Bring out the Branston - Barbecue Recipes with Pickle, Relish and Sauce

“Bring out the Branston” – the advertising slogan for Branston Pickle – is something I associate with cheese sandwiches, not barbecues. But the brand, which started life in 1922, is now known for more than just pickle and has a range of relishes and table sauces. By inviting a group of food and lifestyle bloggers to the London Barbecue School, they were able to showcase just what you can do with their products - and there wasn't a cheese and pickle sandwich in sight!

 

I've been to the London Barbecue School before; it's run by a very nice man named Alistair who is also the lead tutor at the School of Food. They specialise in using Kamado Joe barbecues, which are ceramic egg-shaped grills that gives you the ability to grill, smoke or sear; the grill itself is in two parts so can be used at different levels to create different heat zones.

 

Edward from Mizkan, the company that owns Branston Pickle, introduced himself and spoke a little about the brand, and then we were told about the recipes we would be cooking. We would be using Branston products in some of the recipes themselves, not just as accompaniments – and I learnt something straight away. Do you know the difference between a relish and a chutney? They often have similar ingredients, but a relish is made to go with hot food while a chutney is meant to go with cold food.

 

We organised ourselves into small groups and chose which recipe we wanted to do, from a choice of:
sticky pork chops
Tex-Mex chicken tacos
mushroom and grilled cheese burger
beer-braised brisket with blue cheese slaw

 

 

I decided I most liked the sound of the steak so my group began to prepare our ingredients.

We were given thin steaks rather than a large piece of brisket as that would have taken far too long to cook; the steaks had already been marinaded so all we needed to do was put them on the barbecue.

Meanwhile two of us got on with making the slaw – I am not normally a fan of coleslaw but thought this looked really good and it did taste great.

To serve, we placed the steak, some slaw, some little gem lettuce and some Branston in a tortilla and wrapped it up - delicious!

I saw people making the other recipes and they all looked very tasty; I would never have thought of using Branston to jazz up chicken tacos and as part of the recipe rather than an accompaniment.

I also cooked some burgers for the rest of the group, which went really well with the Branstons Rich and Smoky sauce; I really had no idea they had so many products beyond just pickle!
 

Restaurant reviews: Miami Florida

We spent the first four nights of our honeymoon in Miami; I laughed when a few months before the wedding someone asked if I had already booked a hotel for the honeymoon and I told them I had already booked restaurants! That just goes to show how much I like forward planning (I’m really not spontaneous) – but also I was realistic enough to realise that if we wanted to eat in a particularly good restaurant we wouldn’t be able to just wander in off the street and get a table.

 

I thought about what kinds of restaurants we wanted to go to in Miami. I was keen to focus on the South Beach area where we were staying, and wanted ones that stood out in some way. I didn’t necessarily want high-end expensive restaurants and realised what I really wanted was to feel like we were really in Miami, so somewhere with a view of the beach or in a lively art deco area. The restaurants also had to fit my husband’s fussy eater tendencies. I found an internet article called “9 best restaurants with a view on South Beach” which was exactly what I needed! So I checked menus and used this to suggest to my husband-to-be where we ate.

 

We were too tired from travelling and the time difference on our first night, so ordered room service at the Fontainebleau hotel where we were staying, which I have reviewed separately.

Stripsteak
 

And for our second night I’d booked Stripsteak, a high end restaurant inside the hotel that is often on lists of top restaurants in Miami. As well as steak, the restaurant is said to serve excellent seafood, but I wanted to try the steak.

 

We had a large comfortable booth and were greeted with real warmth by the staff. When I’d booked they had asked if it was a special occasion so I told them it was our honeymoon and they brought us over a glass of free Prosecco each, which was really nice.

 

I don’t think I’ve ever had a wagyu steak – I’ve had wagyu burgers – and we both opted for the 12oz Australian skirt steak, at $48 apiece. It was excellent steak but to be honest I wasn’t really aware I was eating wagyu or how it is supposed to taste different. A 12oz steak is a lot bigger than we would have at home but the portions are much bigger in America – 14oz or 16oz seems typical!

 

The sides were pretty substantial as well; my husband had parmesan truffle fries and I had the truffle mac and cheese, which I knew would be very filling and I had to leave half of it, which was a shame as it was so good!

 

I was absolutely stuffed at the end but my husband had been eyeing up the dessert menu and announced ‘there’s always room for dessert’. How wrong he was… he wanted the chocolate ganache cake ($14) and when it came we both gasped – I’ve never seen such a big slice of cake apart from when we ate at Gibson’s steakhouse in Chicago (a dessert that the people next to us ordered). The cake would have served 6 or even 8 people easily I think! My husband held his phone up next to it for a photo as a size comparison. They wrote ‘happy anniversary’ on the plate – I guess they’d forgotten it was our honeymoon we were celebrating. We only ate a fraction of the cake so they gave us the rest of it to go; luckily there was a fridge in our room so we were able to enjoy it again the next day!

