Here is an easy risotto recipe with four green and white vegetables that you can chop (excuse the pun) and change to make six different vegetarian risotto versions.

The photos show my cauliflower + asparagus, and broccoli + pea risottos.

Think of the risotto as a base to which you add two vegetables and each time you make this risotto, it will look and taste totally different.  My four vegetables of choice are asparagus, petit pois peas, tenderstem broccolli and cauliflower. The variations you can create with these beautiful white and green vegetables are:

• broccoli and peas (photographed)
• broccoli and asparagus
• broccoli and cauliflower
• cauliflower and asparagus (photographed)
• cauliflower and peas
• asparagus and peas

When I make this green and white risotto, I roast all of the veggies except for the peas. The first time I tasted roasted tenderstem broccoli I was blown away. Roasting totally changes broccoli into a smokey, nutty veg and roasted cauliflower tasted sweeter. Definitely much more interesting than just boiling or steaming!

It’s super easy to roast these vegetables. I just throw it in a bowl, add a glug (technical term) of olive oil, fresh or dried herbs, salt and give it all a good mix. Then it goes onto a baking sheet lined with tinfoil (for easy cleaning) and into the oven for about 15 minutes. Sometimes I remember to turn over the vegetables half way through the 15 minutes, sometimes I don’t. Either way, the vegetables come out beautifully roasted and very tasty.

If you want more crunch and protein, you can toast flaked almonds to sprinkle over the risotto. (In our house we have to avoid nuts so I haven’t done this.)

Green and White Risotto mix and match recipe

• Servings: 2
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Here is an easy risotto recipe using four green and white vegetables that you can chop and change to make six different vegetarian risotto versions.

Ingredients

• 160g arborio rice
• 220 g tenderstem broccoli and/or 1 whole cauliflower and/or handful frozen petit pois and/or 220 g fine asparagus spears
• 2 tbsp dried mixed herbs
• 40 g parmesan cheese
• 1 lemon
• 1 red onion
• 1 garlic clove, chopped
• 1 vegetable stock cube
• olive oil

Directions

1. Preheat oven to 200 C.
2. If you are using asparagus, slice the the spears until you reach the tips. Leave the tips whole.
3. Use a big bowl and coat the broccoli and/or cauliflower and/or asparagus tips with olive oil, dried or fresh herbs and salt.
4. Put the coated vegetables in the oven for 15 minutes but keep an eye on it so it doesn’t burn.  If roasting asparagus, add the tips to the baking tray half way through the roasting time (it needs a little less time to roast than broccoli and cauliflower does.)
5. Boil a kettle and dissolve the vegetable stock cube in 200 ml of boiling water.
6. Meanwhile, peel and finely chop the red onion and fry in a large pot until softened.
7. Once the onion has softened, add the rice and chopped garlic. Stir well and make sure each grain of rice is covered in oil.
8. Add 1/3 of the vegetable stock and stir continuously until the water is absorbed. Continue to add the stock one ladle at a time, stirring almost continuously for roughly 20 minutes.  When there is one ladle of stock left to add, add the frozen peas and/or sliced asparagus and stir. Add the last ladle of stock and cook until all is absorbed and rice cooked.
9. When the rice is cooked remove from the heat and stir in the cheese and juice of half a lemon.  Add a generous pinch of pepper.
10. Serve the roasted vegetables on top of the risotto.
11. Sprinkled with more grated parmesan cheese.
12. Enjoy!

Natasja King – food for the body, food for the soul

Are you looking for a quick and easy home made pizza? Full of flavor but low on effort? You got it!

You won’t have to make pizza dough, nor do you use a store bought pizza base. No, you’ll use naan bread! Coriander and garlic naan bread is absolutely delicious as a pizza base. Regular pizza base can be bland, but with naan bread as the base, half of the flavor war is won before you even start.

The first layer of the pizza is a creamy mix of light cream cheese and yogurt with dried herbs and salt.  Spread it on nice and thick, all the way to the edges. For the vegetables I used red pepper and courgette, but you can use almost any type of vegetable as long as you cube the veggies the same (smallish) size so that it will cook evenly. Finally sprinkle over cheddar cheese.

