Homme cuisine and feu d'artifice

After Friday morning’s procession around the bay, the Fêtes de St Vincent reached its spectacular climax with that evening’s firework display over the same water.

Having made the gargantuan mistake last year of imagining that we would easily be able to find somewhere to eat, and then discovering that this was far from the case, as thousands of people pour into the village, we had resolved to eat at ‘home’.

One of the major selling points of the place we’re renting is that it has a small roof terrace – delightfully private and a total sun trap. And on that terrace is a small barbeque.

I’d picked up a large steak (quite enough for the two of us) and a length of the local Catalan sausage, and we marinaded the former in garlic, oil, a squeeze of lemon juice and pepper.

And then it was time for a spot of homme cuisine.

The Other Half got a little fire going and eventually, popped on the meat. Since there was no through draft and because it was so small, it turned out to be a tad more awkward than he had imagined, given his experience in these matters.

However, he got there and we dined pleasantly at the window, as people continued to cram into whatever space they could find to watch the display.

One of the other selling points of this house is that the aforementioned roof terrace is part of an added third floor, linked to the rest of the house by a small room, which has a wine fridge that keeps nothing very cold – but also two huge windows that give a wonderful vista right over the bay.

From the moment we’d spotted this particular place, we know that it would fully come into its own for the fireworks.

Indeed, when the display was underway, we could almost feel it.

Fountains of light cascading down Collioure’s iconic bell tower, chateau and lighthouse; gold exploding in the velvet heavens.

Red, green and blue flowers bursting into bloom and fading away in seconds; purple streaking into the sky above, reflected in the mill pond sea below.

And, as with last year, red hearts above.

I never used to be much of a fan of fireworks, but done like this – as opposed to your father fiddling around in the back garden with a rocket or two and a catherine wheel on 5 November – they’re quite wonderful.

The added bonus was that having such a view also enabled me to rest my arms on the window sill and keep steady as I photographed it.

This is not quite the end of the festival – there were more sardanes yesterday and a ‘traditional ball’ in our part of the village at night.

As we returned from eating out, we found the carpark at the back of the beach full of dancers (there was even an example of French dad dancing) as a band played on the stage that had been erected next to the pétanque court.

It was more of the same boisterous fun, with a touch of anarchy, that characterises the festival – and seems to be a reflection of Collioure as a whole.

Congratulations and Jubileeations

Whatever one might think of the institution of monarchy generally or in the UK specifically, avoiding the splurge of Diamond Jubilee events is next to impossible.

There is something altogether surreal about watching an elderly woman who always seems mild enough and who has few meaningful powers (although let’s not forget the Privy Council) being fawned on by people.

Large sections of the media in particular seem to be having a pre-Olympic competition in sycophancy and hyperbole.

Perhaps we need a figurehead. Perhaps not. Perhaps a monarch is better than a president. Perhaps not.

But whichever side of that little debate you come down on, it’s a tad disingenuous to go on at length about her longevity when, unlike the overwhelming majority of her subjects, she has all the benefits of just about the best of everything – including health care – and certainly doesn’t have to get up in the morning worrying about what to get the children for tea – or whether she can afford to pay the gas that will allow her to cook it.

And indeed, to pick up a popular theme amongst some, her model of family life, which on the surface is the oft-spouted ideal, does not seem to have produced great success in terms of her children’s own relationship histories.

Although of course, living in a goldfish bowl doesn’t help. But if that’s the case, then why do we pretty much expect the monarchy to display itself to us – and condemn other celebrities if they do something similar?

The House of Windsor is largely another form of mass entertainment. It’s just one that we all pay for.

So, to jubilate or not to jubilate? That is the question.

Well, since it is probably nobler to join in than to sit churlishly on the sidelines, when the subject of a BBQ was raised among some of our neighbours, I was more than happy.

Indeed, while it’s a pity that it seems to take something like this to get communities mixing, it’s one of the ideas behind today’s Jubilee Lunch.

