It’s autumn so it’s time to celebrate bold seasonal flavours with this roasted beetroot, lentil and pickled chilli salad. Sweet roasted beetroot pairs beautifully with earthy lentils and sharp, zesty chillies for a refreshing, satisfying bowl that’s ideal for quick weeknight meals. lunches or even as a side for meats and fish.
Roasted beetroot, lentil and pickled chilli salad
Creamy Mushroom and Carlin Pea Soup with Tahini and Miso
This creamy mushroom and carlin pea soup with tahini and miso is a rich, savoury bowl packed with deep umami flavour. Earthy mushrooms blend with nutty carlin peas for a hearty, protein‑boosted base, while tahini adds silky creaminess and miso brings a subtle, salty depth. It’s an easy, nourishing soup that’s perfect for autumn and easily adapted to be fully vegan.
Carrot and Fennel ‘Beanotto’ with carrot top pesto
Carrot and fennel make a wonderfully unexpected pairing — sweet, aromatic, and earthy all at once. In this “beanotto,” creamy white beans take the place of rice, creating a silky, comforting base that soaks up the vegetables’ gentle warmth. The fennel brings it’s aniseed aroma and the carrots bring their natural sweetness, and together they create a bowl that feels both rustic and refined.
What really lifts the dish is the carrot‑top pesto: bright, herbaceous, and just a little wild. It turns what could be a simple recipe into something vibrant and full of life, celebrating the whole vegetable from root to leaf. This is thrifty cooking at its most elegant — nourishing, colourful, and quietly impressive.
Carrot Top Pesto
Don’t throw away your carrot tops if they’re in perfectly good condition — they’re edible and can be used to make a vibrant, herb‑like pesto that tastes fresh, green, and a little peppery. Their flavour sits somewhere between parsley and celery leaves, giving you a bright sauce that’s perfect for tossing through pasta, spooning over roasted vegetables, or spreading onto crusty bread.
Flemish hutsepot with potatoes and white beans
Flemish refers to the a specific group of Dutch dialects native to Flanders a northern Dutch speaking region of Belgium. Hutsepot means ‘mixed pot, and that’s exactly the spirit of the dish: simple ingredients cooked together so their flavours meld into something greater. My hutsepot with potatoes and white beans has a warm, golden colour, dotted with chunks of vegetables. It’s thick enough to mound on a spoon, but still brothy enough to feel like a stew.
Courgette and chickpeas with preserved lemon and mint
Courgettes and chickpeas with preserved lemon and mint, a dish that feels both refreshing and deeply satisfying, it can me used as a side, part of a mezze or simply eaten on it’s own. Mediterranean at heart with a north African edge.
Lentejas con Calabaza, Spanish Lentil Stew with Butternut Squash, Cumin, and Smoked Paprika
Lentils are a fundamental part of the Spanish cuisine, here the lentils are paired with butternut squash, cumin and smoked paprika for an easy, earthy and nourishing weeknight meal.
KAFERBOHNEN SALAD
A simple and delicious traditional recipe from the state of Styria in Austria. Scarlet runner beans are used and cooked from dried, but they can easily be substituted for butter beans. This basic recipe can easily be enhanced by adding tomatoes, sweetcorn, green beans or boiled egg.
Antiguan Spiced Black Bean Cakes
This is the first recipe from my first ever series where I’m making a bean recipe from every country I have visited so far in my life.
First up and we are off to the sunny Caribbean to enjoy some Antiguan Spiced Black Bean cakes.
Dreamy, creamy, mushroom, miso and bean soup
I put together this soup predominantly by a few ingredients I had left over in the fridge and I needed too use them up. I had bought some yellow sticker mushrooms and very kindly been sent some amazing oat miso to finish this soup off, but you can use any miso you have.