anyone got any nice vegetarian one pot recipes?

[UsuallyHateNameChangers]

My SIL is due any day and when we go and visit her I'd like to take her some home cooked food. When I've done this for other friends I usually do a lasagne or shepherds pie type thing but she's a veggie and hates mushrooms and i'm a bit stuck. Am very much a meat eater myself.

Anyone got any nice properly vegetarian easy to cook recipes they'd like to share?

Bookmarking this because I'm vegetarian and only ever make one-pot stuff that takes a very short time ...

UHNC - easy quick dinner idea (assuming your son isn't vegetarian...)
Cook a serving of pasta. About 3 mins before it's finished add a serving of peas and sweetcorn to the pan. Drain when pasta al dente, stir in a couple of spoons of creme fraiche, some chopped ham (or chicken, or cooked steak in thin strips) and some grated cheese. Sprinkle more cheese on top. Takes 10 mins from pasta in boiling water to dinner with carbs, calcium, veges and protein :)

Pasta bakes would work and keep for a few days. Fry onion and garlic for a while, add tinned tomatoes and some herbs, mix with cooked pasta and top with cheese.

Before you mix with the pasta, add whatever else she'll eat. Things like tinned tuna or veg. Carrots are nice with a tomato based sauce. But I wouldn't add fish to be sat there for a couple of days without being baked.

The easier method is using a jar of sauce.

At the moment the grated cheese packs are the same price for the same weight.

agoodbook your macaroni, does the milk thicken while cooking the pasta? I usually do a roux based cheese sauce which obviously had the flour to thicken. Do I need to put any flour in your method?

doAndroids I love pasta bake, my fave is courgettes,onion , pine nuts and truffle oil (if I'm feeling fancy ??).

My dd brought friends round unexpectedly and I made a chilli completely out of cans. Mixed beans in chilli sauce, kidney beans in chilli sauce, fried an onion and a couple of wrinkly old mushrooms, tin of tomatoes, veg stock, chilli flakes to make it hot and creme fraiche and cheese on top. It was bloody good actually. Served with Doritos!

My variation on a quick pasta meal - spaghetti, peas and spinach (I use the frozen one for cheapness), some dried mint for flavour and feta cheese (sainsburys basic Greek salad cheese for cheapness) .Takes about 10 minutes and is a complete meal.
Really any veg you like works with pasta and cheese. There is no need to make a sauce, just mix it all together.

UsuallyHateNameChangers- heres the recipe ( from my daughter - I will 'fes up!)
250 ml milk for every 100g pasta. put in a pan, slowly bring up to simmer, stirring until pasta is cooked, then stir in 50 g cheese for each 100 g pasta used. Season and done :)

agoodbook that's going on the list of dinners this week! Nice one.

I'm making unicorns chick pea and lentil slew cooker recipe today. Dh didn't look too impressed when I told him - he'll be expecting a big chunk of meat in there

Great thread I am going to save it for future ideas. I gave up meat when I was about 16 but continued to eat the odd bit of fish. I usually say I am a fish eating veggie but I don't know why people get so precious about it. I think its more a state of mind.. I hate animal cruelty. I have a friend who is a strict vegan but she follows the diet more for heath reasons.

Me and my dd love Jamie Oliver's Pasta Rotolo. You can google the recipe, it has butternut squash, red onions, spinach and feta cooked in a tomato sauce. I want it now!

I think I've done SIL a disservice really, I'm sure when it matters she tells people she s a fish eating veggie (our some version of that), I just wrote veggie in the op as I did genuinely only want veggie ideas.

Either way, my spicy chick pea stew is slow cooking and it already smells amazing!

Update on spicy chickpea and lentil stew.

Do it!

I had to mumble through a bit as didn't have some of the ingredients (used dried chilli, half the chickpeas and doubled the lentils, added honey to sweeten it up a bit, used tumeric, coriander and paprika instead of garam masala) but it is delicious.

Sorry to bang on about this, but why doesn't your SIL just say she doesn't eat meat? Why even mention the word vegetarian? After all, when it comes down to it, her diet can be described as "I eat some animals but not others".

So how is that in any way vegetarian?

If you're sorry about banging on about it SuburbanRhonda, then do stop banging on, please. It has been made patently clear that the pedantics of how much more purely vegetarian some people are compared to others are not welcome on a thread where someone just wants recipes

Planning to make time tomorrow to get the ingredients for spicy lentil thing...and hook mum's crock pot...

Oh, I'm not that sorry, elphaba!

Actually, the OP herself raised the issue of what constitutes a vegetarian because her SIL was unclear about what she did and didn't eat.

I wasn't aware there was a MN rule that responding to a side issue raised by the OP was verboten.

Some of you rant against 'so called vegetarians' who eat Fish as they will ruin it for all the 'Real' vegetarians who get fed meat all the time because someone once met a fish eating vegetarian and therefore assumed ALL veggies ate fish.

I tell you what annoys me. As a vegetarian for over 20 years, I still find people's attitudes towards veggies as quite negative. They assume we all go around shouting about what people should and shouldn't eat, and people don't like that. So they tar all veggies with the same brush.

In my two decades of vegetarianism - it's those people - the ones who give other veggies a bad name, and the people who believe that attitude applies to all of us - that have made my life more difficult. Not the ones who choose to eat fish.

Anyway, as you were - I'm really enjoying the recipes and can't wait to try the Chickpea one!

CAN EVERYONE STOP ARGUING WHILST I BASK IN THE GLORY OF MY CHICKPEA THING???

Thank you

I'm going to try the chickpea thing, even though I haven't eaten chickpeas since suffering an unfortunate incident whereby I barfed up a chickpea curry after one too many glasses of wine - can't blame the chickpeas, but the sensation, the texture as they revisited me... Hard to forget.

If your Chickpea Thing can get me liking chickpeas again, I'll love you forever

Does anyone know if I could make the chickpea thing without a slow cooker? It sounds delicious!

At a guess id say yes. Just simmer very low with a lid on.

Unicorns. It was amazing, we had it again last night. Really does fill the tummy, both DH and DS want it again. Bask away!

What are people using for the '28oz can tomato purée' in (what will forever be known as) the spicy chickpea thing? About 800g tomato passata? I don't think Americans mean the concentrated stuff we get in tubes when they say tomato purée.

If your SIL is BF, bear in mind that some BF babies can't tolerate legumes and curry spices as it makes them 'windy'. Not sure about Quorn and babies.

spankopita
Aubergine Parmigiana (you can substitute courgettes).
Quiche
macaroni cheese in a crockpot
veg soup with dumplings
caluliflower gratin
Spinach Casserole
veg fritters and tabbouleh
roast squash soup with yoghurt and lime dressing

Elphaba- I used a tin of Napolina tomato puree. Was grand.