One Pot Mexican Quinoa

An easy and very tasty one pot dish I modified from one of my favourite food blogs, damn delicious. The recipe list looks long but there are no special ingredients and this dish requires very little work as you essentially just add everything and cook with the lid on, though you might want to stir occasionally to prevent the quinoa from sticking to the pan. I added grated cheese to the final dish but you can easily omit it for a vegan version.

Smoky spring greens with butter beans (lima beans)

A lovely, vibrant, recipe adapted from a BBC good foods recipe; this is a relatively quick and simple dish to make. I've eaten it with both rice and mash potato, and both worked well. If you don't have access to spring greens, you can substitute with any spring/summer cabbage, kale, or even spinach.

Olive and Pistachio Pesto

A rather unusual alternative to basil pesto, this uses more specialist ingredients than I usually go in for but looked so interesting I couldn't resist trying it out. It was delicious. If you can't get hold of green peppercorns, I'm sure black would be fine. Be careful to use unsalted pistachios or this would be far too salty. The recipe I used called for parmesan but since I am a strict vegetarian, I substituted for strong cheddar. However, feel free to use parmesan (or a vegetarian equivalent if you can find it) instead. The recipe I used actually called for double the quantities here and it made a lot of pesto so I've halved it to a more manageable amount. I kept mine in the fridge for a couple of weeks and it was fine. 

Sweet Potato Peanut Stew

This warm and comforting stew is perfect for dark, cold autumn evenings. Adding peanut (or any other nut) butter to stew really enriches it and gives it a lovely thick consistency. You can vary the vegetables according to what you prefer or what's in season and you can eat this as it is or serve with bread if you like.

Sweet Potato and Coconut Soup

Autumn is here and that means one thing in my house: soup is back on the menu! We've had a cold snap here in the UK this week and this soup was perfect over the weekend to add a bit of warmth into the house. For extra heat, you could add fresh or dried chilli peppers, though I omitted them because I was giving this to my 11 month old daughter, who absolutely loved it. 

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.

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.

Kashmiri Paneer Masala

I have recently discovered Maunika Gowardhan's Indian food website, and found this kashmiri paneer masala recipe there. I modified it since I didn't have all the spices in my cupboard, and it was lovely. So much so that I was pretty gutted there were no leftovers. We cooked this without salt or chilli and gave it to my daughter who couldn't get enough of it! In Maunika's recipe the paneer is first pan fried before being removed and added later. I didn't bother to do this as my paneer was quite firm and it held up well in the sauce.

Gluten Free Peach Polenta Cake

I made this cake for a gluten-intolerant friend of mine who came round for dinner one Sunday. The cake is actually best served warm on the day of cooking as it can go a bit dry upon cooling. You can always reheat the cake in the microwave if eating later; I froze the leftovers and popped it into the microwave on defrost to warm it up.

Baked Tofu and Mushrooms

This dish is a very tasty and unusual way of cooking tofu. The tofu is marinaded in a garlic, lemon, soy sauce and tomato paste marinade, and so is best made the night before cooking. It is very full of flavour and if you want to tone it down a bit use less garlic and/or less soy sauce. You can eat this with pretty much any carb of your choice; I had it with mash potato this time but in the past I have had it with rice or noodles, and I am sure you could also eat it with pasta. 

I am not a big fan of cooking with tofu because although it is very versatile and you can do some really interesting things with it, I find the prep can be a bit of a pain if you don't want it to fall apart when stirred into anything. To prepare tofu properly you should press it to remove excess liquid before dry frying it. I frequently don't bother to press it; if you dry fry it for long enough and make sure you press the tofu lightly when frying, you should remove enough of the liquid and give the tofu some stability. Note: if you dry fry it, make sure you use a non-stick pan or you will be very sad. I speak from experience.

Three Bean Chilli

Vege chilli is a classic vegetarian dish and this is a good store cupboard recipe. This dish is best cooked slowly, but if you need to cook it relatively quickly it will still taste great.

I use dehydrated soya mince in this, which you simply rehydrate by pouring hot water over the top and leaving for five minutes, but you could omit it or use any other type of vegetarian mince. I prefer dehydrated mince to other types as it doesn't have so many preservatives in it as other brands, and has the advantage that it is gluten free. You can use any type of beans you like; I used kidney, black-eyed, and black turtle beans in this but they are by no means necessary. The recipe list looks quite long but most of it consists of store cupboard spices which you can always omit if you don't have them.

This serves 4 - 6. We had a very generous four portions out of this plus a bit extra for my daughter (minus salt and chillies!), who had a lovely time digging into her portion and made a massive mess:

Caramelised Red Onion Chutney

This was my first attempt at chutney and was very pleased with how it turned out since I was playing it by ear a bit with the ingredients. It's a very simple chutney, but the addition of treacle adds a subtle flavour which really complements the dark brown sugar; however you could omit it if you don't have any in your store cupboard. I ate this chutney with a range of cheeses such as mature cheddar, goats cheese, and Camembert and it went well with all of them.

Leek and Mushroom Risotto

A rather straightforward risotto dish from one of my random vegetarian cookbooks. I used mature cheddar cheese but if you can get hold of any vegetarian parmesan style cheese (or if you are happy to eat parmesan cheese) then that would also work very well.

Vegetarian Brazilian Feijoada (Black Bean Stew)

Feijoada is a traditional dish served in Brazil, which essentially involves beans and a lot of meat, often smoked. To make the vegetarian version, I substitute meat for vegetables and add smoked paprika to get a smoky flavour. There are a number of ways you can play with the recipe; you can also use 'fake' meat with a smoky flavour such as vegetarian frankfurters, or 'fake' bacon. I've done this before with much success but since I don't tend to cook with fake meat that often, I usually just use a root vegetable or something from the squash family. Carrots, butternut squash and sweet potato all work really well in this dish, but you can basically use any vegetable you want. Adding onions or spring onions also enhances the dish, but I like to keep it simple: beans and vegetables, cooked until soft and creamy. I use a brazilian seasoning called 'tempero completo' in this dish, which is sold in the 'world foods' section of my local supermarket, but if you don't have access to it, just add in a tsp of dried vegetable stock instead. For a truly authentic Brazilian experience, serve with farofa (toasted manioc flour) but again it is fine without. In my house, we also eat this with an egg on top, though this is entirely optional.

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...

Roasted Pepper Soup

As the Starks would say: Winter is coming. And in my house that means one thing: soup!

This is a relatively simple soup recipe but it is still very tasty. I used shallots but you could just use onions instead. This soup uses a couple of potatoes to bulk it up; I cooked the potatoes in the stock to be included in the soup, so as to retain the starch for thickness. The resulting soup was very thick (how I like it) but if you prefer a thinner soup, or you want it less starchy, you could cook and drain the potatoes before adding to stock, or use slightly more stock.

Roasted Vegetable Spicy Couscous with Feta

This is a relatively quick and easy dish, which is great either hot as a side dish or cold as a lunch or side salad. I used red onion, courgette and butternut squash, which all roast up nicely, but you could vary the vegetables to suit your preferences.

Creamy Mushroom and Butterbean Pie

This was an experimental pie filling of mine which turned out really well; in fact exactly as I imagined, which is always a bonus when cooking something without a recipe for the first time! Not many pictures of the final product as I served this when we had guests round for dinner, but suffice to say it was yummy. This uses pre-made puff pastry isn't actually that complicated to cook.

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.

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.