A can of tuna, a couple of decent eggs (I like those Burford Brown ones) – cooked somewhere between soft and hard-boiled, ideally with a slightly runny yolk. some green beans from the market/garden/allotment – briefly blanched in salty water. A nice lettuce, perhaps some ruby little gem, cut into quarters. A few piquant provencal olives. A couple of warm, waxy salad potatoes – perhaps Charlotte or Roseval. A few thin slices of red onion. Some sweet, British summer cherry tomatoes. Simply arrange artfully on the plate and cover with a dressing made from a neutral oil, a good red wine vinegar, Dijon mustard, garlic crushed in salt, whisked so it is emulsified and becomes a little thick. Drape a couple of decent anchovies on top if you like.

– How I, and I imagine a French person might make a nicoise salad

A whiffy old piece of tuna fillet steak, nuked to oblivion on the stove with cartilage left on. A huge mound of flavourless, tough curly lettuce, outnumbering other ingredients 3:1. Back of the fridge-cold eggs, boiled to within an inch of their lives. Aim for the yolk to go greyish. Green beans, ideally picked and shipped from Kenya some weeks back – cooked without salt and refrigerated hard. Huge, flavourless Dutch tomatoes, cut into large segments. Cold potatoes, cooked – without salt – until not quite soft. Combine that lot into a large bowled plate and pour an ungenerous amount of thick dressing tasting of nothing except oil and perhaps an artificial thickener.

– How Maison Mayci in Harborne makes their nicoise salad

Deeply disappointing, especially as I know the (French) owners would do it much better than this if they were manning the stoves. I still like this chain in Moseley but the Harborne branch has not hit the same levels.

Also the patisserie in all branches is no way as good as it used to be, is it all bought in now?

A shame because Harborne could really use a decent cafe and bakery.

Addendum: I just stumbled upon this recipe by Simon Hopkinson from his new series. Looks good to me.

YSL asked if we were having pickle backs at Sunday’s BBQ cook-off and I initially had no plans. But this insidious question has eaten away at me all day and I decided in fact we WERE to have them.

But a problem; how do you make something that you’ve never tried before and you have no recipe for? A problem – but surely not an insurmountable one?

What’s a Pickle Back exactly? It’s a shot of whiskey (yes, with an ‘e’) with a pickle juice chaser. Simple. It sounds amazing (to me) but Hannah didn’t sound very keen. I doubt Alan Partridge would order one.

It’s an American thing – clearly – but has come to my attention by the excellent sounding Pitt Cue BBQ pop-up in London.

The whiskey bit is easy enough – and for my Southern BBQ quite clearly it should be rye, something like a Sazerac.

But the pickle juice. Now quite clearly to me that needs to be home-made and not from a jar. The idea of drinking Mrs. Hamisha’s by-water is too disgusting to contemplate. Not that people don’t use jarred juice – this impressive blog tried out 4 different “pickle juices” including the juice from a jar of pickled eggs. That’s quite an extraordinary effort.

Their conclusion was that Claussen half-sours had good pickle juice.

But really making my own pickles and juice is necessary. My first thought was that I should just make my normal dill half-sours. But then I thought; would dill-flavoured lactic acid water really be correct. I don’t mind admitting I got my confused face on about now.

Perhaps vinegar pickles are more appropriate?

YKL suggested I should ask for some help from the Twitter account of PittCueCo, they suggested:

“Indeed vinegar is in the brine. Almost 50/50 vinegar / sugar. Not quite. Long live the pickleback.”

Long live the pickleback indeed.

Are they really suggesting a brine of 50% vinegar and 50% sugar? I suppose it’s possible, I don’t really make vinegar pickles usually.

I clarified if water was replied. They replied.

“use some of the extract from the salted cucumbers. Tasty water!!”

Right!

OK, so here’s an entirely off-the-cuff pickle back recipe which I will now try out.

Cucumbers
Enough salt to liberally cover them
500ml vinegar (white wine would be a good choice)
400g sugar
A couple of cloves of garlic, bashed
pickling spice

Salt cucumbers (Whole pickling cucumbers or sliced large cucumbers), reserve the water.

