One Pot Chipotle Bean and Potato Stew

This stew uses chipotle chillies to add smokiness, but they aren't necessary if you don't have any to hand. You can substitute for liquid smoke or extra smoked paprika. Make sure you cook the potatoes in the stock before you add the passata, as the acidity of the tomato sauce means the potatoes will take much longer to cook once it is added to the dish. We ate this dish by itself but if you wanted more carb you could serve with crusty bread.

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:

Dal Makhani; Spicy Lentils with Kidney Beans

Had one of those days recently when I got home and had nothing in the house except store cupboard ingredients. I felt like cooking some lentils so I had a little look online and found this Pakistani recipe, which as ever I tweaked slightly. It was perfect, and delicious. I had never thought to use kidney beans in a curry recipe, and it made a nice change from the usual dal I make (which I'll have to upload onto here sometime...). You can make it with dried coriander but fresh is better, and I have to admit I sent my boyfriend to the shop down the road to get it, which defeated the point of cooking with what I had in the cupboard, but oh well! I've since found out that the correct name for this is 'Dal Makhani', and it is supposed to be cooked with black lentils. I used red lentils though, and it was amazing. I wanted more but only made two portions, which I regretted afterwards... I've also since seen much more complex recipes for this, but I like the simplicity of this recipe, using very few strong flavours, so I've not tried them.