Summer barbecue

If I could, I would happily spend all summer cooking on a barbecue. However, as I choose to spend my summers living in a 2nd floor flat in Scotland (with an extra flight of stairs down to the garden, at basement level) daily barbecue use is not really an option. We do try to throw at least one barbecue party every summer, and do a bit of spontaneous barbecue cooking when the mood strikes us.

The only recipe on this post is one for having a good time, and it goes like this.

Ingredients
2 barbecues
plenty of meat, fish and vegetables
1 gardenful of people

Method
Light the barbecues. Once the flames have died down and the charcoal is covered with white ash, cook the food and serve it to some of your favourite people. Thank you all for coming.



And don't forget the babies
We seem to have had a bumper crop of babies this year. Here are just three of them: Yago, Iain and Ellis.







Hip to be square
My trusty old barbecues finally rusted away last summer, so I had to replace them. Usually, in an annual triumph of hope over experience, Scottish shops have piles of unsold barbecues by late July and you can pick them up at half price or less. Unfortunately, this year, the retailers seem to have learnt their lesson, and I had to do a lot of phoning around before I finally tracked down a couple of barbecues. One of them is shown below. (Lurking in the background, under the Outback cover, is my neighbour's rarely used gas-fired barbecue. Pah!) Apart from my preference for charcoal over gas, I also prefer square to round, and will have no truck at all with deep kettle style barbecues.