A healthy chickpea salad dressed with sweet white balsamic and smoked paprika, diced avocado and aromatic coriander is a beautiful lunchtime treat that's bursting with mexican and middle eastern flavours. It's vegetarian and vegan to boot, a meatfree treat to have for lunch or dinner and tastes even better if you make it in advance!

Smoked Paprika Avocado Salad

Gavin Wren Recipes, Vegan, Vegetarian

Most of the writing on my blog is not about food, but life in general and how I cope with it or not, in some cases. On occasion I veer onto a food-related social or political bent, but it’s rare for me to write lovingly about the flavours and story behind a recipe. Today, I’ve been staring at my screen for 53 minutes and have only written the preceding sentence. The first 51 minutes and 13 seconds were spent typing then deleting, typing then deleting as I attempted to coax a story about smoked paprika onto the page.

Constructive Procrastination.

I also checked out the bulk price of Kalamata olives (c.£20 for 2kg on eBay, £16 on Amazon fresh) and appraised which size Really Useful Boxes I need for my cupboards (none, they’re not quite the right size), to round up the disparate bags of half… come and read more…

Wholemeal ginger cookies made with spelt flour and reduced sugar, as well as some wholesome oats, to really bump up the micronutrients in this recipe. Fiery ginger makes for a perfect flavour to go alongside a mug of hot milk on a cold day.

Wholemeal Ginger Cookies

Gavin Wren Baking, Recipes, Spelt & ancient grains

Today I’m making wholemeal ginger cookies, using spelt flour and trying to curb the sugar content. These are lovely, light cookies with a deep flavour and soft bite, perfect to go on the side of some hot milk to warm you up on those winter days. What is Going on? I’m in a mess. Existentially. Everything I do leaves me in an existential mess these days. Maybe I need to stop saying that word so …

Golden, light and flaky vegetarian sausage rolls made with spelt rough puff pastry and filled with onion, garlic, mushrooms, thyme and oozing, molten Comté cheese. Perfect for the dinner table or the picnic basket.

Vegetarian Sausage Rolls with Mushroom and Comté

Gavin Wren Baking, Side dishes, Small Bites, Spelt & ancient grains, Starters, Vegetarian

Sausage rolls. This recipe presented me with a very complex, difficult and hard to resolve problem. It demonstrated the depths of philosophical wrangling that I have to endure, just to bring to you what seems, on the surface, a simple recipe. Take this particular little gem. It’s got 8 ingredients, an average amount by most standards, half of those being day to day ‘store cupboard’ items. There are no complicated process involved and if you …

Chorizo, spinach and egg one-pot two-pot

Chorizo, spinach and egg two-pot one-pot.

Gavin Wren Main Dishes, Recipes

The title of this one really got me. I spent ages labouring over a name, unsure what genre it falls into despite the Shakshuka style and the Spanish influence. I was very close to just calling it a one-pot, but I can’t hide the fact that I actually used two pots to make it. However, spiritually, this dish absolutely feels like a one-pot, as it’s a hearty, strong flavoured, low maintenance recipe that’s eaten straight …