Lovely jubbly

Unless I’m in a really good mood, I can usually count on the fingers of one hand - excluding my thumb - what I like about living in Edmonton (although when I lived in the UK I rarely needed more than one hand for the same exercise). One of those things is cooking on the barbecue in the summer. I know that barbecue cooking isn’t exclusive to Alberta, but to me it sort of is as before I moved to Canada I had never used a barbecue. I had eaten food cooked on one, but never used one to cook on myself.

When our landlord was showing me and my boyfriend round the house we’re now in, she pointed to the contraption tucked away at the back of the shed and said that we could use it (the barbie) if we wanted to. Seeing as my boyfriend is vegetarian we didn’t think we would ever bother to roll the thing out of the shed, but this being my third summer in Alberta, I find I’m using the barbecue more and more.

Yesterday evening I thought I would try cooking chips on it using Jamie Oliver’s “recipe” from his Jamie at Home cookbook. It’s not so much a recipe more a suggestion (but then I suppose all recipes are): slice potatoes in half inch rounds, par boil for five minutes, drain the water, throw in some olive oil and herbs, shake around, and then place the potatoes on the barbecue. I had only one of the herbs Jamie suggested using, which was rosemary, and I think that most of this got washed away with the olive oil at the bottom of the pan as there seemed to be very little green stuff stuck to the potatoes when they went on the barbecue, but nevertheless, these chips were bloomin’ lovely! (As the geezer himself would say.)

What helped with their loveliness was serving them with rhubarb habanero ketchup. I picked this up when I was downtown yesterday in the city’s gourmet supermarket (for gourmet read sells sundried tomatoes). It’s a locally produced ketchup-cum-chutney and very tasty. Habanero peppers are small spicy peppers from Havana (habanero meaning from Havana – La Habana – my clever boyfriend told me). The ketchup is made by Cooks Corner with all natural ingredients. Lovely jubbly!

So that’s two things I like then…