With over 300 recipes in just over a year of food blogging, some readers might get the impression that all my time is spent in the kitchen. Well, there are days when it seems like that to me, and when those days come around, there's no simpler remedy than that time-honored friend of busy cooks, students and lazy people alike — pasta and sauce!

Even on the laziest days, though, I can't bring myself to emptying sauce out of a store-bought jar. And there's no need really, since there are plenty of pasta sauces that take no more time to prepare and make than it takes to bring a large pot of water to boil and cook the pasta. That just happens to be enough time to do something really creative and unusual as well, to take the example of this striking banana and fruit juice based "devil's nightmare pasta sauce" — fire up the water to boil, and the sauce is ready from start to finish by the time the pasta is done.

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Although widely cultivated throughout east Asia, the colorful little red bean known variously as azuki, aduki, or adzuki suffers a serious lack of recognition here in the West that is unfortunate considering its delicate sweetness and easy digestibility. But even in Asia, where it is almost always eaten as part of sweet desserts or boiled and puréed with sugar to make red bean paste as a stuffing for pastries, it's generally quite difficult to find savory dishes featuring the azuki bean as the main ingredient, though azuki beans can easily be used in place of whole mung beans. Still, it's exciting to fine original recipes for azuki beans and I've been fortunate to find a few and when I saw this croquette recipe from Lucy's Nourish Me blog, it was certainly an occasion to sit up and take notice.

As with all of Lucy's recipes, there's never a need to change anything at all to produce perfect and beautiful food every time. So the slight changes I've made here are only designed to enhance the particular aspects of Lucy's azuki croquettes and spicy sesame sauce that most strongly appeal to me — namely, the spiciness. When someone says that they "toned something down a fraction," I can't help but to tone it right back up, and a few more fractions besides. But apart from not being able to find khombu seaweed and substituting wakame instead, the only changes I've made are to add some dried hot red chilies to the beans and cayenne to the sauce, owing to what I consider the perfect harmony of cayenne's fiery heat with the salty and nutty flavors of tamari and sesame.

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Thankfully, I do not have any dietary restrictions except the obvious self-imposed one of avoiding meat, poultry and seafood. Still, I do enjoy gluten-free options and like to offer up gluten-free recipes for my readers who do suffer from food allergies. Tthis recipe for a gluten-free honey, lemon and poppy seed cake is a perfect dessert to end a special meal I prepared last Friday. It's easy to prepare and is sweetened with a bit of honey.

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A cooked dal is often one of the most substantial courses in a West Bengali dinner, making West Bengali cuisine an important source of inspiration for mung bean dishes, where it is the dominant legume of choice in addition to red lentils or "masoor dal". Another characteristic feature of West Bengali cooking is the refined use of exquisite spice blends incorporating cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and peppercorns.

It is one of these unique spice mixtures that lends to an extraordinary and perfect balance of flavors and fragrances in this mung bean and tomato soup. Toasted cardamom, cloves and peppercorns with coriander, cumin and fennel seeds will fill your kitchen with a smoky and spicy-but-slightly-sweet aroma that will have you anticipating the meal to come, and the addition of the earthy sweetness of toasted sesame oil and the heat of just a few fresh chilies makes this one of the most perfectly seasoned and perfumed soups I have made in a long while. Serve this with green tea & curry rice and spiced creamed spinach for an elegant and satisfying simple meal.

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