 

 Smith & Wollensky

 

We also ate at Smith & Wollensky, a steakhouse located in South Pointe Park, at the tip of South Beach just across from the exclusive Fisher Island.

 

 

We were asked if we’d like to sit inside or outside, but the wait for an outside table would be at least an hour and we could see several people smoking outside (we are non-smokers) so opted to sit inside, and were given a table next to the window. We were slightly above street level – you have to go down a flight of steps to get to the street – which meant that the outside awning of the restaurant was obscuring part of the view which meant we couldn’t really see the sun set as I’d hoped. But I did pop outside a couple of times between courses to take photos and enjoy the view as the sun went down – and found five cats sitting just off to the side of the tables as well!

 

Even being inside, the view and the ambience was lovely and the service was excellent. And the food… well, the food was fantastic. We paid less than we had at Stripsteak – it was still expensive, but we didn’t order wagyu steaks – but we actually thought the food was better.

 

We skipped the starters, knowing that once again the smallest steaks would be huge (to us, anyway) and both had the 10 oz Black Angus filet mignon for $46 (about £35 at the time of writing but this was the day before the EU referendum vote and since then the pound has been in freefall!). It was easily one of the best steaks I’ve ever had; beautifully tender, cooked perfectly to medium-rare. I chose to have a loaded baked potato with it ($10) which came with sour cream and bacon, though the potato was a little under-cooked for my liking.

 

We were absolutely stuffed and weren’t going to order dessert and then the waiter came over with…. a giant piece of chocolate ganache cake, almost exactly the same as the one we’d had at Stripsteak – and the same size! They’d asked when I booked if it was a special occasion and I said our honeymoon and so they gave us a printed Smith & Wollensky anniversary card (yes, I said anniversary) and wrote ‘happy anniversary’ on the plate containing our dessert. I’m not sure if people don’t get the difference between honeymoon and anniversary or they just keep forgetting! So it was lovely getting a free dessert but quite funny it was the same giant cake we hadn’t been able to manage the day before! Once again, we ate a small piece of the cake and were given the rest to go, and were able to enjoy it the following day – so we had chocolate cake several days in a row!

 

 

 

Larios on the Beach
 

The same article about restaurants with a view recommended Larios on the Beach, owned by the singer Gloria Estefan and her husband. It serves Cuban food and is located on Ocean Drive, known for its art deco hotels though I’d disagree with the description of it being a restaurant with a view. You can sit outside the restaurant within a roped-off area but it was a very busy area with people walking past and car horns blaring, so we chose to sit inside (where there was air conditioning). If you are upstairs I guess you would have a view over the street and might be able to see the beach as well (across the road but not immediately visible)- I don’t actually know if they have an upstairs seating area as we weren’t offered a table there and instead shown to the back of the restaurant. So in a restaurant I chose for the view, we had no view at all. I took this from the other side of the road to the restaurant:

 

We also weren’t that keen on the food – I thought Cuban food would be a nice change from all the steak, but neither of us has eaten much Cuban food before.

 

To start we shared some empanadas, which were really good, but we found the main courses a bit disappointing. My husband had a breaded chicken steak while I had grilled chicken with onions - I can't remember exactly what it was called.  It was fairly plain and with rice as a side order, actually a little bit dry. Sides to choose from were white rice, wholegrain rice, moro rice, crispy plantain or sweet plantain. I tried the plantain but didn’t particularly like it and we were both really just a bit underwhelmed. I had a nice cocktail and it seemed a pleasant enough restaurant with a nice maritime décor otherwise but as we only had a few nights in Miami I was left wishing we’d chosen somewhere else.

 

Shula's

We had breakfast and lunch in our hotel every day which I've already reviewed; the only other place we ate in Miami was the airport. It was quite early in the morning when we checked in for our flight to Quito, Ecuador, and we had breakfast at a place called Shula's Bar and Grill. I had French toast with sausage which was a bit disappointing - the sausages were round patties rather than actual sausages and the French toast was fine but nothing special, and when I asked for tea I was told they had run out. My husband had chocolate chip pancakes which he enjoyed but again it was nothing in particular to write home about - realistically an airport breakfast was never going to compare to the other meals we had. Next time I'll tell you about the next part of our trip in Quito.

