To ask for your best barbecue ideas?

[Gerbills]

I’m hosting a barbecue for four other people, so five in total, next Saturday evening.

I know I could do the usual sausages and burgers, but for people who do a bit more, what would you do? No vegans or vegetarians. I don’t think salads would be eaten or at least very little.

I’ve got a coal barbecue and I am hosting alone, partner is not invited coming.

I know you said no salads, but a big bowl of mexican street corn and another of cucumber/yoghurt/lemon/mint salad always goes down v well even with die hard salad-dodgers.

Pork shoulder. Cheap cut but slow cooks beautifully. A full one will take about 7-8 hours but you just put it on in the morning and forget about it other than keeping an eye on the temperature.

Bit left field as I only tried it today, but BBQ nachos.

Prepared them as normal, but in silver foil trays and popped on the BBQ (lid down) for a few minutes to melt the cheese / heat up the chips.

Very popular with a bunch of 13 year olds at lunch!

Also - repeat but with s'mores ingredients and get them to dip crackers / rich tea biscuits / bread sticks into. Yum!

When we have a nice BBQ , we also do minted lamb, tandoori chicken kebabs, baby jackets tatties with garlic and Parmesan, apple and mango salad and , onion and mango coleslaw.

Corn on the cobs are good..

I quite like pork steaks, can get some good flavoured ones from morrisons.
Chicken skewers always a good shout..

That sounds unreal but I suspect well outside of my skill set. I have a brick barbecue with no lid so wouldn’t know where to begin with managing temperature.

I always have a coronation chicken and rice made for a bbq as a pre-prepared other dish, to take the pressure off whoever is cooking!

Lamb and aubergine chunks, marinaded in lemon juice, olive oil, minced garlic, salt, and oregano, threaded on skewers and served with large flatbreads always seems to go down well and is rather more forgiving of being slightly underdone than chicken or pork.

Fish is also an interesting one if you can find whole fish - sardines, sea bass, bream all grill well whole. Throw rock salt on while cooking.

Ah yeah you need something with a lid like a Weber or Napoleon. Then you use the ‘snake method’. Basically make a snake of briquettes around the outside of the ash grill and light one end. That way only 2-3 briquettes are burning at any given time which keeps the temperature nice and low.

minted lamb steaks/chops.. bbq to within in an inch of their life.. amazing!

If your friends like lamb, this is amazing. Prep the day before to marinade, then it’s so easy, 12 mins on one side and 8 on the other till it gets to the right temp inside, a bit longer if you like.

https://www.recipetineats.com/greek-butterflied-lamb-leg/

If they all eat red meat I'd go for a large rib of beef and BBQ that. It tastes gorgeous and looks impressive too. For sides I'd do 1 warm salad (a pasta / couscous / rice salad) and 1 cold (I like cubed cucumber, watermelon and feta with fresh mint).

An easy dessert is to get some bananas, cut a slit in through the skin and sprinkle in some brown sugar and rum then wrap in foil. Cook them on the cooling coals while you eat the main and serve with a posh vanilla ice cream. It also works with fresh peaches, plums, nectarines (cut in half, remove the stone and wrap in foil)

halloumi - cut the package into 6 chunks
sugar snap peas x 5 or 6
repeat a couple of times on a skewer
baste with a dressing based on fennel seeds and black sesame seeds (recipe was in a recent waitrose magazine..
delicious

if doing corn - don't wrap it - char it on the bbq so that you watch the kernels all slightly shrink and there is some black on the corn - then brush it with a harrisa flavoured butter...

loads of veg are really nice done on the bbq (asparagus / carrots / broccoli etc.) as they caramalise...

for desert - wedges of pineapple, or plums / apricots / etc. - bbq them to char-grill them...
then thick cut slabs of brioche (ideally the type you find in France with sugar crystals on it!) and bbq them for a few minutes until golden brown and the edgs just starting to turn black at the edges...
serve both with ice-cream (we like salted caramel ice-cream)

have fun!

My Greek friends always do pork chops that they then slice to serve. Delicious.

I like nicely seasoned chicken on the BBQ, so chicken marinaded in yoghurt with either Greek herbs (Lidl have some in at the moment on their Greek week stuff), garlic and lemon or tikka marinade (husband got some online, it came with the red food colouring like they use in Indian restaurants) and then I would do a tzatziki and yogurt and mint dip with it.

Sound fab! Do you par boil first?

How does one do lamb hearts,that sounds good?

Dh does them.
He cuts them into cubes like 1.5cm or so, olive oil, salt, pepper, lemon juice. Skew, grill.

These are all the details I managed to pry out😂 He is as amazing in telling recipes as grandma who cooked whole life😂 "so how much water?" "just enough" 😂

Braising steak is a bad choice for skewers...it's anything but tender until it has been, uhm, braised.

My kind of bbq.

those bland boring ones with a ‘green salad’ are the ones I would rather miss

Oh yeh…what beef is best then? I find some of it quite tough x

Beer butt chicken | Chicken recipes | Jamie Oliver recipes

this is good!

I'm in the US, as I assume you probably are too.

What we call grilling, folks in the UK call barbecuing. It has nothing to do with US barbecue. (Incidentally, when they see grilling they mean broiling.)

I don't know why you would bother wrapping corn on the cob in foil to barbecue it. You may as well just boil it in that case!

We like cooking it directly on the grate so that it gets nice and charred in places. Then as soon as it comes off, slather it with butter, salt and pepper.

Top tip. You can freeze chopped grilled corn for future salads 😁 same with chicken skewers