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…

Spicy whole smoked cauliflower cooked on the BBQ with a paprika, garlic, lemon, cumin and tomato marinade spiced up with a hint of cayenne pepper for a colourful and smokey BBQ treat for vegetarians and vegans alike. This is also a great fun project to learn how to smoke or cook with indirect heat, whether it's summer or winter.

Smoked Cauliflower with Paprika Garlic Marinade

Gavin Wren Recipes, Side dishes, Vegan, Vegetables, Vegetarian

This post shows how to make smoked cauliflower and why smoking vegetables is a great way to start playing around with indirect cooking or hot smoking, as you don’t have to worry about temperatures and cooking times like you would with meat or fish. With this recipe I’ve added a full flavoured marinade to the cauliflower to spice up the flavour and it adds some fantastic visual impact to the finished article. Vegetable Lust. Poor …

red pepper onion and lentil soup with parsley

BBQ charred pepper, onion and lentil soup

Gavin Wren Recipes, Soup, Vegan, Vegetarian

So the season of soup has swerved surreptitiously into softer summer styles. I would love to continue this entire post with such extravagant alliteration, however I don’t think my mind, or thesaurus for that matter, is quite up to it today. But, if such a thing as culinary alliteration exists, in the form of repeated use of similar sounding ingredients, then this soup would be a perfect example. You’ve got red peppers, red onions, red …