Pasta with Black Beans and Kale

From a Reader's Digest cookbook that I've had longer than I remember, but which I never really use anymore. I came across this recipe a while back and the idea of using black beans in a pasta sauce intrigued me. They combine with the cheese to make a very tasty and creamy sauce. I bought a prepared bag of kale from my local supermarket, but if you can't find it then spinach would be a good alternative.

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.

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.

Feta Cheese Summer Frittata

This is my first attempt at making a frittata, and it turned out really well. I used feta cheese in this, but any cheese you fancy will do; goats cheese would also work well, I think.

For best results, you want to use a dish which can be used on the hob as well as in the oven (such as a cast iron ceramic dish), and I've written the instructions with this in mind. Don't panic if you don't though, as I actually didn't have one to hand when I cooked this, so I fried everything in a pan and transferred it to an oven dish. It turned out fine, but the bottom of the frittata was not as well set as I would have liked.

Roasted Halloumi and Vegetables

A pretty easy and very tasty roasted dish. I mixed this with plain cous cous to make a salad, but you could serve it hot with pasta, rice, pitta bread, wraps - basically anything you fancy. Feel free to mix up the vegetables, though I have to admit the super combo of sweet peppers, sweet potatoes and red onion really did it for me.