Dad's quick frankfurter casserole

When I told my parents that I was becoming vegan, my mum cried. Seriously.

It wasn't quite the reaction I was expecting, but apart from the initial few tears, my parents have been oddly enthusiastic about my plant-based diet, and they're always coming up with new things to feed me when I go and see them.

This is something my dad made, which was a stroke of genius - hummus in a stew? Get out of town, you'd think. But it's really good. Give it a go. No, really - it tastes so much better than it looks.

Dad’s Quick Frankfurter Casserole   
Serves 4

Ingredients
Pack Taifun Frankfurters (cut sausages into 2cm/¾in pieces)
200g pot of houmous
Pinto or cannellini beans: one 400g can, drained or 250g of cooked beans
One red pepper and one orange pepper, deseeded and chopped into thin strips
Two medium carrots, halved and thinly sliced
Two medium leeks, thinly sliced
Half a dozen closed-cap mushrooms
Three garlic cloves, peeled, made into paste – or large blob of ready-made garlic paste or mix of both
2 tbsp Dijon mustard
Vegetable stock
Salt (depending on saltiness of stock cube if using) and black pepper

How you do it
1. Slowly sweat mushrooms in frying pan. Add in garlic after a few minutes. Continue till mushrooms reduced by half.

2. Place pepper strips in saucepan cover with hot stock, cook for two mins. Add carrots to pan and cook for further two minutes, add leek to pan and cook for further three minutes. (Adding more stock or hot water as necessary.) Adjust timings depending on desired crunchiness of vegetables.)

3. Remove veg from saucepan and heat frankfurter pieces and beans in stock for a few minutes.

4. Then add mustard – and pepper (and salt if necessary) to taste. When seasoning mixed in, add houmous to seasoned stock till desired thickness achieved (if necessary more hot water).

5. Add mushrooms, pepper, carrot and leek back in and heat through.

Version two

The recipe above is my dad's way. The version I made above is basically the same thing, but with a few tweaks. I added an onion, sweated it off til caramelised, then added the garlic and carrots, cooked for a few minutes, then added in the peppers, beans (I used butter beans rather than pinto or cannelini), hotdog pieces and stock, then cooked til the veg was tender crisp. Then I stirred in the hummus - I used piri piri hummus, so I didn't use the mustard.

This is now one of my favourite standby meals - it takes 20 minutes or so, and it's great (not to mention a handy way of using up all that hummus that's almost going off and the hotdogs that are lying around.