Too Hot for Fire!

It's bee quite a while since I posted on here.  That doesn't mean that I haven't been cooking with fire, I have but just haven't either deemed it worthy enough to post about or it was simply a repeat of previous successes.  I mean, how often can I post pictures of bread coming out of the oven?

When we designed the outdoor kitchen we decided to include a back wall of open work bricks.  The idea being to allow heat to escape.  During the summer we experience temperatures up around the 40C mark on a regular basis and on these days cooking in the house becomes problematic (i.e. it raises the temperature in the house to unbearable levels) and it should in theory be more comfortable to cook outside. Here you can see the open work bricks let the beetles in too!

This has only been partially successful.  The bread oven is simply too hot in summer.  Open work bricks or not I am now not baking bread at all.  This is a bit sad because I do prefer my own home baked bread but I find that not only is it too hot, working in front of a raging hot oven is not something I can cope with at the moment, but also it is sooo hot I have very little inclination to do much beyond some very basic cooking.

Fortunately the BBQ really comes into its own now.  Simple grilled meats and veggies from the garden accompanied by a salad make for the best of summer lunches.  Here the sweet corn are steaming inside their own natural covering (the outer leaves) only seconds from being harvested in the garden.  Pork chops sprinkled with a little salt and paprika will be teemed up with a warm lentil and pea salad (sage, oregano and spiced vinegar give it a summery lift).

The spiced vinegar is left over from making pickled cucumbers and will be fine used in salads.  The little pot is full of butter, a little smoked salt and some cumin, this will be mashed together and then smeared on our warm corn on the cob.  What could be simpler?

No not a Molotov cocktail that's the vinegar bottle that doesn't have a cork!

Yum!