Carmela's BBQ chicken kebabs

As Sammy has his own kebab recipe, I thought it only fair that Carmela should have one too, so this is what we came up with. We took these camping with us and we didn't get any shots of the food, but I did catch Carmela loosing off an arrow.

Ingredients
1 kg skinless chicken breast
4 tbsps tomato sauce
1 tbsp dark soy sauce
1 tbsp honey
1 tsp sesame oil


Method

1. Cut the chicken into chunks.
2. Mix the tomato sauce, soy sauce, honey and sesame oil together.
3. Pour over the chicken pieces, mix well and leave to marinade (anything from 30 minutes to overnight).
4. Preheat the oven to 220oC, and line an oven tray with lightly greased foil.
5. Thread the chicken pieces onto skewers, and cook in the hot oven for 12 minutes.

Sammy's chicken kebabs

Sammy and Carmela are gradually doing more and more cooking, and right now this is Sammy's favourite thing to do with chicken.

Ingredients
1 kg skinless chicken breast
juice of 1/2 lemon
6 tbsps of natural yoghurt
2 tbsps of chickpea flour
1-inch piece of ginger, peeled and finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, peeled and finely chopped
1/2 tsp chilli powder
1/2 tsp turmeric
1 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp garam masala
1 tsp salt

Method

1. Cut the chicken into chunks, put in a bowl and mix well with the lemon juice.
2. Mix the yoghurt and the chickpea flour, then add the ginger, garlic, spices and salt, and mix well. Pour over the chicken pieces, mix well and leave to marinade (anything from 30 minutes to overnight).
3. Preheat the oven to 220oC, and line an oven tray with lightly greased foil.
4. Thread the chicken pieces onto skewers, and cook in the hot oven for 12 minutes.

Barbecue sauce chicken kebabs

A quick chicken kebab recipe.


Ingredients
500g chicken breast
3 tablespoons tomato ketchup
1 tablespoon dark soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon chilli paste
1/2 tablespoon sesame oil
1 tablespoon sunflower oil

Method

1. Skin the chicken breast and cut it into chunks. In a large bowl, mix the marinade ingredients. Add the chicken to the bowl, mix well with your hands ensuring that all the pieces are basted in the marinade, cover the bowl with clingfilm and leave in the fridge overnight (or for as long as possible if you are making this on the day of the barbecue).
2. Shortly before you are ready to start cooking, thread the pieces onto skewers - 4 or 5 pieces on each skewer at most. Grill over a nice hot barbecue.

Seekh kebabs with coriander

I've been a bit lazy with my barbecues this summer, as a result of which we have all eaten a LOT of sausages. Anyway, we decided to say goodbye to Edinburgh for the summer with a proper barbecue, so in addition to a couple of different types of chicken kebab, some plain mince kebabs, some veggie dishes and a bit of home baking, I made some spicy little seekh kebabs with fresh coriander.


Ingredients
250g minced lamb
250g minced pork
2 teaspoons garam masala
1/2 teaspoon chilli
1/2 teaspoon salt
small bunch of finely chopped coriander


Method

1. Put the mince in a large bowl, sprinkle all the other ingredients over it and mix very well with your hands. If you have time, leave to stand for an hour or so.
2. Take a small handful of the kebab mixture and shape into a sausage around a skewer. Repeat until you have used up all the mixture. (500g of meat should yield around eight kebabs, depending on the size.)
3. Grill over a nice hot charcoal barbecue and serve with pitta bread and a chunky vegetable salad (lovingly prepared by your other half).

Chicken kebabs

Spain (or at least Cadiz) has a surprisingly primitive barbecue culture. For somewhere where the weather is reliably good for 6 months of the year and intermittently so for the other 6 months, I can never understand why there is not much tradition of outdoor cooking and that most gaditanos limit their barbecues to tossing some sardines onto a grill.



Despite this, a lot of Spansh food is actually well-suited to barbecues, and these little chicken kebabs are really just my version of the pinchitos de pollo which are commonly found in both butchers' and restaurants.

Ingredients
1 kg of chicken breast
4 teaspoons of mild curry powder
4 tablespoons of sunflower oil

Method

1. Cut the chicken breast into large chunks.
2. Mix the curry powder and sunflower oil in a large bowl, cover the chicken chunks in the mixture, cover with clingfilm and marinade in the fridge for at least 4 hours.
3. Thread the chicken chunks onto wooden skewers (3 or 4 pieces per skewer) and cook over a hot barbecue.
4. Serve in a hot tortilla wrap (toasted over the barbie), with some salad and sauce.

Playing with fire
No doubt this defies every rule in the health and safety manual, but I think kids should be allowed to barbecue too. Here is Carmela expertly placing some kebabs and sausages on the grill.



And here is grillmeister Sammy, checking to see whether the flames have died down yet.

Barbecued Chinese trout in tinfoil parcels

Barbecued fish is great, but is not quite as robust as meat or vegetables. If you are doing whole fish like sardines or small mackerel, then a little grill holder is good, as you can cook them in this on top of the barbecue. Another good technique for fish is to marinate it and cook it in a parcel of tinfoil.



Ingredients
1 trout, gutted and cleaned
1 large chunk of fresh ginger
2 spring onions
2 teaspoons of light soy sauce
2 teaspoons of sesame oil

Method

1. Cut off the trout's head and tail, and cut it into 3 equal-sized sections. Put the trout in a bowl.
2. Mix the marinade ingredients together, then pour over the trout, cover with clingfilm and leave to marinade in the fridge for a couple of hours.
3. Wrap each piece of trout in a piece of foil and cook over the barbecue until done, turning once (at least 8 minutes and maybe more, depending on the heat of your barbecue).

Hands off my camera
One of the curses of digital cameras is that they break down the barriers between what is a toy and what is not. This means that kids feel free to grab them and take hundreds of awful, out of focus shots with them which their parents then have to spend hours deleting (usually after midnight). However, I really liked the one below and spared it from the usual cull. Well done Sammy.

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.

Barbecued meat

I don't hold with the idea of cooking pizzas on barbecues, and other such nonsense. In my book, barbecues are for cooking high-quality meat, which has been thinly cut and marinaded, and for cooking fresh, oily fish such as sardines and mackerel. As a sop to any vegetarians, I may even add the odd sliced, marinated courgette, but woe betide anyone who tries to cook one of those nasty vegetarian sausages on MY barbecue!

The barbecue below was one I did at Zahora. The meat comes from Antonio, our butcher in the market at Cadiz. I need to find a way of taking a photo of him holding a whole oxtail so I can post it with the caption "Nobody beats my meat!"



The steaks were just marinaded with a bit of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and plenty of fresh oregano.



The ribs were marinated in mojo picón, a spicy garlic, chilli and paprika sauce from the Canary Islands.