Pop in the oven for about 15 minutes and that’s it. Super easy, super fast pizza using naan bread as the base.

Easy vegetarian pizza

• Servings: 2
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Inspired by a Gousto recipe

Ingredients

• 2 large naan breads
• 1 courgette, chopped in cubes
• 1 red pepper, chopped in cubs
• 100 g greek yoghurt
• 100 g cream cheese
• 1 tbsp dried oregano
• 40 g grated cheddar cheese

Directions

1. Preheat over to 200C / 180 C (fan).
2. Mix the yoghurt and cream cheese in a bowl. Add salt and dried oregano.
3. Spread the yoghurt and cream cheese mixture over the two naan breads
4. Top with courgette, red pepper and cheese
5. Bake for approximately 15 minutes or until the cheese has melted.
6. Enjoy!

Natasja King – food for the body, food for the soul

Mushrooms and cheese go together. Blue cheese and sage go together. Mushrooms stuffed with blue cheese and sage would therefor go together. And it does. Oh boy, it does!

The blue cheese stuffing is super easy to make. It’s just blue cheese, fresh sage, breadcrumbs and a bit of milk. Easy. Just one word of warning: sage is a strong herb that can easily over power the other ingredients. Saying that, blue cheese is definitely not the wall flower of cheeses and it can handle the sage much better than Edam for instance would, but you still don’t want to overdo the sage. I’d say 6 fresh sage leaves is enough to fill the four mushrooms.

For this recipe you serve the stuffed mushrooms with brown rice, leeks, carrot and yellow peppers. (There’s that love of yellow again!)

I don’t know about you, but I can easily have the mushrooms on their own, and I can have the rice on its own as well. It’s a real 2-for-1 vegetarian dish this one!

Brown rice and vegetables with blue cheese stuffed mushrooms

• Servings: 2
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Inspired by Lynn Bedford Hall’s book “The Best of Vegetarian Cooking”.

Ingredients

• 4 large breakfast mushrooms
• 2 heaped tbsp bread crumbs
• 5 – 6 sage leaves, finely chopped
• 50 g saint agur blue cheese
• splash of milk
• olive oil
• 160 g uncooked brown rice
• 2 leeks, thinly sliced
• 1 carrot, diced
• 1 red onion, diced
• 1 yellow pepper, seeded and diced
• 2 tbsp soy sauce

Directions

1. Preheat over to 200C / 180 C (fan).
2. Cook the rice according to the package instructions.
3. Prepare the mushrooms by removing the central stalk. Chop the stalk finely and mix with the breadcrumbs, sage leaves, blue cheese and salt. Add a splash of milk to bind it all together. Using a spoon, fill the mushrooms with this mix. Place the filled mushrooms on a lightly oiled baking tray and bake for around 20 minutes.
4. Meanwhile, heat a large, wide pan with a drizzle of olive oil and fry the onions and leeks until soft and caramelised.
5. Add the yellow pepper and carrot and fry for a further 2 – 3 minutes.
6. By this time the rice will be cooked. Add the rice and soya sauce to the vegetables and mix through.
7. Divide the rice between two bowls and top each serving with two mushrooms.
8. Enjoy!

Natasja King – food for the body, food for the soul

We’re going Italian with today’s vegetarian recipe. No pasta or meat in sight, but it definitely has an Italian feel to it. Especially if you say it like this: Par-mi-gi-aaaaana *fingertips of right hand bunched together while hand is waving up and down*

Right? It’s Italian!

My Parmigiana is made up of layers of sliced aubergine with a tomato, red pepper and courgette sauce, lots of basil, topped with Ricotta and parmesan cheese.  With it you’ll serve cheat’s bruchetta for crunch and for wiping up the tomato sauce. Ooh la la!

Oh wait. That’s French.

