Mackerel with beetroot, apple and horseradish

Pan fried mackerel with beetroot and apple salad

Gavin Wren Fish & Shellfish, Main Dishes, Recipes, Salads

There’s everything to like about this dish. Thin slivers of just-cooked beetroot doused in a simple red wine vinegar dressing, crisp apple, fresh pan fried mackerel and finished with some nutty, leafy and tangy adornments. It’s a simple recipe for success that I can’t believe has sat in my recipe notes, remaining unpublished for so long. I wrote this recipe in the summer of 2014 and was instantly taken with it. It was made few …

Spicy vegetable and preserved lemon quinoa

Spicy veg and preserved lemon quinoa

Gavin Wren Main Dishes, Recipes, Vegan, Vegetarian

Today’s hearty pot of wonder is a dish full of mouth filling flavour that has a slightly spiced, Indian slant. It’s a vegetarian, quinoa plate of joy, that through it’s development went from “mmmmm, this is nice” on it’s first outing, through “mmmmm, this is pretty good” on it’s second, to “wow, this is really tasty” on it’s final incarnation that you see here. I’ve always had a soft spot for Indian food, when growing …

beetroot and dill yoghurt dip

Dill & beetroot dip

Gavin Wren Recipes, Spreads & Dips, Vegetables, Vegetarian

It’s been a long time since I wrote ‘dill and beetroot’ on my list of ingredients to play around with. As individual ingredients, they both rank pretty highly on my mental list of favourite tastes; dill especially, because when it’s good, it’s breathtakingly aromatic. You could almost make a perfume from it, although that might be just a little bit weird. One of the first dishes that I mastered beyond cheese on toast (with tomato …

Labneh cheesecake with lime and coriander

Pistachio-topped labneh cheesecake with lime & coriander – no added sugar

Gavin Wren Baking, Desserts, No Added Sugar, Recipes

For once, I’m going to start talking about the food first, rather than sharing obscure excerpts from my prandial past with you. Previously on le petit oeuf, I’ve professed my love for yoghurt and featured it in a few recipes. This has developed recently into a lean towards the delights of labneh, and anyone who is following my Twitter feed (and if not, why not?) will have seen a few more labneh based adventures, such …

Mango, labneh and pistachio on a plate

How to make great labneh and avoid the mistakes I made!

Gavin Wren Basic Ingredients, Food Techniques, Recipes, Writing

Do you get food obsessions as well? Mine are so whimsical that I can rapidly shift between favourites regularly, not hanging around too long before a new gastronomic sensation passes my nose and sucks me in. It’s like fashion, how quickly foods or flavours can become the next big thing, yet before you know it, they’re gone again. Labneh was a ‘thing’ that I’d come across in the past, so you might ask why my …

Mango frozen yoghurt three ways

A trio of mango frozen yoghurt with no added sugar!

Gavin Wren Desserts, No Added Sugar, Recipes

I’ve got a real treat for you today, in the form of no less than THREE different ways to spice up your mango frozen yoghurt, or froyo, or whatever you’re calling it this week, with some interesting and unnervingly tasty additions. All of these frosty, dessert based frolics also feature no added sugar thereby making these the healthiest recipes ever published on the internet! (well, perhaps) It all started when I began to wander through …