Tomato and Cheese Rice

This is a relatively simple recipe from one of my random vegetarian cookbooks. It is basically a pasta bake but with rice, so nice if you're gluten free and fancy a comforting dish. The original recipe called for peppers, but I didn't have any so I substituted for green beans and sweetcorn; the dish would work with any mixed veg you prefer. The original recipe called for half a tin of tomatoes, which annoyed me, so I adjusted it and tried to adjust the stock as well. It came out ok, so my conversions must have been fine...

Penne all'Arriabbiata

A simple, quick, and tasty dinner. The trick to this sauce is to cook the chillies whole in the sauce as it imparts both heat and a lovely flavour of chilli. You can then either remove them once the spice has reached your desired level or - if you want it even spicier - you can remove from the sauce and slice before adding back to the sauce. I used regular medium chillies from the supermarket and it wasn't spicey enough for me, but you might want to keep an eye on the sauce if using other hotter chillies e.g. birds eye. I also made this sauce for two portions and it was very sauce-y, so you could always use this amount for four portions (for example).

Chilli Broccoli Pasta

A recipe from one of my more underused vegetarian cookbooks (I have so many you see, that I tend to forget about some from time to time!) called 'The Vegetarian Bible'. It's a great little cookbook that has  some interesting recipes. I used frozen broccoli in this rather than fresh, as it's more convenient. I also added cheese but this is not necessary at all if you want to watch the calories or are vegan.

Vegeree

After a small break from the blog due to moving house, work-related madness, going on holiday and then returning to more work-related madness (it's been an overwhelming three weeks), I present to you: Vegeree. Since becoming vegetarian nearly 5 years ago, I often get asked by my meat eating friends what I miss the most, and I always answer that I don't really miss anything (which often gets a raised eyebrow and a look of disbelief, but there you go). Whilst I don't really miss meat or fish, there are certain dishes which it took me some time to make good 'substitutes' for. I was never a big fan of fish, and kedgeree was pretty much the only fish dish I used to eat, so when I became vegetarian I just assumed there was no substitute and left it at that. Until I got hold of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's 'Veg Everyday' book that is, which I'm sure I've banged on about in previous blog posts. 

He uses aubergines in his recipe, but they happen to be the one vegetable I cannot stand. I will eat aubergine if necessary (i.e. somebody has cooked it for me), but will never cook it for myself. He suggested complementing the aubergines with courgettes, one of my favourite vegetables, so I just used that instead. I imagine peas would work well too. I also added in the tomatoes because when I used to cook kedgeree I always garnished it with tomatoes and they give a nice contrasting coolness to the spicy rice. The egg is ideally almost hard boiled, but with just a touch of soft yoke - though you can of course do the eggs however you prefer.

A lack of photos in this post I'm afraid, as it was dark in my kitchen and I struggled to get any decent ones. This recipe is very wordy and sounds complicated, but actually it's very straightforward and I'm simply giving you very detailed instructions on how I cook it - you can play around with this recipe how you want until you get the timings right for however you like to do things.