Summer Spirit BBQ

To make sure, my boyfriend and I would be able to maintain our summer spirit, having just returned from our holiday in Scandinavia and thinking about work again. I decided to put together a small BBQ for the two of us and surprised my boyfriend with an evening in the park (our appartment doesn't have a garden and unless I want to smoke us out, BBQing on the balcony is a bad idea). Since this was a spontaneous idea, I first raided my freezer and adjusted my shopping list to whatever I could find. Furthermore, it presented me with the perfect opportunity to go through one of my new cookbooks Leila's Food with a Golden Touch, which I bought in Sweden. The first dish in inspired by a recipe by Leila Lindholm:

Chicken in Thai Marinade

1 dl of coconut milk
1 red spur chili
1 stalk of lemon grass
2 gloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 tsp of fishsauce
1 tablespoon of sugar
3 bayleaves
1 chicken breast, defrosted and diced
zest of half a lemon
Salt to taste

(The original recipe asks for 5 lemon leaves and the zest of a lime, but our local supermarket does not sell these, so I was forced to come up with substitutes)

Break the lemon grass and the chili in bits and crush slightly. Put the crushed ingeredients in a bowl with the coconut milk, the fishsauce, the sugar, the lemon zest, salt and the bayleaves and stir. Add the chicken, cover and leave in the fridge for at least an hour, preferably longer. Right before you need the chicken, put the diced and marinated chicken on skewers. If you use wooden ones, which I did, it is smart to soak these in water before use, or else they will catch fire.

Marinated tiger prawns

16 tiger prawns, scaled and defrosted
2 gloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon of dried chili flakes
2 teaspoon of dried thyme
salt and peper
lemon juice
1 dl of olive oil

Put together the oil, garlic, chili flakes, thyme, salt and peper and mix it all in. I added a bit of the lemon juice from the lemon I used in the previous recipe. Add the prawns to the mix, cover and put in the fridge until use. I always marinate my meat and fish before putting it on to the skewers, because I can use smaller bowls. However, if you don't like to get your hands dirty, you can also put the prawns on the skewers before marinating them. The prawns will get a lovely shade of orangy-pink, when finished. Serve with sweet chili dip and lime wedges.

No BBQ is complete without a potato salad, so I made this super simple recipe, which can easily be adjusted to fit your taste by adding ingredients, but this is how I did it:

Super simple potato salad

500 gr potatoes
2 tablespoons of yoghurt
2 tablespoons of mayonaise
1 tablespoon of creme fraiche
1 red onion, finely chopped
1 avocado (optional)
parsely, finely chopped.
salt and peper

Peal the potatoes and boil them till there just about ready, about ten minutes should do. Once they are cooked, cool the potatoes in the fridge untill they are the cold. In a bowl put together the other ingredients and stir well. Add salt and pepper to taste and do the same with the parsely. Add the chopped onions and the diced potatoes to the dressing and mix well. I topped my salad off with a slide avocado, which I sprinkled lightly with lemon juice, as I wanted it to still look fresh and green when I arrived in the park.

To finish our meal in style, I marinated some fresh strawberries in balsamic vinegar and springled them with sugar and a teaspoon of cummin seeds. Unfortunately, I couldn't take any ice cream with me to the park, nevertheless, my summery desert went in well!