I made another dinner earlier this month out of the Running On Veggies book I told you about.

(Full credit, since I will probably reference a few dishes from this book: It’s written by Lottie Bildirici. She’s a triathlete and nutrition coach.)

This one is called a BBQ Fajita Bowl, and I didn’t get what made it barbecue until I started perparing it.

It called for a bed of red quinoa, black beans, an avocado - and the heavy lifting was done with some portabella mushrooms and red peppers.

I had to slice both the mushrooms and the peppers - that was no problem. The peppers needed to be tossed in some oil and salt.

The mushrooms needed to be brushed by a mix of a couple of things including tomato paste and cumin. And once you get the cumin going, you realize that’s where the BBQ part of the name comes in. (Maybe you are familiar with these ingredients and already guessed this, but I was not familiar with cumin…or, really, what makes anything BBQ other than putting it on a barbecue.) But brushing the mushroom was the most time-consuming of the prep tasks. It seemed like it would be easier, but the mushroom texture was not super-absorbent immediately and it took a couple of passes to coat them.

They call the mushroom slices mushroom bacon. I guess they’re supposed to be a vegetable substitute (the book is a vegetarian book, after all), so in theory this could be a bacon dish.

I was really proud of this one - you see the picture above, which is what I made, and to the right there is what the picture in the book looks like.

Not bad.

I had some leftover mushrooms and I wasn’t sure what to do with them and a friend of mine gave me a suggestion.

I’ll tell you about that next week.