 

 

 

 

Flavours of Thailand Cookery Course at Food at 52

 

 

Thai food has largely been a mystery to me. I’ve never been to Thailand, and when I’ve cooked Thai food at home it’s usually been a case of a spoonful of Thai red curry paste from a jar and adding a tin of coconut milk. That’s Thai food, right? (Uh, not really).

 

I occasionally have Thai food when I eat out, and my future mother in law really likes a particular Thai takeaway, but the last time we got dinner from there, we waited 2 hours, gave up and went and collected it ourselves! I thought at the time, what I shame I don’t know how to make proper Thai food at home…

 

Luckily the nice people at the Food at 52 cookery school stepped in to help. You may have seen that I went to an Old El Paso product launch there recently.

 

The people who ran the cookery school, which Old El Paso had booked for the evening, invited me back to do one of their other courses. I had a look at the list on their website – courses range from kitchen confidence, mid-week seasonal suppers and meat-free Monday meals to the cusines of different countries such as Spanish, Moroccan, Southern Indian, Vietnamese and Thai. I signed up to Flavours of Thailand.

  

The cookery school is near Old Street in London so very easy for me to get to from work. There were 10 people, each at our own workstation along a long wooden table, with the chef John in the middle. The class was quite fast-paced but they don’t assume any prior knowledge – which is good as when it comes to Thai ingredients I didn’t have any. John also demonstrated good knife skills and passed on all sorts of other tips.

 

 

 

We began by making a Thai salad with green papaya – I’d never even come across a green papaya before and looked more like a giant cucumber than the orange-fleshed tropical fruit I was familiar with when I’ve eaten papaya. It was peeled and pushed through a food processor with a shredder attachment – this would form the basis of our salad.

 

 

 

John demonstrated how to prepare the other ingredients then we each took on one or two tasks – I was finely slicing ginger and lemongrass while someone else did red chillis.

 

I was then asked to thinly slice a piece of fillet steak which was sprinkled with lime juice, ceviche style, so it did not actually need to be cooked.

 

 

 

To make the dressing a large stone pestle and mortar was used, and we ground together chilli, palm sugar, garlic, lime juice, coriander stems and white sugar. We were encouraged to taste the dressing and while everyone was sagely nodding, saying it was a bit fiery perhaps, I couldn’t speak! I’m not good with spicy food and at this point wondered how I was going to be able to eat anything… then the fish sauce (nam pla) was added and it totally changed the taste. Before, you could almost pick out each flavour individually – the sharpness of the lime (there was a lot of lime) hit you first, then the warmth of the ginger, then the fiery chilli at the back of your throat. The fish sauce somehow brought all the flavours together and toned down the spice a bit.

 

 

 

To make our salad we took a handful of shredded green papaya, some beef, and added dried shrimp, dried red onion and some mint and poured the sauce over the top. It was delicious!

 

 

 

For the main course we made a green curry with seabass and green peppercorns. John held up some green birdseye chillis and asked how many we thought we should add to the dish.. I was thinking one or two or maybe even less, and I almost fell off my chair when he said the answer was 80! We each took 8 and learned the right way to prepare them – slice in half from the end, sliding a sharp knife through horizontally. Then use the heel of the knife – if it’s a big knife with a small handle like we had – to scrape the seeds and membrane out in one go. I used to turn chillis over and cut with the shiny, hard side facing up but this is wrong and you should actually have the soft underneath facing up.

 

 

The reason for adding so many chillis isn’t just heat – they also give flavour, and colour. Apparently some cheap curries use green bell peppers to give the same colour. But as you don’t want it too spicy to eat, the taste is tempered – as the salad dressing was – with fish sauce.

 

 

The chillis were put in an electric chopper along with something called galangal, some lemongrass, kaffir lime leaves, coriander root, shallots, garlic, shrimp paste, peppercorns, coriander seeds and cumin seeds to make a paste.

 

 

Did you know you can make oil from coconut milk? When you open a tin of coconut milk you always get a thick layer of cream on top and the liquid – like water – underneath. Spoon off about half the thick cream and heat in a wok or frying pan. Keep heating until the cream actually separates – you are burning the water content off and reducing it down to an oil. This means there’s no need to add any extra oil to your pan.

 

 

 

Place 1 level tbsp. per person of the curry paste into the pan and heat, stirring. Pour in the rest of the tin of coconut milk – cream and water – and scrape around the sides to incorporate the green paste and add some fish sauce and palm sugar. We poured this into an earthenware bowl with a lid and left on one side for a while then put the bowl back on the heat to gently heat through. We added sweet Thai basil and peppercorns at the end to serve.

