Get Your Grill On

It's been a bit of a busy and stressful week but there have been some nice things to punctuate it. One was a fab vegan wine tasting at the wonderful Bakerie Tasting Store. The Bakerie Bar and Tasting Store are one of the most vegan friendly businesses in Manchester so make sure you check them out if you visit here. They have also just been nominated for Best Newcomer in the Manchester Food and Drink Awards so if you could spare a minute to vote for them that would be ace! Hopefully one days our cities will be full of vegan friendly businesses of the same calibre. I also got round to spending my accumulated Nectar points which I always use for cookery books. I'd read good reviews of this.


I LOVE barbeques. Even when I wasn't veggie I used to prefer to cook veggie stuff on them. I have Rose Elliot's Vegetarian BBQs and Grills which I think is out of print but there are some good used copies here on Amazon from as little as 1p - well worth snapping up. The pictures are lovely and there's some good burger recipes. I was pleased to see my new book had arrived when I got home from work tonight and immediately had a flick through. I was going to have an avocado salad for my tea and this quickly got translated into one of the ideas from the book although I did use my oven's grill rather than trying to fire up a BBQ in the rain!


This is very quick and simple. Toast a piece of bread on both sides. Mash an avocado  and season with lemon juice, salt, black pepper, thyme and oregano. Once the avocado mix is spread onto the bread it goes back under the grill for a few minutes. It's then topped with green leaves - I used a mix of rocket, watercress and spinach. My side salad was some of the lovely organic multi coloured tomatoes that Lidl are doing at the moment and my current favourite olives, naturally wrinkled olives from Thassos which I picked up in Tesco which have an amazing almost sweet, licorice-like taste. A nice cold glass of crisp white wine and this was a great meal made in minutes.

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