I love cooking new and exciting things, but when I’m in a hurry I tend to stick to my staples. There are a few recipes that are so fantastic, and so easy, that I make them over and over again. Here’s three of mine.

1. Stovetop Mac and Cheeze from American Vegan Kitchen.
This is one of my favorite pasta meals. It doesn’t taste anything like the mac and cheese I grew up with, but does remind me of a really good alfredo-y sauce. When I make it, I usually add some kind of homemade seitan sausage and fresh basil.

The fresh basil makes this dish so incredible.

2.  Sauteed Baby Beans with Artichokes and Green Olives from Vegetarian Cooking – A Commonsense Guide

This recipe is really elegant, beautiful, and fancy. Green beans, sauteed with green onions, green olives, artichoke hearts, and capers with rosemary and extra virgin olive oil. The recipe calls for the green onions to be chopped to the same length of the beans. My boyfriend wasn’t a fan of that and would have preferred them being chopped smaller, but I love green onions (and have even ate them raw on a number of occasions) so I enjoyed it. So I guess that’s a personal preference.

3. Tamarind Lentils from Veganomicon.

Even though lentils make me fart a lot, I still love to eat them. These tamarind lentils are delicious. However, I do double the tamarind-ketchup mixture before adding it to the lentils at the end though so that the flavor is a little bit stronger. It’s great with rice and with pita crisps. You can get tamarind extract at Asian markets, and the bottle I got has lasted forever, so after acquiring that one ingredient, this recipe becomes cheap to make.