BBQ sides

So, people get stuck with what to have along with their grilled meat or fish, at least thats what i hear when i go to my slimming world group, so here is a few ideas.

Grilled corn on the cob

Mixed veggie skewers then push them off a skewer into a bowl or oven bake some Mediterranean style veggies.

My BBQ style baked beans (on my blog)

Boiled or baked potatoes or even slimming world chips.

Rice salad (or plain rice)

Pasta salad (or buy a passatta that has garlic and herbs in, add some salt and pepper and you have a syn free sauce)

Slimming world coleslaw recipe (also on my blog)

fruit skewers (obviously not for the BBQ but for dessert)

Salsa (roughly chop 3 large tomatoes, 1 small red onion finely chopped, pinch of salt and pepper, juice of half a lime, some roughly chopped coriander)

Boiled eggs

mexican salsa; 1 large can drained corn, 1 cn drained and washed black beans, 2 large spring onions finely chopped, 1/4 cucumber deseeded and finely chopped, handful of coriander OR parsely, finely chopped, juice of half a lime, generous pinch of cumin, salt and pepper.

Asparagus; 1 packet of aspargus trimmed coated in 1 tsp olive oil (2 syns) pinch of salt and pepper. You can either cook them in a foil packet or grill them straight on the BBQ.

Gherkins

A big bowl of fresh green lettuce or even the bagged stuff washed if you are short for time with slices of cucumber and a punnet of cherry tomatoes.

And of course, cloud bread! if you haven't heard of this phenomenon you can have it on an SP day it is literally eggs, a pinch of salt and quark! you seperate the eggs, whisk up the whites and well i am going to do another blog on that later!

I hope you liked this short blog on a few ideas to go alongside a BBQ or even just as side dishes!

spinach and 'ricotta' lasagne

This is my take on spinach and ricotta, the most important step is trying to get moisture out of quark, if you have cheesecloth use that or when salted leave in the bowl and pour away as much excess moisture as possible!

you will need a lasagne dish (use whatever you have, a bowl or rectangular dish or anything you have)
lasagne sheets (dried)
2 pots of quark
2small red onion finely diced
1 large clove of garlic or 2 medium
salt and pepper
a bag of frozen spinach (thawed out, squeezed from excess water and roughly chopped)
2 tins of chopped tomatoes
2 sticks of celery
2 carrots
2 egg yolks or 1 egg
4tbsp grated parmesan (4 syns)

starting with the quark, add 1.5 pots to a bowl and stir in a generous pinch of salt, if you can leave the bowl at an angle for at least an hour or even over night.

meanwhile you could either finely dice the vegetables or use a food processor.
process one onion with half the garlic to make a puree. add to a pan and cook until most of the moisture is gone, and a generous pinch of salt and pepper and add the spinach, again cooking till there is no moisture, move to the side and cool completely.

process your other onion, the other bit of garlic, celery and carrot until finely minced and fry off in a pan with fry light until they soften, add in the tomatoes (here you could add in some dried basil and some fresh parsley) cook down and season to taste.

pour off the excess moisture from the quark and stir in the spinach and onion mixture.

starting with a layer of tomato sauce layer it into your dish then a layer of lasagne sheet then the spinach mixture, layering until you have no spinach or tomato mixture left.
leave a blank layer of lasagne sheets on top of the dish.

mix together the remaining quark with the egg, 3 tblsp of water the parmesan and a pinch of black pepper and evenly layer over the top of your lasagne.

cover with foil and put in your oven at 180oC for 40 minutes, remove the foil and cook for a further 20 minutes.