Yelvertoft mum cooks up some great ideas for National Barbecue Month

Here's my latest Countryside Kitchen column for the Daventry Express.

I’ve a real passion for growing food and cooking delicious meals the whole family can enjoy. That’s why I created a food blog and Facebook page called No Fuss Meals for Busy Parents, to share recipe ideas, local ingredient suggestions as well as focus on food producers, providing a connection between the food produced in the UK and how to make quick and easy meals.

You can follow me on Facebook and Instagram @NoFussMealsForBusyParents or the website is: www.nofussmealsforbusyparents.food.blog

All this month, it's National Barbecue Month, a celebration of eating outdoors with family and friends, which I’m sure many of you will have been embracing with the current covid restrictions in place.

From smoking to braising and roasting to grilling, the barbecue offers so many tasty ways to prepare food that everyone can enjoy. It’s not all about cooking (or cremating!) meat on an outside grill. These days there are so many options and utensils to use to cook fish, cheese, vegetables and sundries as well as locally sourced meat.

And we must not forget the salads, sides and breads to accompany the feast. Hands up who had a dabble at making sour dough during the pandemic? Now that really is an artform if you can master the technique behind the perfect sourdough loaf!

It’s still pretty early to be eating anything homegrown from our vegetable patch, however the asparagus is just peeping through and I’ve taken my first cut of salad leaves. The apple blossom is in full bloom and now we’ve had a drop of rain the plants look so much healthier for it.

One thing I really enjoy using in my cooking is rapeseed oil. It’s great for roasting, frying and dressing a salad. We are fortunate to have a wonderful company in Northamptonshire called Farrington Oils that produce a ‘Yellow Mellow’ rapeseed oil. It’s made my cold pressing the seeds of the oil seed rape plants, a bright yellow-flowered plant you will see across the fields at present.

It’s a really healthy option to use as it boasts half the saturated fat of olive oil and 10 x the amount of mmega 3 than olive oil. What’s more is that Farrington’s is certified as carbon neutral and plastic neutral. Farrington’s Mellow Yellow Rapeseed Oil is the world’s first food product to be certified as both carbon and plastic neutral and this ground-breaking step is just the latest in a long list of sustainable actions they have worked on over the years.

Here is a quick, simple, no fuss way of how to prepare and barbeque a selection of vegetables using cold pressed rapeseed oil courtesy of Farrington Oil: https://www.farrington-oils.co.uk/?s=bbq+vegetables

Please do share your recipes with me online.

Happy Barbecue Month!