The bruschetta is super easy to make. It’s just sliced store-bought ciabatta buns (I’m not even going to pretend I bake my own ciabatta buns), topped with an easy herb, garlic and parmesan mix. The trick is to add course salt to the herbs, garlic and parmesan so that when you mash it all together, the salt with break up the finely chopped herbs even further.  It’s really so easy to do, but looks impressive and tastes awesome.

The recipe makes two generous portions, but you can easily stretch it to four portions if you add a salad.  Just don’t leave out the cheat’s bruchetta – those babies are gooood!

Parmigiana with ricotta and easy bruchetta

• Servings: 2
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Inspired by a Gousto recipe.

Ingredients

• 1 can of organic chopped tomatoes
• 1 large courgette, diced
• 1 red pepper, diced
• 1 aubergine, sliced lengthwise thinly
• 1 red onion, diced
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 2 garlic gloves, finely chopped/grated
• big handful of fresh basil, chopped
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 vegetable stock cube dissolved in 50ml of boiled water
• 2 tbsp agave nectar or sugar
• 250 g ricotta cheese
• handful of fresh parsley, chopped
• 40g  parmesan cheese, grated
• 2 ciabatta rolls

Directions

1. Preheat over to 200C / 180 C (fan).
2. Heat a large, wide pan with a drizzle of olive oil and fry the aubergine slices 3 – 4 minutes on each side. Set the aubergine aside until you need it later.
3. Drizzle olive oil in the pan again and fry the onions with a pinch of salt until softened. Add one of the chopped garlic cloves and cook for a further 1 minute.
4. Add the tomatoe paste, dried oregano and 2 tbsp of agave nectar or sugar to taste and cook for half a minute.
5. Add the tin of chopped tomato, vegetable stock and half of the basil. Cook until the sauce has thickened to a bolognaise consistency
6. Layer the aubergine slices and tomato sauce into a oven proof dish. Let the sauce cool slightly.
7. Whisk together chopped parsley and add ricotta
8. When the sauce has cooled, top with the ricotta mix and sprinkle with half of the parmesan cheese.
9. Bake for 15 – 20 minutes until the cheese has browned
10. While the parmigiana is baking, grind together the finely chopped remaining parsley, basil, one crushed garlic clove and remaining parmesan cheese with a pinch of coarse salt, until smooth. Add 2 tbsp of olive oil and 1 tbsp of cold water and mix well. Spread this on the sliced ciabatta rolls and place onto a baking tray. Add the tray to the oven for the last 10 minutes of the lasagne baking time.
11. Remove the parmigiana and ciabatta slices from the oven. Let the parmigiana cool before slicing.
12. Enjoy!

Natasja King – food for the body, food for the soul

Purple, green, salty, sweet, tangy and very crunchy. That’s the Big Crunchy Salad! I almost don’t want to write out a recipe for it because it’s so easy to put together.

You’ll be mixing chickpeas, courgette, baby spinach, red cabbage and feta cheese with brown rice. In my case, I used a packet of Seeds Of Change Organic Quinoa and Brown Rice but you can cook your brown rice and/or quinoa from scratch.  (Like I said yesterday with the butternut in the microwave, I’m all for quick & easy food prep especially on a week day.)

The only measuring you’ll be doing is for the honey-lemon dressing, and even then you can adjust the lemon and honey to your liking.

I just have to warn you: when it comes to eating this bad boy, your jaw is going to get a workout and it’s a deceptively filling salad with a lot of protein and fibre.

Rice, chickpea, feta salad with honey lemon dressing

• Servings: 2
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Ingredients

• 1 tin cooked chickpeas
• 3/4 of a pack of feta cheese
• 2 handfulls baby spinach
• 1 handful red cabbage, thinly sliced
• 1 medium courgette, grated
• 2 spring onions, sliced
• 240g cooked rice and/or quinoa
• 1 lemon, juiced
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tbsp honey
• 1 tsp Dijon mustard

Directions

1. Make the dressing: combine the lemon juice, olive oil, honey and mustard.
2. Cook the rice according to the packet instructions.
3. In a medium bowl, toss together the warm rice, vegetables, cheese and chickpeas. The heat from the rice should wilt the baby spinach slightly.
4. Mix well and pour over the honey-lemon dressing.
5. Enjoy!