Our neighbours, though, don’t generally need quite as much encouragement to mingle. For around nearly half the residents of our block, the sun is all that’s required.

The gate that is now in action in our garden, allowing us easy access to the carpark, makes it easier for us to join in too.

On Friday, I nipped down to Borough – first to Savannah, a shop specialising in South African produce that sits under London Bridge station.

There I picked up two packs of boerewors, a six-pack of Castle for The Other Half to imbibe while doing his Man Cooking, and a small bag of biltong to make sure the cats had some sort of treat for the weekend too.

At the market, I found more beers – blonde and dark Brugse Zot from Brugge, plus a US craft beer, Blue Moon, which I decided to pick up for as naff a reason as that being the Manchester City fans’ theme song. I have to say, it's very nice.

I had bottles of magnificent Bavarian white beer Franziskaner due to arrive in an order the following day, together with the necessary ingredients for trifle.

The plan was to have our little party on Sunday, but by Friday evening, the weather forecast was very poor, with Saturday looking like much the best option.

It meant a few changes – the trifle was put on hold – but nothing we couldn’t cope with.

In the late morning, The Other Half made dough for roosterkoek – a South African bread that you cook on the griddle of the braai (BBQ) – while I scraped close to nearly one and a half kilos of Jersey Royals and then cooked them until just ready.

With all this in mind, last weekend, I’d cooked chicken in a pot with water, the giblets, range juice and rind, black pepper, bay and lashings of tarragon, then frozen the stock.

Now, this was brought back to a simmer and then poured over the just-cooked spuds. After a couple of hours, the potatoes had absorbed much of the liquid, taking on the flavours. All that remained was to take a few chives from the garden and snip them over the top.

I’ve bnot actually done much in the way of entertaining, so the amount had been a guess. But it worked well – and I’m delighted that the potato salad was very popular.

So too were The Other Half’s bread and the boerewors that he cooked on our small BBQ, which we wheeled through the gate to join the bigger party.

Two neighbours had put bunting up and, as we sat around, feeling chilled and under a grey sky, it was hard to imagine anything much more British.

But the sun suddenly pushed its way through the cloud, the day suddenly bright and hot.

Later, there were enough ripe strawberries to hand round a small bowl, ensuring everyone had the chance to try at least one.

The stunned expressions and comments as people realised the difference of what they were tasting was perhaps particularly gratifying – simply because it reassures me that I’m not deluding myself about the difference in taste.

Looking back, I don’t think that, even as the bunting fluttered in the breeze, anyone mentioned or gave a thought to the anniversary that it was all supposed to be about.

Beer was quaffed, music played, banter enjoyed – and every one of our small community, from one to 50-odd, seemed to be relaxed and thoroughly at ease.

And if that's not worth a spot of jubilating, then what is?

Let it burn. let it burn, let it burn

It's difficult to imagine any form of cooking that is so inherently masculine - in terms of gender stereotypes at least - as the barbecue. Or the braai, as we know it at the home of The Voluptuous Manifesto, where The Other Half spent a decade of his youth in South Africa.

But cooking over a real fire goes far beyond the masculine. It goes into something far deeper, and something that is part of a much more universal cultural heritage.

And I suspect that that is why, when we smell a certain type of cooking, it calls to us so deeply.

If you've ever walked past a take away (which most of you will have, regularly) you'll know what I mean: it's attractive even when you wouldn't actually dream of trying the fodder because you know that:

a) it'll be full of crap;

b) the taste will never, ever live up to the expectation created by the smell.

The latter is, of course, sometimes true of perfectly good food and drink. Does coffee ever taste quite as good as it smells, for instance? It's a question that always makes me think of Arthur Miller's wonderful A View From the Bridge, where Eddie Carbone tells how unloading coffee sacks is one of the joys of a longshoreman's working life.

Bacon is another such smell, and I blame it for luring me away from vegetarians - years before I became a foodie. Although I am hardly unique in succumbing to meat again under such temptation.

