Italian Rice & Beans from Vegan Yum Yum

Okay, so this is my first blog and I've never been more aware of how an amazing looking meal can look so crappy through a mobile phone camera. I had to weigh up whether to eat my rice & beans straight away or take a nicer photo. I chose eating. Sorry. I've given a link to the recipe below so you can see some more tempting photos there.

When you work til 7pm everyday, surrounded by food, all you want to do when you knock off is eat as quickly as possible with as little effort as possible. Enter Italian Rice & Beans. We picked this one last night from our new favourite recipe book Vegan Yum Yum by Lauren Ulm. We have heaps of baby spinach in the store that i wanted to use and this recipe also has a few of my favourite ingredients: sun dried tomatoes, pine nuts and balsamic vinegar. Yum.

The recipe book contents indicate which recipes take less than 30 mins and we roughly timed this one as taking less than 20mins if you start frying up the other ingredients when the rice is halfway through cooking. It's so quick and simple. There isn't even any chopping involved if you don't slice the sun dried tomatoes. We'll definitely be whipping this up all the time now.

You can find the recipe on the Author's blog here
http://veganyumyum.com/index.php?s=italian+rice+%26+beans&searchbutton=Go!
We only altered a couple of things. We were out of olive oil so had to use peanut oil and Raquel doesn't really like lemon zest so we added it at the start rather than the end and served it with a sprinkling of lemon juice. Also we don't have a zester or a fine grater so we used the spiky side of our grater that we usually use for fresh ginger. I have no idea what it's called.

Our dinner guests thought is was awesome and couldn't believe how easy it was to make. They had the mistaken impression that vegan recipes are either complicated or bland. We have a lot to teach. So far our new vegans have been finding it pretty easy but since they began reading the ingredient labels on food they've been a bit shocked at what goes into the food they were eating.

We've sold out of the Vegan Yum Yum recipe book at the moment but more is on the way so let us know if you want to order a copy. You can also check out more of Lauren Ulm's amazing recipes on her blog veganyumyum.com or download the free Vegan Yum Yum iPhone application.