Scrumptious Saturdays is my series of weekly roundups.  I am frequently surfing around the interweb looking at lovely pictures of food and finding delicious new recipes that I want to try out. I thought it might be handy for you if I shared some of my favourites with you each week.

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The weather here has been lovely recently and thoughts have been turning to barbecues, indeed next week (26th May-1st June) is National Barbecue Week here in the UK. This week (19th-25th May) is National Vegetarian Week!

What do you do, though, if you are a dedicated carnivore hosting a barbecue? How to cater for your veggie friends?  You can make things easy for yourself by ensuring all the barbecue accompaniments are veggie-friendly. The meat-eaters won’t even notice as all these sides go great with their juicy steaks too!

I’ll definitely be mixing up my own creamy crunchy bean and avocado salad, although I’ll probably skip the lettuce as it tends to get a bit limp in the heat. This one is vegan-friendly too. 🙂

 

I also love the sound of this pasta salad by Ronda of Kitchen Dreaming. So many pasta salads have mayonnaise dressings which can get a bit icky in the heat. Ronda has made this with a vinaigrette instead and it is also chock-full of all my favourite veg. Extra flavour is added with parmesan cheese and garlic. Yum!

 

Or how about this unusual coleslaw from Renee of Renee’s Kitchen Adventures? It is made with broccoli, kale and Brussels sprouts with a light Poppyseed Dressing – sounds amazing. One of the ingredients is broccoli coleslaw mix, which I had to look up – a clever company in USA have taken the broccoli stalks that no-one wanted to eat, shredded them up and sell them as a prime salad ingredient – genius! Not available in the UK (yet?) but a great idea of how we can use up our broccoli stalks.

 

I do love rice in all its forms and Kristin from Dizzy Busy & Hungry devised this Cilantro Lime Asparagus and Rice dish as a dinner accompaniment. I think it would also be delicious as a cold rice salad, so I’d make it using Kristin’s recipe and pop it in the fridge for the flavours to mingle and marinate.

 

Remember too that barbecued veg is absolutely delicious. I found this recipe for Balsamic Glazed Roasted Asparagus on Aunt Bees Recipes. Brandi’s recipe is roasted in the oven but asparagus is also wonderful cooked on the barbecue.

I think it’d be really fun to make Brandi’s dressing right on the barbecue using one of these cute little pots!

A little plea from the heart here too for your barbecuing adventures. Please do try really hard to use sustainably sourced charcoal, from well-managed woodlands.  Otherwise your charcoal is likely to be contributing to deforestation, illegal logging, land degradation, loss of biodiversity and often slave labour. It is quite easy to find a sustainable charcoal if you make the effort to check the info on your charcoal bag & choose the sustainable brand.

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In other news, most definitely not vegetarian news!…

I wrote a guest article about local company Seriously Good Venison for the Crail Food Festival website.

 

Also, I was lucky enough to win a hamper of half a lamb back in December. The estate delivering it have had a few problems and so I have only just received my prize. The estate owner wanted to recompense me for all the delays and very kindly upgraded my win to a whole lamb. So my freezer is chock full of delicious cuts of lamb.  Look out for lots of lamb recipes coming up on Vohn’s Vittles in the coming months!

So, tell me dear reader, what’s your favourite lamb dish and what do you love to have as accompaniments to your barbecue?

Vohn
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P.S. If you’d like more vegetarian ideas, have a look at last week’s Scrumptious Saturdays which was all about seasonal veg!