The Condiment Queen

Free Range Chicken

Im very much at the point where vegetarianism is a viable option.
You think that eating ethically sourced meat would be enough, but some days it just isn't.

Watching Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Chicken Run on Channel 4 last night has made me really upset. I haven't bought chicken that wasn't free range in quite some time but I know there have been meals when I must have done and its made me feel deeply ashamed. Not so much because an animal had to die (although that is increasingly part of it) for my pleasure but because of the 45million chickens every year that are killed by the poultry industry for no real reason. Awful stuff. Great TV.

If only I could stomach Quorn (urgh)...

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Jamaica

I am one of those awful people who has to have a theme before I can have a party. So this summer we’ve a Jamaican BBQ, twice and a very nice greek one as well. The Jamaican one works best because it employs the best two condiments known to humanity – ketchup and hot sauce.

A bbq is a world made special by charred flesh and special sauces. According to Harold McGee it’s the best way to ingest carcinogens. Mmmm carcinogens. 

We bring to the table Hot Sauce, made from the mighty haberño chilli, carrots, vinegar and god knows what else. Then we also put out some ketchup to mellow all that heat out.

But while the mighty purchases are being used to best effect, we are pleased to discover that it is the marinade from the jerk chicken, boiled down, reduced and poured over the chicken that makes the whole thing really special.

While discovered Jerk Chicken a few years back I thought I needed to find something 'new' with which to partner it. Rice & beans and coleslaw is what they serve it with in the Caribbean, but to my dinner party brain I thought coleslaw might be too low brow, and rice & beans to far fetched. I have of course be proved wrong.