Al fresco

I love cooking and eating outside. Now, I know that to many of you lurkers and commenters from the US, and certainly those from Oz, BBQing in summer is a way of life, not an occasional party. Slap a steak (or some shirmp) on the BBQ and dinner is served.

In the UK, it's a different matter. A BBQ is a sort of astounded, hurried celebration of unexpected sunshine. Or a sort of rain dance. It usually involves family and friends and neighbours, and the eternal promise of everyone piling into the house when it starts to rain half way through.

The food? Well, underdone chicken with burnt skin is traditional, and you have to have scorched burgers AND charred sausages. Maybe ribs. Sometimes steak, but more likely something made from the sweepings of butchers' floors shaped into the SHAPE of a steak. Other cheap cuts of meat soaked in some toxic waste designed to enhance flavour and create a nice, healthy, neon colour are often included. Seeded burger buns (white - because it would be a terrible thing if some fibre were to work its way into this veritable meat feast), limp lettuce, an ocean of ketchup and usually some gummed and processed version of coleslaw swimming in a milky liquid mendaciously called mayonaise.*

For someone who is aspiring to maximum healthy intake of red meat being once a week (I said aspiring, not achieving) and who strives for her 5 A Day, (again, note the strive) the BBQ as interpreted by many Brits is viewed with something approaching horror.

BUT. I love cooking over charcoal. I love parties.

So, here and now, I make two exceptions:-

ONE. A proper party. I have one coming up that I'm really looking forward to!

TWO. USING the BBQ, as opposed to HAVING a BBQ like the one outlined above.

And when I am USING the BBQ (lumpwood charcoal from managed Cumbrian woodlands, mark you *waves finger*) two of my favourite things to cook are fillet steak marinated in soy sauce, sesame oil, ginger and garlic (with a little bit of dark brown sugar) and fillets of salmon basted with hoi sin sauce.

What are your favourite BBQ specials? And side dishes? No blackened raw chicken, if you please!


* I would like to say that in spite of all my food views, I do, occasionally, enjoy a traditional British BBQ as much as the next woman. ;-)