 

 

 

The curry was served over rice and was delicious – it had quite a kick but was nowhere near as spicy as I was expecting and it tasted so good.

 

 

We had a quick dessert which John demonstrated – sticky rice with mango. You just cook some glutinous (rather than jasmine) rice and mix some chopped mango with some mango puree from a tin (which has more flavour and provides the liquid you need). Spoon some rice into a bowl or plate, spoon the mango chunks and sauce around it and sprinkle with some dried coconut and torn mint leaves. Far better than the rice pudding I had as a child!

 

 

 

I really enjoyed the evening and the laid-back atmosphere of the chef- John was a great tutor and happy to answer questions on anything else (e.g. the trick to a good Pad Thai) and made the evening a lot of fun. They don’t stint on the drinks either – aside from suggesting we might want to go easy on the wine until we had finished chopping with sharp knives, the drinks flowed all evening and we really bonded as a group even though most people had come in pairs or on their own as I did. The course cost £115 but for that we started at 6.30pm and went on until 10; had starters of spring rolls, then of course ate the three courses we’d prepared, had plenty of wine and learnt some really useful techniques. I highly recommend Food at 52 – and will definitely be making more Thai food at home!

 

I was a guest of Food at 52 and asked to write a review – all opinions are my own.

Bridget Jones' Blue Soup Dinner Party

I love Bridget Jones. When she first exploded onto the scene – by which I mean the novel by Helen Fielding, as I’d never read the forerunner Independent column – she was a breath of fresh air. The diary style of the novel was unusual for its time (though the epistolary novel has been around since at least 1748 with Samuel Richardson’s famous ‘Clarissa’, fact-fans and literature geeks like me) and not the cliché it is now, but it was Bridget herself who was ground-breaking. Here was a heroine who was flawed, funny and fond of giant pants. She made singledom both depressing and hilarious, and made ‘smug marrieds’ into a catchphrase that I still hear today. I was in a relationship when the film came out, so while I wasn’t quite a smug married, I could read Bridget’s adventures without worrying that I too would die alone and be eaten by cats (one of Bridget’s fears). But when I suddenly became single at 30, Bridget was more of a role model – if this ‘overweight’ (though actually a perfectly standard size), chain-smoking, career in a mess woman could find true love with Mr Darcy, who likes her just as she is, then so could I.

 

Evelyne at Cheap Ethnic Eatz has chosen Bridget Jones’ Diary for Food ‘n’ Flix this month which did bring a smile to my face. I’m not going to describe the plot of the film any more than I have above, because you have almost certainly already seen it, and if you haven’t, you must DO SO NOW.

 

The idea of Food ‘n’ Flix is to cook a dish inspired by the film; it can either be a meal featured in the film or something inspired by the characters, setting etc. But as soon as I saw the movie choice this month there was really only one thing I could possibly make: blue soup. I’m sure you all remember that scene, where Bridget is trying hard to throw herself a birthday dinner party and cook an elaborate menu, which goes horribly wrong. But can you actually remember what she was trying to make?

 

Her planned menu is:

Veloute of Celery

Char-grilled Tuna on Veloute of Cherry Tomatoes Coulis with Confit of Garlic and Fondant Potatoes.

Confit of Oranges. Grand Marnier Creme Anglaise.

 

And as she says in the book, “Will be marvellous. Will become known as brilliant but apparently effortless cook.

People will flock to my dinner parties, enthusing "Oh it's marvellous to be going to Bridget's for dinner, one gets Michelin star-style food in a bohemian setting."”

What Bridget actually ends up serving is blue soup, omelette, and marmalade.

As it’s harder to quote the film here is the relevant passage from the book.

                   *****************************************************

7pm Hurrah! Just got home. Right. Soup will be absolutely fine. Will simply cook and puree vegetables as instructed and then - to give concentration of flavour - rinse blue jelly off chicken carcasses and boil them up with cream in the soup.

8.30pm Aargh aargh, just took lid off casserole to remove carcasses. Soup is bright blue. And have not even started veloute of cherry tomatoes. And fondant potatoes should have been ready 10 minutes ago and are rock hard.

9pm Love the lovely friends. Were more than sporting about the blue soup, Jude and Tom even making lengthy argument for less colour prejudice in the world of food. Why after all - just because one cannot readily think of a blue vegetable - should one object to blue soup?

Aargh aargh. Just looked in fridge and tuna is not there. What has become of tuna? What? what?

9.30pm Thank God. Magda come in kitchen and helped me make big omelette and mashed up half-done fondant potatoes and fried them in the frying pan in manner of hash browns. Tom put the recipe book on the table so we can all look at the pictures of what char-grilled tuna would have been like. At least confit will be good. Looks fantastic. Magda said not to bother with Grand Marnier creme anglaise but merely drink Grand Marnier.

