AIBU to HATE the barbeque season?

[cyrilsneer]

I think I must be the only one... Everyone gushes about how simple life is when their husband "just barbeques"...

My husband loves barbequeing (why? It is just a grill, the same as the one in the kitchen?) and here's what it involves for me:

Spend three times as much money in Waitrose as usual because you can't just do a chicken breast each or a few sausages each... No, you have to have the chicken breast, the sausages, a little steak etc etc

Spend ages stuck in the kitchen making salads, marinades and so on

Make umpteen trips, trotting in and out, to schlapp everything outside to lay the table

Get pissed off when, just as the food is being served, everyone starts sprinting around because it is too bright and they need their sunnies (then can't find their sunnies) or too cold and they need a hoodie (then can't find their hoodie).

Have to bundle the table-cloth straight into the washing machine because someone always blobs salad dressing

Feel like committing murder as I find the dirty, smelly grill in the belfast sink in my utility room where Mr Sneer has "left it to soak" and gone off to work on Monday morning, forgetting all about it.

All of this just so we can have sausages (possibly slighty overdone on the outside, possibly slightly underdone on the inside?) that split and look rough???

Am I the only one? We've just had the first of the year today and it's all come flooding back. Am I the only person that thinks "roll on September" so I can stick a casserole in the oven and make life easy for myself?

I think I must be a miserable cow. Everyone loves barbeques except me. I just don't get it...

I love me own bbqs, biut hate other peoples'. No-one round here seems to know the meaning of restraint so an afternoon bbq usually ends at 2am with a contant braying, cackling and Dooof-doof-doof music.

I often do extra sausages or chicken breasts, which can be eaten cold next day in a sarnie or with salad. And I cook tomatoes, pepper halves and big flat mushrooms as accompaniments. DH likes those big salad onions; you can do thin slices of oiled aubergine and courgette too. It's not all about meat and fish.

We don't always eat outside either, on colder evenings we eat inside.

I really recommend kettle barbeques, when you put the lid on it keeps the flames under control and food is roasted and cooked through without burning.

noddy makes a good point though, why do so many people play bob marley nonstop for their BBQs?

hours and hours, it's just boring after a while

also disrespectful, the man was a vegetarian after all

you're just not doing it right.

'If you're eating outside get a vinyl topped tablecloth, you just have to sponge it off. I don't get how a tablecloth gets any dirtier with BBQ than anything else.'

I wish! Last year resorted to using throw away tablecloths and paper towels instead of napkins because the bbq sauce is impossible to remove. I hate using this sort of thing but our tablecloth was stained beyond repair. I have now bought a cheap white tablecloth and 50 napkins from the local wholesalers. They should be able to withstand a boiling bleach soak. DH makes his own dry rub mixes and uses my coffee grinder. It makes for an interesting morning when he hasn't cleaned it out with bicarb.

Ah but there is a difference between barbecuing and 'having a barbecue'.
Just like there's a difference between having dinner and having a dinner, or a dinner party.

We barbecue pretty much every day the sun comes out, it's just an alternative method of cooking. We are out in the garden so we cook in the garden - Potatoes/tomatoes etc in the fire, meat, mushrooms/kebabs/corn etc on the grill. Salad and fruit salad. There's no more prep than an indoor meal. We don't have to invite anyone reound (though we may do, but with the same frequency as we would do with an indoor meal) and we don't play music.

And whoever cooks, cooks, there's no male/female outdoor/indoor divide.

Agree. Us Brits get it all wrong, piling loads of overcooked meat on our plates.

Barbecues should only be brought out for mass outdoor catering - and even then kept to one or two items - i.e. simple hot dogs / burgers / fish kebabs.

A bottle of ketchup, a bottle of mustard, a bowl of rocket and some rolls. No more. Keep it simple.

My dear friends rush to host the first barbie of the season and always serve copious amounts of charred meat... still they're entertaining, it's their washing up not mine.

MsScarlett - that sounds like my parent's way of cooking in the summer. It's nice I admit. Also really effortless because it's kept simple. I wish dh could be arsed to help me do that.

We had a barbecue this afternoon.

DH cooked the meat (Welsh black beef burgers, free range chicken breasts and saddleback pork sausages from the farm shop, so no supermarket meat). DS1 made the salads etc. DS1 and DS2 carried everything from the kitchen to the garden. We didn't use a tablecloth, and definitely didn't play Bob Marley. Fruit kebabs for pudding, DS1 helped me to chop the fruit and then everyone just helped themselves.

DH and DS1 washed up

I love barbecues, they are far less work than a roast!

