Wholewheat Banana Nut Loaf

I credit this recipe with introducing me to the joys of baking. High praise indeed, and worth it. Cake is one of my big weaknesses and this particular cake is, to me, everything a cake should be: moist, tasty, with the walnuts adding a lovely bit of crunch. Back in the 2006/07 academic year, I was studying for my masters and during exam time needed something to do during my revision breaks. That something was baking this cake. Once I perfected this recipe, I started experimenting with other baking recipes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Courgette, Rosemary and Goats Cheese Quiche

One of the things I love about quiche is you can put whatever you fancy in it as a filling. For example, my previous quiche recipe involved beetroot and feta, but I mixed things up a bit here by using courgettes, goats cheese, and rosemary. This recipe comes from one of my many generic 'vegetarian kitchen' cookbooks and is a lovely balance of flavours. As ever, if you don't want to make the pastry, just use packaged stuff. 

For some reason I see quiche as very much a spring/summer dish, so this is probably the last quiche I'll feature on the blog for a while, as my attention turns to soup in the coming months.

French Onion Soup

Another busy week, so squeezing in a blog post before I head off to work (yes I'm working on a Saturday, not for the first time this month, nor, sadly, the last). It's getting colder now and as autumn/winter rolls around  I find myself gravitating towards soup more and more, so expect to see plenty of soup recipes in the coming months. This is a  very straightforward and cheap soup that tastes delicious. It takes a bit of time because the onions are best cooked slowly on a low heat. I had some shallots lurking in the garden I used for this, which gave it an extra special tastyness.

Paneer and Butternut Squash Curry

Mmmm curry. Indian food is my favourite of all cuisine. I could literally just live off curry. As I've said before, I don't pretend to know what I'm doing when it comes to curry. Rather, I experiment with flavours and see if they work. I did this from scratch, but as ever if you don't want to, just use curry paste. My friend Yusuf once gave me an invaluable tip when it comes to making curry: don't use tinned tomatoes, this isn't a rich Italian tomato sauce. You want to use fresh tomatoes and cook for a long time to get the sauce thick. It might sound obvious, but it wasn't ever something I'd thought about, and my curries are so much better for it. 

The peas in this dish are optional; I made this dish twice, once with peas, and once without, and I preferred without, but the peas were a nice variation. Of course, if you don't have the time to use butternut squash or can't get hold of it, sweet potato or carrots will do just fine. You can buy paneer cheese in most supermarkets. It is pretty flavourless by itself, so if you can be bothered, marinate it before hand. I didn't and it still turned out fine.

Note: if you want to print the recipe without pictures, just click 'print friendly' and 'remove images'.

Mushroom and Olive Pizza

Ordinarily, I make pizza dough in my bread maker, but for the purposes of this blog and my dear readers out there who don't have a bread maker, I made the dough by hand and include instructions for this. Obviously, if you have a bread maker, just use that, as it is slightly easier. I borrowed the dough recipe from Delia Smith, but I didn't like her method so I made it the way I used to make pizza dough back in the days when I didn't have a bread maker to do it for me.

One of the (many) great things about pizza is that with one recipe (pizza dough) you can get a lot of variation in your meals out of it, just by changing the toppings. I went for a relatively straightforward pizza topping here but there are so many you could choose from - the only limit is your imagination and budget. I am a big fan of quite saucy pizzas so this has rather a lot of tomato sauce on it and you might want to adjust it to your tastes. 

A final tip: when using mushrooms on pizza you must precook them or when they cook in the oven, they will lose water which will make the pizza soggy, or at best will mean when you serve it up you have liquid all over the place - not ideal. What I did in this recipe was to fry the mushrooms in garlic, and then use the mushroom juice in the tomato sauce, so nothing goes to waste (and you get great tasting sauce).

ALSO: If you want to use this recipe (or any on this site) but don't want the photos - click 'print friendly' at the bottom of the post and 'remove images'. There are a LOT of photos on this post, so you might want to do that...

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.

Beetroot Granola Cake

Me and Pete are moving house and as a result need to use up as much of our food as possible, to save on carrying half opened packets of food 150 miles across the country. This has led to some interesting food over the past week or so (stir fry vegetable curry with peanut butter and mustard anyone? ... surprisingly alright tasting if a bit bizarre), and this cake is the result of having several young-ish beetroot from the garden which needed eating up.

I also had some granola lurking in the back of the cupboard which I put in. If you don't have granola, just use oats and dried fruits, or omit it altogether, and leave out the milk. This recipe was cobbled together from a variety of online ones, and then modified a bit more...  it could have been a disaster but it turned out pretty nice. It's very easy to make, and pretty quick, with one caveat: the beetroot is a bit of a nightmare to grate, so be careful as you will definitely have pink fingers afterwards and will look like you've gone on some kind of murder spree. A final tip: I've found that glass chopping boards don't stain with beetroot, whilst plastic or wooden ones are more likely to.