Bring vinegar, sugar and pickling spice to the boil.

Wait for it to cool.

Add cucumbers to brine in a Ziploc bag. Add the cucumber water. Refrigerate.

Then after a few days, drain and reserve the pickle water and serve with rye whiskey!

Don’t do this yourselves until I’ve tried it first.

Any suggestions welcome.

Update: I just tried this and it seems terribly sweet. Perhaps the salt from the cucumbers will balance this, if not I will add some more vinegar.

Photo by my wifelet Hannah

The few times we’ve been to the Selfridges restaurant – usually on a Sunday lunchtime – it’s been the same story. A half-empty restaurant. Glacially slow service. Warm Coke, with too little ice served from the always-disappointingly small 250ml bottle (that’s a mixer size in my view). Burgers are bought-in, evidenced by their regular shape and harsh onion flavour which you know will linger all afternoon. Chips are limp and too thick. Hannah’s tomato soup has the rasping acidity which comes from tedious and unripe glasshouse tomatoes. The chef doesn’t even the sense to roast them to give sweetness. Red mullet was, in the words of Alan Partridge, “burnt to a crisp – so it can only be identified from its dental records”. And the long, lingering “can we get the bill”, “now can we pay the bill” stalemate usually involves the walk of shame to the cash register. Like you don’t know the procedure for paying in a restaurant.

The food hall is no better. Yo Sushi! (!!) has turned into a grim vision of a future without fish. So infrequently now does anything containing fish pass along the conveyor belt you could give it 50 points in I-Spy. Your protein options are the ubiquitous tofu and chicken tonkatsu. The worst sushi in the world – the hideous Californian roll – waves past every 30 seconds. This hides a crab-flavoured stick (again, thanks Alan). When you do spot tuna it’s buried as a near invisible sliver, deep in a maki roll.

The Tiffinbites concession is worse still, a Pakistani friend still winces at the memory of eating their sad, reheated curries which have the lifeless colour of having sat around for a day or two and taste only of what Harold McGee would describe as “leftover flavours”. I remember the early Tiffinbites near Liverpool Street which served reasonably cheap, lively, vibrant curries. That’s not what you get here.

I’ve never tried the noodle counter which is always packed. But my friend Lap says that the laksa is “pretty good” but it’s the “only thing he’ll order there”.

Pret A Manger is a good option if you can fight your way over the mums wielding toddlers and prams like an offensive weapon.

The sad Selfridges diner concept which can’t decide if it’s American or not and is a similar story to the main restaurant. The burgers are sad and £5 too expensive.

The rest of the food hall is little better. They used to have a cheese counter with overpriced, poorly affineured cheese. That’s gone now. Fresh food options are virtually nil. They used to sell the estimable Walter Smith’s pork pies, albeit for a large premium over the same pie from Walter Smith in the indoor market. His pies are both great-tasting and locally made – so this couldn’t last and they swapped them out for the inferior *East* Midlands Mrs. King pie (they are OK but not a patch on Walter’s).

The biltong counter does an inexplicable trade.

There’s no fresh meat or fish or veg. London Selfridges has Jack O’Shea’s fine meat counter, with a range of aged beef that brings tears to the eyes. Here the best option for umami is marmite chocolate.

It’s sad that this icon of Birmingham, still the place we take visitors to first for its fabulous exterior has such poor eating options.

A massive missed opportunity.

Lunch at the Star Inn, Harome. Just pictures really because I’m feeling a bit lazy. Stand-out dish was probably the duck egg with shrimps, “little crab sandwich”. All lovely and buttery and eggy and dill-y and mace-y. Andrew Pern’s recent Great British Menu dish of rhubarb twenty-seven ways (approximately) was most notable for its Yorkshire Puddings (two each!), filled with rhubarb compote and pistachio custard. A little pot of venison cottage pie which went with roe deer was also rather toothsome. Hannah was on the whole a little less impressed with her fish dishes. But she’s crap at ordering I’ve come to realise. Generally speaking it was “all good baby”.