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I’ve never been good with purely vegetarian dishes -- I always want to add a bit of meat for texture and flavour!  However in an attempt to reduce my meat intake I knocked together this tasty, filling and more importantly healthy dish in under 15 minutes last night and more importantly I didn’t miss the meat at all!

For those of you on a Slimming World diet it should fit in perfectly as an evening meal on a green day.  It’s not a completely free meal, but as with most of my recipes each ingredient is optional, so feel free to add/remove bits to your hearts content!

The first thing you need to do is finely chop a red onion or two.  It does need to be fine, not chunky -- the rest of the veg makes up the chunky part of this recipe.  Here’s Gordon to show you how…

This has got to be one of my favourite types of recipes.  Simply chuck things into an oven proof dish, bung in the oven and serve with loads of rice and french bread!

There is no measuring, no weighing and virtually no stress – even those who profess to be unable to cook can make something that tastes great!

I had a pack of chicken legs left in the fridge that weren’t used at a BBQ and couldn’t be bothered to do anything fancy so I grabbed a couple of courgettes, a red, yellow and green pepper, a few small red onions and half a pack of baby plum tomatoes.  If I’d have had any olives, a handful would have gone down a treat too…  A glass of white wine, throw that in too! That’s why I love these kind of recipes – want a hint of garlic?  Throw in a lightly crushed clove or two!  There is no right or wrong way…

To make this work you must weigh nothing, simply cut all of the veg into similar size pieces, drizzle over some olive oil and add some sea salt and plenty of freshly ground pepper, mix and pop in a preheated oven at 375°F/190°C/Gas Mark 5 for roughly an hour.

Summers here!  It’s BBQ time and some of my favourite side dishes are deep fried (sorry mother!)

There’s nothing like some crunchy beer battered onion rings or mushrooms, washed down with a bottle of ice cold Bud or a nice glass of Pinot so without further ado, here’s how to magic them together…

To make the lovely batter you need:

• 200g of Plain Flour (plus extra for dusting)
• A good pinch of salt (preferably sea salt)
• 1 egg
• 300ml (give or take) of beer, lager etc…

Do NOT sift the flour but dump it straight into a bowl with a nice large pinch of sea salt.

Add the egg (minus the shell) and start whisking.

It will become obvious really quickly that there is not enough liquid in the bowl to accomplish this task, so open your bottle of Bud (or chosen beverage).  If you have a 330ml bottle then take a nice swig (30ml worth) and add the remainder nice and slowly to the bowl whilst whisking.

Keep this up until you have a fairly smooth batter about the consistency of double cream.  Don’t fret if you have some small lumps, that’ll just add a bit of extra crunch – we don’t want boulders but little specks are good.

Congratulations, you now have your beer batter.

Now take whatever you want to deep fry, button mushrooms, onion rings, mars bars (minature ones on skewers work best apparently!), lightly dust in flour, dip into the batter until nicely covered then gently place into your deep fryer at 170ºc and cook until nicely golden brown.

At this point I would like to emphasise the word place.  Never drop things into hot oil as this will generally cause splash backs and nasty red burns which hurt!  You have been warned.  If in doubt get someone sober to do this part…

Once nicely golden brown, remove from the oil and place onto kitchen towel to drain and sprinkle with some more sea salt.

Serve and amaze your friends with your culinary expertise!  Enjoy!