinned. Sounds simple (and may be obvious to some?), but it really makes a difference. That and cook your curry for as long as possible. This recipe was cobbled together from several I found online; I used cream because I had some in the fridge which needed using up, but you can omit if you'd like or substitute with yoghurt  You can use any vegetables you want in this curry (you could even omit them entirely) - I used sweet potato and a courgette and the sweet potato took a long time to cook, so if you're in a rush substitute for a vegetable that takes less time to cook. 

Spicy Roasted Chickpeas and Feta

This is a quite simple, throw some stuff together and roast it recipe, so it's minimal effort. I modified this recipe from a chicken based dish I found over on the BBC's good food site. I quite liked the idea of trying out roasted chickpeas and I would definitely recommend it as it turned out great. They become quite crunchy on the outside but are soft in the middle which adds an unusual (in a good way!) consistency to the meal. The recipe called for harissa pasta which I didn't have, so I found a substitute recipe online. It was very spicy however so if you like things less spice, tone down the chilli content. Finally, props go to Pete as on the day I planned to cook this, I was very ill, and he cooked it for me and even let me annoy him half way through to take a picture for the blog.

 

North African Butternut Squash and Chickpea Stew

Another Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall recipe that I have tweaked to suit my store cupboard contents; despite having a large library of cookbooks, I keep coming back to his 'Veg Everyday!' cookbook because it's so fabulous. This is essentially a Moroccan stew, but the addition of pasta means this is a one-pot dish and you don't need to serve with any carb e.g. cous cous. The low pasta content (in fact I added more to Hugh's original recipe) in the stew also means those who would rather have it without can, in my view, remove it without fear of compromising the recipe too much. I bought saffron especially for this, because I've always seen it in recipes and omitted it, but felt like trying it out. I have to admit that I balked at the price - four GB pounds for a small jar! However, I pressed on and bought it anyway. I have to admit, I'm not sure how much it adds to the dish - perhaps a subtle flavour - so if you too do not feel like shelling out for such an expensive spice then feel free to omit that too.