Grilled Garlic Prawns with Nectarine and Avocado Salad

Start with the prawns themselves. Peeled, raw, not pre-cooked — pre-cooked prawns have already gone through their one window of tenderness and grilling them again just pushes them further into rubber. If your fishmonger or freezer aisle only has cooked ones, you can still make this, but treat the grill time as warming, not cooking: seconds, not minutes, just enough to pick up char and the marinade's smoke.

The marinade is small but doing three different jobs. Garlic for savoury depth, honey for sugar that browns, smoked paprika for a smoke flavour you're not actually generating over a domestic hob. This is worth being honest about: a kazan or a coal grill gives you real smoke as a by-product of fat hitting fire; your frying pan or electric grill pan gives you none of that, so the paprika is standing in for the fire you don't have. Don't skip it thinking it's just colour — on a flat in a UK kitchen, it's doing the job your equipment can't.

Fifteen minutes marinating is a floor, not a target — it's long enough for the surface of the prawn to pick up seasoning, not long enough to start "cooking" it the way citrus-heavy marinades can. If you've got the time, an hour in the fridge does no harm and lets the honey and garlic actually penetrate rather than sit on the surface.

Any neutral oil with no smell of its own will do for brushing and grilling — a light rapeseed oil instead of olive oil for the actual high-heat contact, saving your better olive oil for the dressing where its flavour actually gets tasted rather than burned off. Olive oil has a lowish smoke point for genuinely hard grilling; it's the classic ingredient here, but if your extra virgin starts smoking and turning acrid in the pan, that's your cue it's the wrong tool for that particular job, not a failure on your part.

For the bread: stale, firm, day-or-two-old bread grills far better than soft fresh sliced bread, because it holds structure under direct heat instead of just steaming into mush. Rubbing it with raw garlic after grilling — not before — is the old trick for getting pungency without burning the garlic itself; burnt garlic turns bitter fast, and there's no coming back from that once it's happened.

The elderflower cordial in the dressing is an unusual, very British touch — it's a cheap, familiar bottle in most kitchens here, used for lemonade, repurposed as a sweetener that's gentler and more floral than honey or sugar syrup would be in a vinaigrette. Mustard is the emulsifier holding oil and vinegar together rather than letting them split in the bowl; if you've no Dijon, any sharp, smooth mustard works on the same principle — it needs to be able to bind fat and acid, not necessarily taste of Dijon specifically.

Pine nuts toasted, not raw — raw pine nuts are flat and a bit waxy; a dry pan over the fire until they go gold (watch them, they go from pale to burnt in the time it takes to answer the phone) brings out an oil and bitterness that raw ones simply don't have. Almonds, flaked and toasted the same way, are a reasonable stand-in if pine nuts are pricier than you fancy — the criterion is a small, oily nut that toasts rather than a specific one.

This feeds four as a light main, which in a Sunday-roast household might read as a starter course rather than the week's dinner — it's a warm-weather, outdoor-grilling kind of dish, built for when the idea of a roast feels like too much heat in too small a kitchen.