I love barbeques ,I am this minute chilling in the garden in the sun with a nice full belly and all the benefits of three glasses of
chilled rose.
Must say I haven't had to prep anything just show
up

my bil always insists on a bbq when we visit. he gives a time, say 2pm, we arrive more or less on time and hungry but he only starts the fire around half 3, first food at half 4. sooo annoying. and it is all supermarket marinated cheap meat. soooo annoying.

When I live in NZ (when it was always sunny!) we used the BBQ for breakfast/lunch and dinner! I don't get what all this 'lots of prep' is about. I catered a BBQ for 50 last May and even then I didn't have tons of prep it took my an hour the previous evening.

Were I live now people use their outside grills right through the year and often have them attached directly to their main gas supply. so cooking on the barbeque is very normal. Having a BBQ to me means having friends around for a bit of a party and in the summer we eat all our meals outside.

For an ordinary family meal at the weekend it's not much different to a normal meal except for the grill prep. So we might have more than one type of sausage, but otherwise we cook either chops or steak or burger or sausages etc. In fact it's not really 'we' as dh does all the prep and cooking, with help from dd as she fancies herself as a bit of a BBQ queen. We never wash the grill and have a wooden table which gets brushed after meals but not washed. We also do a lot of campfire cooking (much more fun as xkittyx we all enjoy playing with a fire)

So I think you need to say to your family that if they want BBQs that's fine, but that you are scaling back on them, to one meat and one salad, unless anyone else wants to put in the work.

I really dont like the smell or taste of barbecued meat. I would much rather cook it inside on the cooker and leave all the mess in the kitchen.

That aside, a nice table full of salad and pasta and bread and veg to eat outside is very nice.

Why do you set the table and use a tablecloth for a BBQ?!

What I loathe about BBQs (at other peoples houses - we had one for one summer once and I put it in a skip at the earliest opportunity), is that the food always seems to come in dribs and bloody drabs.

For example, 8 people sit around starving and eventually a plate with 4 sausages is produced, then another hours wait for 2 blackened burgers, then another hour and some half raw chops and a chicken breast that resembles a burnt flip flop is presented.

By this time, everyone is drunk, hungry and stinks of BBQ smoke.

Everyone sits around waiting for not enough, rubbish food which is accompanied by limp salad which has been sitting around for 3 hours in the sun and dried out bread that the flies have been landing on for 3 hours.

I HATE BBQ'S!

We are having a house full here on Easter Sunday, and I will cook something INSIDE that can be eaten outside and everyone will get to eat at the sametime.

Who the feck uses tablecloths outside anyway? I don't even use 'em inside.

I did enjoy the OP, references to shopping in waitrose, a utility room and a belfast sink all in one post!!

Our BBQ's generally involve burgers/sausages in baps on paper plates. But then again I am awfully common.

Loath Barbeques .Nothing on this earth will get me to eat charred /half raw meat/chicken/ sausages.
I cansee the food poisoning and just cant eat it .
Also the smell- how delightful having lunch in the garden while the smoke billows and everything stinks -yuk

Compo - we have up to 50 people over every weekend for our bbq's. Our table of choice is a 6ft folding table which looks as ugly as sin. I refuse to spend $10,000+ on nicer tables because we don't have anywhere to store them during the winter months. Some of our guests are the people (we invite the whole family) who DH sells to so it does need to look like we are making an effort. I managed to get all of our seating arrangements for less than $2500 (tables 2nd hand and chairs new) and everything fits nicely into the basement storage area. For that price you can bet your bottom dollar they are ugly!

I don't hate them but, would prefer to make the food inside and serve it outside ( IYSWIM ) It takes twice as long for considerably less. I do love being outside as much as possible though......Just not surrounded by smoke.

Our neighbours were BBQing in November :O

Wanttobe that's not exactly a normal BBQ situation though is it? You are essentially holding a function every weekend, most people are just cooking a family meal outside.

Not a great fan but I'll scarf the grub if someone else has cooked it. Can't be arsed with the palaver on my own account.

cyrilsneer You are putting too much work into a BBQ. Get some of your guests to help, that's the point... big BBQ's and everyone brings something and gets put to work. We BBQ a lot but just to cook meat grill off some veg, nothing spectacular by any means. But sausages overcooked on the outside, undercooked on the inside?: your DH is cooking them on high. Turn down the burners.

We have a gas BBQ and use it 3 or 4 times a week. We just see it a s our "grill". I find it easier and less easy to cook meat on there than in the oven. So I am not really getting all the loathing on here!

Having friends round for a BBQ is no more work than having friends round at any other time. You always make more effort when people come round so it is probably not the BBQ that is the issue!