I cooked my first barbecue the other day and I think it was a great success, you know, foodwise. I did the basics of any barbecue: sausages, burgers, potato salad and coleslaw.
Not much needs to be said about sausages. Except that they were half price, beef sausages that I simmerred in water for about 10-15 minutes to cook them before frying them.
Burgers were simple as well. A butt load of beef mince, a couple onions and some garlic. In terms of flavouring, I ground up some corriander seeds, thyme, sage, sald and pepper together. I can't say that I could taste all that herbage but I like to believe without it, the burgers would have been boring.
I have made potato salad so many times and each and every time I do something different. This time it was super simple partly because I got lazy and partly because I didn't want to spend so much time on it. This was done the night before for even more time saving-ness. It was just potatoes cubed and boiled, and then the dressing was maybe half cup mayo and half cup sour cream. Into it I threw in two boiled eggs, chopped and some good old fashioned seasoning. I also wanted the dressing to have a bit of a kick, so I decided to add some wasabi to it. As I was too lazy to make up the powder properly, I just added the powder straight into the dressing. I added a good couple of teaspoons but there wasn't much flavour, so I just gave up. And on the day, I didn't get to try any because I was too lazy to eat it before it had all gone.
I had never made coleslaw before but I knew it wasn't hard watching my mum do it. Just shred some cabbage and throw in a bottle of dressing. There was a bit too much cabbage so I had to add some mayo and sour cream. It was an ok coleslaw, however some of the larger pieces of cabbage were a little bitter.
And then my favourite. The chickens. There were four chickens marinated two different ways. One was spicy, with lots of chilli and lots of garlic. And the other was honey and soy. The spicy one was pretty straight forward. Four large chillis, a couple of heaped teaspoons of crushed garlic, juice and zest of a lemon and enough oil to turn it into a sexy marinade. The second one I wasn't as sure about. I used about half a cup of light soy and a good couple of tablespoons of honey. I didn't know if I should add some sourness so I decided to leave it out. I also wanted to put some ginger in to boost the asian flavour however ginger is expensive now and I kind of forgot.
Leaving them overnight (I should have turned them but forgot to), I roasted them in the morning so that come barbecue time, all I'd have to do is colour them up on the hot plate. It all worked very well, except the honey soy got a bit too much colour in the oven, most likely because of the honey. After their turn on the hot plate, I was really surprised that all the chickens came out perfectly cooked and super juicy. Somehow, I had managed to not over-cook them into dryness or under-cook them into... salmonella.
Then came dessert. I didn't know what to do for dessert because there aren't many dishes you can cook on a hot plate. I went for simplicity, fruit kebabs dusted in brown sugar. I used banana, pineapple and watermelon. Perhaps could have used some other fruits but once again, got lazy (this time in shopping). The role of the brown sugar is interesting. It could be argued that it's for some sexy caramelisation, but the natural sugars in the fruit do that anyway. So basically it's there for flavour, and you really could taste it. It also left this really really delicious looking caramel sauce on the hot plate, too bad we didn't get to eat it. But the kebabs were nice, pineapple cooks really nicely, the bananas went soft and fragrant and the watermelon's juiciness was to die for.
So all in all, a big fat smiley face.
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