10pm V sad. Looked expectantly round table as everyone took first mouthful of confit. There was an embarrassed silence.

"What's this, hon?" said Tom eventually. "Is it marmalade?" Horror-struck, took mouthful myself. It was, as he said, marmalade. Realise after all effort and expense have served my guests:

Blue soup.

Omelette.

Marmalade.

Am disastrous failure. As Tom remarked, "Michelin-style cookery? Kwik- Fit, more like."

                   ***************************************************

 So my intention was to make Bridget's planned dinner party menu for me and my boyfriend on new year's eve, but to do it properly. Unfortunately, it went wrong - though in different ways to Bridget's - so it was a complete disaster! It would have been funny but my boyfriend's family pet rabbit was unexpectedly put to sleep by the vet that day so we were all miserable and it was the icing on the cake of a terrible day!

Some of the food turned out OK and since this is my entry for this month's Food 'n' Flix I thought I'd still share with you what I did and what went wrong.

First up: Veloute of Celery aka Blue Soup.

I'm not really sure what the difference is between a veloute and a smooth soup so I made a simple celery soup recipe. I sweated some onion and celery in butter, and brought it to a simmer in a pan of vegetable stock.

Season, puree in a blender... and if desired, add blue food colouring so it looks something like this!

For the main course: Char-grilled Tuna on Veloute of Cherry Tomatoes Coulis with Confit of Garlic and Fondant Potatoes

I'd been thinking about doing steak for new year's eve before I decided to cook Bridget's menu and my boyfriend doesn't eat tuna so I was going to do that for me and steak for him, then somehow forgot that she did tuna and cooked steak for both of us!

I found a Martha Stewart recipe for roasted cherry tomato sauce which was easy to make. I had a packet of cherry tomatoes which I put into a roasting tin and drizzled over some oil, balsamic vinegar, brown sugar, thyme and salt and roasted in the oven for about an hour.

Martha Stewart serves them as they come and they do look very attractive - I forgot of course that for Bridget Jones the menu is a coulis, so I should have put it in the blender. This is the sauce after being blended, which I did with the rest to put in the freezer:

 Confit of Garlic

I found this recipe on FoodandStyle.com. All you really do is heat some cloves of garlic in a saucepan, covering them with oil, over a low temperature for about an hour. After that you will have cloves of garlic that are slightly crispy or browned on the outside but beautifully soft on the inside - if you press one, the garlic inside squeezes out - and also some garlic-infused oil which you can use for another recipe.

 Fondant Potatoes

This is where things really started to go wrong. In the book, Bridget complains hers are still rock solid; mine turned to mush. Unfortunately I was so disappointed I forgot to take a photo. The recipe I used was from BBC Food.

I peeled and fried the potatoes then poured in the stock and garlic. I tried to cook them until tender but they went very quickly from being not quite cooked to being far too soft and falling apart. Also, I used a whole stock cube with the 75ml water which I think was too much for this amount of liquid as the potatoes had a strongly overpowering taste of stock which wasn't very nice. I've had fondant potatoes in restaurants so knew what they were supposed to be like, and mine were nothing like that. I decided the stock flavour was so overpowering that I threw the potatoes away and put some chips in the oven!

So instead of tuna steak, veloute of cherry tomatoes coulis, confit of garlic and fondant potatoes, we had beef steak, roasted cherry tomatoes, confit of garlic and chips. And very nice it was too!

Confit of Oranges. Grand Marnier Creme Anglaise.

Bridget's confit of oranges turns out to be marmalade, and I don't think she attempts to make the crème anglaise in the end. I'm pretty sure crème anglaise is just custard and I had an open carton of custard in the fridge so thought I would allow myself one cheat and use that instead.

For the confit of oranges the recipe I used was from Snapguide. It was easy to follow though I reduced the quantities; I didn't think it was setting enough though so I turned the heat up and boiled it for longer. I then left it to cool and when it returned to the pan, it was solid - I couldn't even get a spoon into it! The only thing for it was to reheat it a little so it would soften, and then put it into serving dishes, which I did but the consistency had changed - it was a little like sugar that has dissolved then set into crystals again. And when I did get it into serving dishes, it was rock solid again within minutes - I wouldn't recommend over-boiling it! So whereas Bridget had marmalade, I had solid orange-flavoured sugar... we gave up and had a bar of chocolate for dessert instead.

So like I said it would have been funny if it hadn't been for the rabbit being put down that day - but I can still sort of see the funny side that Bridget had a total disaster with this dinner and so did I!