Totally out of the blue, I’ve developed a love of yellow. The strange thing is, I never used to love yellow – in fact I actively avoided it, but now yellow is all I see! I recently bought mustard yellow shoes (it’s a amazing how much wear you can get out of a pair of yellow shoes in a wardrobe totally devoid of yellow) and I bought a beautiful yellow flowering pot plant for my desk at work.  I’m also considering yellow nail varnish.

According to this article about yellow in colour psychology, yellow is “the colour of the mind and the intellect”. Imagine that! But I have to say it kinda makes sense because I have been giving the big questions in life much more thought recently. I want to be, and know more about, spirituality, becoming more enlightened, acting more from love-based thoughts than fear-based thoughts, and of course get to the bottom of the biggest of all questions: Why Am I Here? (By the way, it’s these thoughts that also lead my husband and I to become vegetarian.)  At the moment I’m listening to Oprah’s Super Soul Sundays podcasts on Spotify and it’s amazing. I’m learning a huge amount and want to know even more, so if yellow really is the colour of the mind and the intellect, it totally makes sense that I’m attracted to it.

The yellow-loving is even appearing in the dishes I cook. Case and point this butternut, couscous and veggies with a hint of curry and cinnamon. I mean, I didn’t HAVE TO add curry powder to the courgette and cherry tomatoes – it was perfectly yummy as it was, but I just couldn’t resist adding the deep yellow curry powder. I also went All In with the butternut: dainty squares of butternut wouldn’t cut it (get it), no, I had to have a huge piece of dark yellow butternut on my plate!

Yellow. Love. It.

Butternut  squash is a great source of fibre, as well as vitamins including A, C, E and B vitamins and has more potassium per 100g than a banana. I adore it. (By the way, can anyone figure out why it’s called butternut because nothing about it says “butter” or “nut” to me….)

I chose to cook my butternut in the microwave. A lot of people will frown upon this, but when I get home in the evenings I don’t want to wait almost a hour for a large butternut to roast in the oven. It took only 20 minutes in the microwave! I don’t see anything wrong with microwaving butternut or other dense root vegetables like sweet potatoes if you are in a hurry.  Microwaving also saves a lot of electricity.

Due to the size of the butternut (thank you Tesco Online Shopper for picking the biggest butternut in the store),  I had to serve each person only a quarter. Of course this dish would look super cute and appetizing if you put the couscous and vegetables inside the hollowed out “tummy” of a butternut.

You can also add more curry powder to the cherry tomato and courgette mix, and if you want it very spicy, add chili. If you do, a side of natural yoghurt will work very well to contrast with the heat of the chili.  Speaking of the spices, do try to use the sweet and healthy Ceylon cinnamon that I told you about here.

Butternut, Couscous and Veggies with a hint of curry and cinnamon

• Servings: 2
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You can add more curry powder to the cherry tomato and courgette mix, and if you want it very spicy, add chili. If you do, a side of natural yoghurt will work very well to contrast with the heat of the chili.

Ingredients

• 100 g Ainsley Harriot Spice Sensation couscous made with 160 ml water, or any other couscous prepared according to instructions
• medium to large butternut
• 6 cherry tomatoes
• 1 large courgette
• 1 red onion
• 2 heaped tsp curry powder
• 1 tsp of Ceylon cinnamon
• 1 tbs tomato paste
• 1 vegetable stock cube
• olive oil for frying
• fresh parsley

