BBQ summer

There has been a lot of noise in the newspapers back home about how the Met Office got their forecast for the summer so wrong. The promised BBQ summer has been drowned by the wettest July on record. It seems odd that this year in Finland the weather has consistently allowed me to set up the kitchen outdoors on an almost weekly basis after the washout of last year.

Yesterday the Boss and I had a fairly quiet day at home. We've got things to do but decided not to do them. Instead there was the very serious job of sitting in the chair in the garden doing very little. I am sure that once the baby arrives moments like that will seem strange and remote, but who knows?

As the day was a lovely one we planned to BBQ, we knew that we would be having potato salad as the Boss has dropped hints to me this week that I have been letting her down in the provision of potatoes!

Our challenge in Finland is mayonnaise. The shop bought stuff is shockingly bad. I would ordinarily make my own but with the Boss building us a baby in her laboratory I need to cook all the eggs in the kitchen. So we cheated and mixed in some mustard which meant that neither really tasted bad. We then added hard boiled eggs, broad beans and some bacon lardons to give it flavour.

For the main we put some cubed pork in a marinade of soy sauce, mirin and sesame oil for a few hours and then put it on skewers with leek. The idea was to make it dead simple, look attractive and taste good! They only took a few minutes to cook and so afterwards we put a bit of wood on the BBQ to make a fire and sat out into the evening chatting about nothing in particular.