Saturday, March 27, 2010

Barbecued Vegetable Kebabs in a Garlic & Lemon Marinade

These Vegetable Kebabs taste great cooked over the flames of a barbecue - but you could just as easily cook them inside under the grill

Whenever we have a barbecue (which is usually at home on a Sunday !) I always do a few vegetable kebabs as they are a great side dish to serve to accompany all that meat (which is typically in excess on an African barbecue – at times I have even been to barbecues which are 100% meat with no side dishes whatsoever – except for the odd bread roll, perhaps !)

You can use whatever veggies you have in your house to make these. I usually try and choose veggies that take similar times to cook, and always include onion.

The marinade is versatile, too – you could flavour it with any type of fresh or dried herbs, too. Or, you could forgo the herbs and add some paprika or chilli powder for an extra bit of heat. You could also use sesame oil in place of the olive oil, and add a little soy sauce and Chinese Five Spice to it for an oriental flavour. The possibilities are endless, and you can just use my recipe (which makes 4 kebabs) as a guide.

These kebabs could also be cooked inside, under the grill -:


Barbecued Vegetable Kebabs in a Garlic & Lemon Marinade

1 large Baby Marrow (a.k.a. Courgette, a.k.a. Zucchini), sliced into rings
1 large Carrots, sliced into rings
¼ head Broccoli, broken into small florets
1 firm Tomato, sliced in to 8 wedges
1 Red Onion, sliced in to 7 wedges

4 wooden skewers, soaked in water before use (this prevents them from burning on the barbecue)

Marinade :
1 – 2 tbsps (i.e. to taste) finely crushed Garlic
2 tbsp freshly squeezed Lemon juice
3 tbsp Olive Oil
Salt & freshly cracked black Pepper – to taste

Thread the sliced baby marrows, carrots, broccoli, tomato and onion on to the wooden skewers. Place in a glass dish and set aside. In a separate bowl, whisk together the crushed garlic, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper. Using a pastry brush, baste the kebabs with this marinade on both sides. Pour any remaining marinade over the kebabs, cover and allow to rest for a few hours at room temperature - or overnight in the fridge. Cook on a barbecue grid over hot flames, turning every so often to prevent burning, until done.

Thursday, March 25, 2010

This & That .....

The sunset from our veranda last week ....

Is it just me, or is the blogging world rather quiet at the moment ? People just don’t seem to be posting as much – maybe everyone is taking it easy as Easter approaches. (Gosh, seems like just yesterday we were talking about Christmas and now it’s almost Easter - where IS 2010 going to ?!)

We’ve been having some much needed rain on the farm this week – which has been a great relief as the situation was getting pretty desperate (with crops planted to meet deadlines and no sign of any rain). We were planning on going away for the Easter weekend but due to the rain, those plans have been put on hold for the time being as we now need to get on with planting.

Instead of going away, we’ve invited some friends out to the farm over Easter, and on Good Friday we are off to our neighbour’s for afternoon tea and an Easter egg hunt ! (Yes, the Easter bunny does know how to find his way all the way out to Kilimanjaro’s foothills !) Easter eggs are very scarce here and are one of the most difficult things to buy each year, so this coming week I am on a *mission* to find as many eggs as I can in the big city – or possibly have to end up making my own this year ?

I’ve recently added the new Blogger ‘Pages’ element to my blog – yay to the clever Blogger people for introducing this – long awaited – blogging feature. So now you can click on the tabs at the top of the blog to find out more – ‘About Me’, ‘Contact Me’ & ‘Recipe Conversions’ and I hope to add a few more pages (like ‘About This Blog’) soon. The ‘Recipe Conversions’ page will tell you all you need to know about converting the recipes on this blog into measurements which suit you, as well as a few other tips and things. (Remember, too, that if you scroll to the very bottom of the blog you will find the ‘Conversion Calculator’ which will also convert weights etc for you.)

I’ve added a new ‘Visitors Map’ recently, too (scroll to the bottom of the blog for this). It’s a rotating globe and aside from recording the location of everyone who’s ever visited the blog (by means of a small red dot) shows the current country flag/location of each visitor browsing the blog in ‘real time’ - I find it quite fun to see which ‘countries’ are reading at the same time as me as I pop in and out during the day to moderate comments etc (as I type this now, there is someone reading from Prahran Victoria & someone else from Berkhamstead, Buckinghamshire – hello there to you both !)

On a more personal (& completely un blog related) note, as you know we’re often waaaay behind the rest of the world here in Africa and a case in point - my l’il sister (who lives in the waaaaay ahead UK) has been nagging me for ages now to do myself a favour and watch this series (which apparently took the world by storm … starting a couple of years ago !) on DVD – I have the first 3 series and recently started watching it and oh my, I’m completely hooked …. so late night blogging has taken a back seat for a while. (So if I disappear for a while, you know it’s probably because I’m lost somewhere on a mysterious island, surviving in the jungle ……)

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Peanut Butter Squares with a Chocolate Drizzle

A crunchy chocolate drizzle really adds to the flavour of these tasty peanut butter squares

Chocolate and peanut butter are always a great combination, and when I made these Peanut Butter Biscuits the other day, I decided to add a chocolate topping to them for this very reason. This topping is hard and crunchy once it sets, and adds just the right amount of chocolate-y flavour !

I also decided to adapt the original recipe and make squares instead of round biscuits (cookies) – only because I was too lazy to stand and roll little balls from all that dough !

The squares worked out really well and I think I will stick to doing them this way in the future, too ….


Peanut Butter Squares with a Chocolate Drizzle
(adapted from the recipe ‘Peanut Butter Biscuits’ from ‘The Complete South African Cookbook’ by Magdaleen Van Wyk)

85 gm Butter (or Margarine)
250 ml (1 cup) Sugar
1 Egg, beaten
125 ml (1/2 cup) Peanut Butter
375 ml (1 ½ cups) Flour
4ml (3/4 tsp) Baking Powder
1 ml (1/4 tsp) Salt
5 ml (1 tsp) Vanilla Essence

Cream the butter or margarine and sugar together in a mixing bowl until light & creamy. Stir in the beaten egg, mixing well to blend, then stir in the peanut butter. Sift in the dry ingredients, mixing well. Stir in the vanilla essence. Knead the mixture lightly to form a smooth, stiff dough & then roll pieces of the dough in to small balls. Place the balls on a greased baking sheet & press them flat with a fork (place them well apart to allow for expansion when baking).* Bake at 180’C/350’F/Gas mark 4 until firm, around 15 minutes. Allow to cool before transferring to a wire rack to cool completely.

*I pressed the mixture flat into a greased baking pan and once baked, cut it in to small squares and topped it with the following -:

Topping:
4 tbsp Sugar
1 tbsp Cocoa Powder (Unsweetened)

Melt the sugar and cocoa powder together in a small saucepan, stirring just to blend. Remove from heat and with a spoon, quickly drizzle the mixture in a zig zag motion across the top of the baked squares (still in the pan). (You have to work quickly as the topping sets quite quickly once removed from the heat !)