Barbecue Season is here!!

One thing I noticed after moving here is that everyone has a grill in their house. Doesn’t matter if the only open space for grilling is a small 3’ x 5’ patch or precariously overhanging piece of wooden deck, they absolutely have to have a grill. People living in apartment buildings in Chicago, either have balconies or wooden decks in the rear. People living in condos or single family homes have a wooden deck or a huge backyard.
The barbecue season officially starts from Memorial Day and goes on till Labor Day. But this is of course in Chicago. I am sure in sunny places like Texas, California or Arizona, barbecuing can be done all year around.
But then people in Chicago really look forward to this season. It means the end of winter. It means the onset of spring and finally summer, the start of the baseball season, it means having parties at your place with just hotdog and beer on the menu and the occasional chicken on beer can. It means having friends and neighbors over for fun. It’s more fun when there is a pool around though…so I am told. Dressing down for an occasion???...this is it. Its Satya’s dreams come trueJ
When we were staying in an apartment building in downtown Chicago, we never had any open space as such. But there we had barbecue grills on the common deck. The first barbecue we had consisted of just me, satya and amol. We had chips and dips, Polish sausages and Pepsi.
We got a barbecue grill recently. It’s a Weber grill and it’s huge. This latest acquisition has got Satya all excited about the possibilities of food it can cook. He has decided to cook at least once every weekend. So it ranges from tandoori chicken, chicken tikka, seekh kebabs, sausages, paneer tikka, veggies, burgers (both soy and meat), shrimp and fish. So last Saturday, he decided to make seekh kebabs. We got everything he needed. We got the meat, the spices, and extra accessories for the grill etc. But then in true Chicago fashion it rained and drenched our hopes. He decided not to light up the gas grill in the pouring rain and we ended up making the kebabs in the oven. But they turned out great too. :) Btw. Seekh kebabs taste great with hot nans and onion with little lime juice drizzled on it.
In the coming month we are going to buy few more grill accessories like the fajita platter (so I can cook some great veggies) and the chicken roaster (similar to beer can chicken apparatus but has place to hold veggies and the drip off chicken juices. The veggies cook in the chicken juices and hence taste way better than usual.) We also plan to buy a portable Weber coal Grill so that we could just pack some food and take our grill to a park or some place and cook ourselves…Picnic timeJ
I just hope that it starts getting warmer and stops raining.
As Satya cooks, I shall post his recipes online, with his permission of course.
Dipti