This is a wonderful menu, in which East meets West, resulting in delicious meal with Indian and American overtones. The lusty sangria, chilled, slightly sweet, and filled with fresh fruit, is as authentically Spanish as an afternoon corrida.
If you are expecting a larger crowd, informal barbecue meals are adaptable to beaches, boats, or backyards - and can be expanded easily. Simply double the quantity of meat, salad, corn, and raspberry tarts - or even triple it, if your crowd's likely to be hungry. Set the fire, then sit back and watch the sunset. Your guests will cook their dinner and serve themselves.
Prehistoric cooks would be speechless if they could see what modern technology has accomplished: precooked, presliced, prepackaged foods, exotic cookware, and sleek kitchen appliances. And, boxed and tamed cooking fires. Even outdoors, fires have been trapped for man's ultimate control and pleasure.
Yet open-fire cooking is as popular for modern people as it was for cave-dwellers. What emerged years ago as an informal entertaining vogue for Californians is not only civilization's oldest cooking method, but in the past decade certainly has become an American summer obsession. To capture summer's outdoor flavor year-round, kitchen designers have even created indoor barbecue pits - and Stone Age chefs would shrug and say, "nothing new under the sun…"
Some scholars conclude that the term barbecue came from the Spanish or Arawak Indian word barbacoa, cooked up many centuries ago in the Caribbean. The Arawak's barbacoa consisted of a screen of green sticks crisscrossed to hold meat cooking over an open fire. Others insist that barbecue is derived from the French cooks' method of spitting whole animals barbe a queue (beard to tail) for easier fire-roasting. Never mind…. this universal cooking technique - which can move anywhere at anytime - is beloved by all.
Selecting proper equipment is the barbecuer's first task. Basically, there must be a container for the fire, a metal grid to hold the food, and long-handled cooking tools to safely turn and remove food from the fire. Otherwise, the equipment can be as simple, or as elaborate, as needs and taste dictate.
How will the grill be used? Should it be stationary or portable? For the strictly backyard cook, the uncovered grill on a tripod, the covered cooker, or a fancy stone barbecue pit will meet most barbecuing needs. However, for anyone who picnics, often, the portable tabletop grill, or Japanese hibachi, is the only answer. Or campers may simply wish to buy the folding metal grill that fits over campfires. What if you need cook for a large number of people? For apartment dwellers, or those who rarely cook for more than four, bulky equipment is unnecessary. The simple, circular unit with cooking space for a few burgers and buns will fit the bill. For grilling steaks or for cooking roasts, the versatile chef, who wants to barbecue the Thanks-giving turkey, as well as grill summer franks, will find that the covered barbecue is the answer. With the top off, the fire grills small cuts of meat quickly by direct heat; with the top on, the fire cooks large cuts more slowly be reflected heat. Some grills are available with partial tops, or hoods, with attached rotisseries -these devices can perform many of the same indirect cooking tasks that the covered grill
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