Never too late to light the BBQ. Adventures in meat and fish.

A few weeks ago I managed to get hold of a beautiful (self assembly) red barbeque at a very decent price through my employer Tesco. The boxed and un-assembled item has sat in a corner of my bedroom until yesterday morning. Feeling suitably inspired, I took all the components out of said box and carefully set aside all the alphabetically signalled nuts and bolts and washers and tentatively started to assemble the beast. The very notion of 'Self-assembly' takes me down the deep dark and scary route of assembling mainly Ikea furniture when I was married. My ex still enjoys the slightly off kilter and upside down Ikea wardrobe I put together in 2001 - A Structural Odyssey. It took a few strong mugs of tea to get me in the mood for the pages and pages of bbq assembly instructions.

As I intimated in the previous sentence - it took a wee while but, due to some unforeseen great patience of mine coupled with the relatively easy instructions it was finally ready for action some approximately ten hours later (joke). Finally assembled in under an hour - it had a photo opportunity in the garden. My elderly neighbour Betty actually cooed at my new assemblage like an 80s Plus pigeon on heat. I often wonder what my neighbours must think as I continually bring my gadgets and meals outside to be photographed for this blog! The light is so much kinder than indoors.

In actuality I took the bbq around to the lesser inhabited side of my house (my front lavender filled garden) so that any wood smoke from initially firing up the bbq wouldn't annoy anyone. Once the embers were glowing I put on some mackerel fillets. The whole mackerel fish happen to be on offer on the Tesco counters at half price as I type. On Saturday I purchased half a dozen of them whole and cleaned and filleted them at home. The trimmed fillets then  sat in my fridge in a covered casserole dish for two days. There was no particular reason for this excepting that I had intended to make to make mackerel pate from the fillets once the bbq was up and running. Not quite smoked mackerel in flavour but something similar.

I cooked the mackerel fillets on silver foil so that they didn't burn or stick to the metal griddle.

'Once the embers were glowing...'

Rather than waste the hot embers on solely cooking the mackerel I also endeavoured to cook some German Bratwurst sausages, some small bits of sirloin and some chicken legs. The Bratwurst came out the wurst in terms of being too gebrannt (burnt skins). However, the little bits of sirloin steaks and the chickens legs turned out to be much more controllable and less prone to a charcoaled effect than the pale white sausages.

The Bratwurst were added to some sauerkraut, gherkins and Dijon mustard for a truly Germanic lunch.