I remember too, the bonfires of my youth: 5 November, just outside Manchester, when we'd go as a family to one or other of my father's churches. There'd be potatoes, wrapped in foil and cooked in the fire itself, to be eaten with meat and potato pies and black peas. I remember them with relish - not least for the excitement of eating food so fresh from something as basic and unconquered as the flames.

But that's rather by the by. The reality is that The Other Half does this cooking rather well – and it's improved because I don't see it (and neither does he, to be fair) as an excuse to use poor produce.

A week ago, I'd spotted boar steaks on Andy's game stall on Broadway Market. Since the date was for 6 July, and since game improves with keeping anyway, I bought them them then and there.

Opening them up, they were very lean. The Other Half wondered about cooking them, but got on with the job. We added venison sausages, since I'd decided to make this our first serious game braai.

So, first of all, he lit the fire.

Don't be fooled. It's excitable to start, but you need to wait a bit. Even if you have to blow it a little to really get it going.

To start with, make the fire from some twists of paper (the Saturday Guardian, which works perfectly well, and the Morning Star, which is also perfectly adequate. Has anyone ever previously suggested such a perfectly left-wing braai?

Then add some wood if you have it and some charcoal. Then light.

But whatever else you do, let the fire burn down. The biggest British mistake is to assume that you have to cook over actual flames.

What you want is the hot coals.

This is the stage at which you might seriously be contemplating putting the food on the rack.

The salad was chopped, pickled beetroot with segements of fresh orange – a great compliment to the richness of the game and incredibly easy.

You can garnish it with a dollop of créme frïche and a shower of cut chives, but it's also perfectly good on its own, for exactly the reasons mentioned above. The original recipe I spotted called for raw beets, that you then had too cook and cool. But however unsophisticated it might be, I like pickled baby beets – and it works beautifully here..

The point is not to allow yourself to do something you don't like.

But what is also clear, is that we shouldn't imagine that the most earthy cooking that we can do is bad just because it carries echoes of our unsophisticated ancestors.

I many not know very much about food, but I know that what The Other Hal;f cooked tonight was very good indeed – and that wasn't just because I'd bought good meat in the first place.

Forget the weather - light the fire

It was hardly perfect braai weather. After a heavy rain shower this morning, I'd nipped up to Broadway Market as the skies cleared and the sun shucked off its grey cover, but as the afternoon wore on, the clouds returned, even as the temperature stayed high.

For various reasons, the last couple of weeks don't really seem to have produced much in the way of major cooking experiences. That's actually slightly deceptive, since I managed, a couple of weeks ago, to cure some pork chops to reasonable effect - a first such effort.

Yet today has had the feeling of being the first 'proper' shopping and cooking Saturday for some time.

Not that that has meant that I've actually done any cooking.

For some time, The Other Half and I have been contemplating the first barbecue - or braai - of the season. To be more specific, we'd been contemplating something that The Other Half has never done before - a fish feast cooked over the glowing coals.

The inspiration was last summer's trip to Collioure - and the boat trip on the Med down to the border with Spain, during which the captain had cooked us sardines on a little fire on board.

Until then, The Other Half has never been inspired to cook fish, but with Cornish sardines now available, it was a perfect opportunity. To three each of them, I added a small piece of line-caught tuna.

By the time the barbecue was hauled from beneath its cover for the first time this year, the weather had already changed direction, setting course for the forecast rain.

Nothing was going to alter our plans, though, and the simple solution was to cook outside and then eat inside, with green olives, slices of baguette and a bowl of the best virgin oil I have with a pool of dipping Balsamico in its midst, plus glasses of rosé on the side.

Captain Eric had cooked his sardines with just a little dried thyme and olive oil. In the absence of any of the former in the cupboard, these were done with oil, fresh thyme, oregano, some flat leaf parsley and some garlic. The tuna was done in oil, pimenton and a little piri piri (I'd forgotten there was even any in!).