Directions

1. Score the skin of the butternut with a sharp knife and half lengthwise. Place on a plate in the microwave for 10 –  20 minutes depending on the size of your butternut and cook until soft, bearing in mind that it will continue to cook even after microwaving.
2. While the butternut is cooking, prepare the vegetables: slice red onion finely, quarter the cherry tomatoes and slice the courgettes into cubes. Chop the parsley.
3. Boil a kettle and dissolve the vegetable stock cube in 200 ml of boiling water. Use the remaining water in the kettle to prepare the couscous according to the instructions on the packet.
4. Fry the onions in a little oil. When soft, add the curry, Ceylon cinnamon and tomato paste and fry another minute until fragrant.
5. Add the quartered cherry tomatoes and fry for 1 – 2 minutes.
6. Add the courgettes and fry for another minute.
7. Add the vegetable stock and cook uncovered until the sauce has thickened.
8. By now the butternut should be cooled. Scoop out the pips. Quarter the butternut if required.
9. Serve the vegetables on top of a bed of couscous, alongside the quartered butternut. If you halved the butternut, fill the butternut with the couscous and vegetables.
10. Sprinkled with chopped parsley and a dusting of Ceylon cinnamon.
11. Enjoy!

Natasja King – food for the body, food for the soul

For me, bright colours equal happiness. Red + Yellow + Green = Smiling Natasja. Would it then come as a surprise that this bowl of mange tout, baby corn and red pepper on a bed of light green edamame spaghetti is my culinary happy place?

I mean look at it! It’s as if someone told me I can use my favourite Crayola crayons to colour in a picture of a bowl of stir-fry.

Even the spaghetti in this dish is green. Ever heard of edamame spaghetti? As in, spaghetti made from young, green soya beans? Don’t worry, it was new to me too.

I came across a big box of Explore Cuisine Organic Gluten Free Edamame Spaghetti at Costco (where the greatest of things can be found) and just had to try it out.  It looks just like spaghetti, except for colour of course, and cooks in only 3 – 5 minutes. It’s sort of tasteless yet a bit nutty. As it’s only ingredient – edamame – really packs a protein punch: 42g of protein per 100g of spaghetti. It’s also high in fibre and gluten free.  If you don’t want to be the super duper big box from Costco, Tesco sells a 200g box for £3.

For my recipe you will stirfry mange tout, baby corn and red pepper in a wok, adding two whisked eggs at the end so that they become scrambled.  The vegetables are then added to the spaghetti and everything is topped with a yummy tahini dressing.

I made the mistake once of mixing the tahini dressing into the cooked spaghetti before adding the vegetables. Huge disaster. The spaghetti clumped together in a sticky ball which looked unappetising and tasted doughy.

It really is best to leave the sauce to the end, or better still give each diner a little bowl of the tahini dressing so that they can drizzle it over themselves.

This is a great, quick, stir-fry with lots of crunch and colour from the vegetables, high protein content from the funky light green pasta and the tahini dressing takes it to the next level. Love!

Colourful Edamame Spaghetti Stir-fry With Tahini Dressing

• Servings: 2
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A protein packed stir-fry with edamame spaghetti, egg and vibrant red, green and yellow vegetables.

Ingredients

• 100g Explore Cuisine Organic Edamame Spaghetti
• 175g pack of baby corn and mange tout
• 1 red pepper
• 2 eggs
• 2 tbsp tahini paste
• 2 tbsp agave nectar
• 1 lemon
• 2 tbsp soya sauce
• 1 sachet of Yutaka miso soup paste
• sesame oil
• fresh parsley

Directions

1. Slice the corn in half lengthways and chop the red pepper into chunks. Chop the parsley.
2. Fill a pot with water and bring to the boil.
3. While the water is boiling make the tahini dressing by combining tahini paste, agave nectar, juice of 1 lemon, soya sauce and sachet of miso soup paste. Add two table spoons of the boiling water and mix well.
4. Whisk together two eggs.
5. Heat a wok with a bit of sesame oil and stirfry the vegetables until cooked.
6. Add the whisked eggs to the cooked vegetables mix until the eggs have scrambled.
7. Add the edamame spaghetti to the pot of boiling water and cook for 3 – 5 minutes. Drain and divide the pasta between two plates.
8. Top the spaghetti with the stirfried vegetables and eggs.
9. Drizzle with the tahini dressing and chopped parsley.
10. Enjoy!

Natasja King – food for the body, food for the soul