It’s not fair for vegetarians. The little time that we all have to cook a nutritious and filling but quick and easy meal on a weeknight is enough to grill a chunk of meat or fish and steam some vegetables. Vegetarian cooking usually calls for more time and effort if you want your dinner to be wholesome, with enough protein to keep you full.
But it’s all doable with the cupboard stocked up with tins of beans and bags of grain, and the right recipes at hand. Here is a collection of quick and enormously satisfying veggie dinner recipes, featuring grains, beans, pulses, pasta and plenty vegetables.
Orecchiette means ‘little ears’ and this pasta shape is adorable. Folded into jammy, roasted cherry tomatoes spiced up with rose harissa, it’s one of the nicest and simplest tomato pasta recipes. By all means use your favourite, but preferably small pasta shape though.
Orecchiette with harissa tomatoes
RECIPE
Tomato and spinach butter beans, a delicious vegetarian casserole and a satisfying nutritional powerhouse. Plus it's a supremely frugal budget recipe especially when using dry beans soaked and cooked from scratch. But if pressed for time on a weeknight, reach for a jar or a tin.
Tomato and spinach butter beans
RECIPE
Wild rice with sautéed king oyster mushrooms is an exquisite treat of earthy flavours, chewy textures and a burst of nutritional values. It doesn’t taste like rice – because it isn’t rice but a type of grass. It's quite pricey but worth an occasional splash.
Wild rice with mushrooms
RECIPE
The traditional dinner (or lunch) staple, baked potato, is universally loved. But you might want to try sweet potatoes: baked in foil, topped with tahini butter they are a fabulous fiesta of flavours. Also, it's a fat bomb (IYKYK).
Sweet potato with tahini butter
RECIPE
Another easy vegetarian meal of cherry tomatoes, tinned chickpeas and feta cheese. A delicious tray bake with chunks of feta roasting upon the vegetables, spiced and sweet with honey and chilli dressing.
Tomato and chickpea tray bake
RECIPE
Dried porcini are possibly my most valued cooking ingredients and they are sometimes as good as, if not better than fresh ones because whilst soaking them to rehydrate, you get the most wonderful stock to use in the same dish. Here it is a risotto with pearled spelt grain, a gorgeous no-effort dish.
Spelt risotto with porcini mushrooms
RECIPE
Bulgur wheat pilaf with red peppers and raisins: cooked like rice pilaf but refreshingly different; looks like couscous but it’s more nutritious; whole grain of cereal but not slimy like barley. That’s my perfect grain!
Thai noodles with cinnamon and ginger, unbelievably easy, unbelievably flavoursome. I ripped this recipe off Nigella Lawson’s one for Thai noodles with prawn to make it vegetarian. A delicious version of Thai egg or rice noodles flavoured with cinnamon, star anise, ketjap manis and ginger.
Thai noodles with cinnamon
RECIPE
Chinese egg fried rice recipe plus how to cook rice, the only recipe you’ll ever need. Arguably it is the best to use leftover, cold rice for fried rice so make sure you always cook a surplus. Frozen, slightly thawed rice works too.
Simple and basic vegetarian chilli recipe. It’s worth soaking and cooking beans for the best chilli but tins make an easy job. This vegetarian chilli is garnished with pickled red onions - a must for a Mexican flavour.