And my goodness, weren't they good! Perhaps the simplest meal we've eaten for some time - a real reminder of the taste of the Roussillon.

Before we'd eaten those sardines while afloat, I'd always had problems with bony fish - a very English issue, as it happens. But then again, that was also the first time that I'd picked up a fish in my fingers and eaten it like that, not struggling ridiculously with knife and fork. It adds to the sensuality of the eating as well.

Today's weather might not have been as conducive as we would have wished, but nothing could dent the pleasure and the deep satisfaction of that meal.

Getting in the swing of summer

It feels – finally – as though summer is really here. Glorious sunshine, headily azure skies and heat to warm the marrow of the bones – there's no mistaking it any longer.

With the signs set for a hot weekend, The Other Half and I forewent the pleasures of an evening in the staff bar on Friday and pottered down to John Lewis for a bit of seasonal retail therapy. Specifically, a pair of metal-framed 'deckchairs' and a new braai, since the previous one had started to collapse. still, it had only cost around £20 from a local Turkish shop and had lasted us some years.

All that meant some work in our garden. I suppose it's roughly 15' by about 12' – can't be much more than that – but it's such a precious space. The Other Half spent Saturday de-cluttering it. First, the old braai – a tin box on legs – went out. Then he finally got around to bashing a garden bench into pieces so that we could carry it out and decant it into the communal bins.

We've had that bench for years, having bought it from a small shop on Hackney Road and, when we got it home and mostly errected, found out that it was missing two struts. It was one of those affairs with cast iron ends and wooden slats. For whatever reason, we never got around to going back to the shop and either demanding the struts or our money back.

So it has occupied space against once fence for years: always wobbly and getting wobblier with every passing season. It was long past our being able to sit on it. We talked of getting rid of it some years ago, but Trickie, one of our cats at the time (and as neurotic a cat as we've had) loved it, so we left it there.

But Trickie is long gone. And in the last week, one of the wooden slats fell off. It was a rallying call.

We'd also had a little table and two folding chairs in our tiny space, but both chairs had finally given up the ghost. So we have now simply shoved the table out of the way, leaving the patio clear for the new 'deckchairs'.

And once that was sorted, the plan for the rest of the weekend was really rather obvious. Sitting in the sun with plenty of chilled water and a book.

And then there was food. Obviously a braai was arranged – that was for Sunday.

But for Saturday, I picked up salmon fillets to poach, plus good new potatoes (still Jerseys), fresh garden peas and fine beans.

And then I made the first aioli of the season to serve with it.

This Catalan version of mayo is an utter delight. When I'd made it, I had a struggle to stop myself scoffing the stuff by the spoonful as it set off an orgy of flavour in my mouth.

Don't believe all the stories about emulsions being difficult – all you need to do is take your time.

So, take one – or more – garlic cloves. Peel and crush, then blend with some coarse salt until you get a paste.

Pop that into a large jug and add the yolk of a very fresh egg. Then whisk until you've got a lovely, stiff mixture.

Now, here's the only real trick: as you keep whisking, start adding some good virgin oil – very, VERY slowly: you really need to just drip it in at first. If anything, your mix should stiffen even further. Okay, it takes a few minutes, but keep going – slowly. When you've eventually got something that looks like a really good, stiff, golden mayo, you can add the oil a little faster until you get the consistency that you want.

Decant it into a pot and stick in the fridge – it'll keep for up to a week, although that's only if you can resist the temptation to use it much much quicker!

Man Cooking

You can tell it's nearly summer, because The Other Half decided to cook yesterday.

Well ... in a Man Cooking sort of way. Lighting a fire, watching the fire and then putting meat on the fire, while consuming alcohol.

That's perhaps a little unfair, because he also made 'pot bread', a South African speciality, which is cooked on the grill too. It didn't start auspiciously. He made the assumption that when the recipe said "20ml" it actually meant 'two large spoons full'. And the usual pinch of salt became a spoonful. Which would have been two if I hadn't spotted what was happening. So he produced an incredibly light dough.

