Bean and Avocado Salad

Happy Easter everyone!

Here's a quick recipe blog for your Easter weekend, Bean and Avocado Salad to perfectly compliment your Easter eating, and a new way to use your BeeBee Wraps to keep salad fresh. Beeswax triumphs again!

Time to chill 

I am enjoying an Easter of chilled time with my family. Time is a resource that is finite and precious. This weekend I've already had time to sit with my kids for hours, unhurried, attentive and relaxed.

Managing BeeBee Wraps is a full-time job, and being a mum is more than a full-time job. Life really is pretty full-on most of the time and so little enclaves of downtime are very welcome. I often wonder if it's just me that always feels like I should spend more time with my kids whilst simultaneously driven crazy by them too...

With time comes great food! Given the chance to potter in my kitchen, (very much alongside my two mini sous chefs), the food I long for is made, and Mr BeeBee Wraps, (David), is pretty happy about the end result too. 

Suzie's salad

This is a shout out to my good friend, Suzie, who is Vegan(ish). Suzie is trying to eat more plants and less food derived from animals. For Suzie, it's 99% Vegan, 1% 'ish'. Labels are not absolute. I am on board with this idea, however, I do miss my eggs. So I am more of a "less meat, more veg" kinda girl. 

My 'Bean and Avocado Salad' evolved from a chickpea recipe in Amelia Freer's book "Cook. Nourish. Glow.". How often do you attempt a recipe only to find you're a few ingredients short? For bread making it's a no-go, for other recipes it inspires creativity. When you don't have chickpeas, use beans. When you don't have rocket, use spinach, or lettuce, or cooked broccoli, or anything green...see what I mean? 

The secret to fresh salad leaves

Before we leap into the recipe, I also promised to let you in on the secret to a freshly kept bag of salad.

Plastic is not a friend of salad. Single-use plastic is no one's friend. Two days after buying salad in a plastic bag it stinks and has started to turn sludgy at the bottom of the bag. You can pop in a sheet of kitchen paper but you can't escape the plastic seal!!!

Food needs to breathe, there's no escaping that. Plastic suffocates food. Droplets of water build-up, unable to escape, and harbour bacteria causing the food to degrade. 

The BeeBee Bread Wrap really should be renamed as it's not only good for bread, cakes (see our Simnel Cake blog) and large pans of leftovers, it's totally awesome and game-changing when it comes to salad.

Fold a BeeBee Bread Wrap in half, pinch the edges to create the legendary BeeBee breathable seal and you've got yourself a salad bag. Pop in your salad, recycle the plastic (if you can) and scrunch the BeeBee Wrap down. Keep it in the fridge and you will enjoy fresh, dry salad for a week. Beeswax wraps are the answer to keeping your food in the freshest state possible.  

(Actually, the record in our house has been 15 days. The salad was thirsty but still very much edible.)

Plug over. Enjoy the recipe.

Bean and Avocado Salad

2 x 400g tin chickpeas/butter beans/borlotti beans/black beans/cannellini beans etc... what ever you have in your cupboards
Zest and juice of 2 lemons
2 handfuls of cherry tomatoes
2 avocados 
Pinch of paprika, dried chilli flakes, cayenne pepper or 1 fresh red chilli, finely chopped.
2 tbsp capers

2 tbsp black olives
2 handfuls of rocket, spinach, lambs lettuce or another fresh green leaf.
Generous glug of extra virgin olive oil
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Drain the beans/chickpeas. Zest and juice the lemons. Halve the tomatoes. Peel, stone, and chop the avocados. Now add all of the ingredients together in a large bowl and stir gently to coat.

I like to eat this for breakfast with boiled eggs, for lunch with feta, for dinner with roast chicken, for midnight snacks straight from the fridge.