I made a side salad of courgettes, very, very thinly sliced (a potato peeler does this well), and then tossed in a dressing of lemon and lime juice, lemon zest, virgin oil, honey, salt and pepper.

This is most definitely not South Africa.

The Other Half was born in Yorkshire, but when 12, his parents decided to move to South Africa – to Pietermaritzburg, to be precise; a place which has been rendered beautifully in print in Tom Sharpe's first two novels, Indecent Exposure and Riotous Assembly (he returned as soon as he'd finished his education and earned enough money for the trip home; and refused to visit until apartheid was dead and buried).

Sharpe's books were published in the 1960s, but the town is still recognisable – and I swear I met one of the characters when visiting a few years ago. A member of the police special squad, he was an old school acquaintance of The Other Half, and we managed a pretty instant dislike of each other.

A group of his former school friends, hearing that we were visiting, decided to arrange a braai for us. By the time of the evening in question, we'd already met one of them and his wife and all got on very nicely indeed. At the braai itself, however, I found myself on the receiving end of white South African customs – the women sit quietly at one end of the patio while the men stand around the fire with cans of Castle beer in their hands, jabbering away.

Sorry, but it just wouldn't do. Fortunately, The Other Half's sister, who was also with us, was company and moral support – since my attempts at convivial conversation with the other women fell about as flat as the proverbial pancake. And my jokes went down like a lead balloon. Perhaps it was because I would insist on actually talking to their menfolk too – and drinking beer. Out of a can.

Braais are not examples of healthy eating. Come to that, South African food – let's clarify: white South African food – is a million miles from healthy eating. There's meat – lots of it. Occasionally with some fish – 'turn 'n' surf' – but you'll struggle to find a vegetable. Other than potato. Mixed with bottled (never homemade) mayo to make a potato salad. And nobody eats that anyway – it's just there for show. That's braais for you. In detail.

The rest of the food isn't much better. Saturated fat and sugar are everywhere – it's no wonder there are high levels of heart disease amongst Afrikaners.

In the middle of the trip, we'd stayed at a resort in the mountains for a week (a break was required from The Common Law Mother in Law and the shopping malls of 'Maritzburg). The exchange rate had allowed us to bask in what was luxury for our inexperienced (at that time) traveling tastes. The dining room was amazing – but finding any healthy and light food was a daily adventure in itself.

After internet research, The Other Half went to three different London addresses yesterday morning, in the hope of finding South African produce to put on his fire – in particular, boerewors, a famous form of sausage. Two of the shops were closed, the third didn't have any fresh meat. He returned with biltong by way of compensation (which The Queen B instantly decided was fabulous) and sat down looking peeved. I refrained from noting that I had advised him to ring first – advice that he had considered silly.

So I returned to the farmers' market and bought steaks so that he could still do the Man Cooking thing – he seemed so disappointed.

But South African beer wasn't to be found for love nor money, so I just poured him a chilled glass of rosé from the south of France. And anyway, he'd already topped his bread with dried oregano and sage and declared it to be "fusion cookery".

It's not much of a braai, to be honest: just a very small tin box on legs, with a rack on top, bought locally from one of the Turkish shops. But then again, such things shouldn't be complex (he pours scorn on those creations that employ gas bottles and so on – presumably that's more Boy Cooking than Man Cooking).

The fire had been going for a while – newspaper (several pages of yesterday's sports section – which I hadn't had time to read before they went to their fate), plus charcoal and some wood (dried branches from the bay tree that we'd saved when we hacked it back last year). And then he put vegetables on (asparagus and a skewered, quartered onion).

The pot bread had squished up (no real surprise – too much yeast and liquid to too little flour). But it cooked very well and tasted darned good. I'm wondering whether I should increase the amount of yeast that I use in order to get a lighter dough.

And the rest of it was all jolly good too.

Perhaps I'll have to let him do Man Cooking again – at least a couple of times while the summer lasts!