As any good Mongolian knows, a little horse racing, wrestling, archery and anklebone shooting whet the old appetite for a good family fry-up out on the steppe.
A good tip is to always make your cooking fire some distance away from the yurt to prevent having to deal with a nasty accidental inferno. That grass out there really burns.
Australians may deal with even bigger problems at the barbie than the Mongolians. Not only is there a lot of grass for raging wildfires, there are huge lizards slithering around in the never-never ready to pilfer from your grill at awkward moments.
Up until the time they’re on a spit roasting over an outback campfire, lizards can be a bit dodgy, even unpredictable. Don’t be too ashamed to stand on the picnic table and avoid them when necessary.
I’m certain that in parts of Thailand lizards would be deep-fried and served with a nice peanut sauce and a plate of garlic rice. Add a couple of roasting hot chillies and you have created a simple, authentic, eye-watering, palate-pleaser.
And keep in mind that while in Oz, the threat to your grilled meat may also be airborne. At one outback barbie, my wife was waving her dinner plate around telling me all about it when a kookaburra swooped out from a big gum tree and absconded with her last select slice of grilled sirloin. To this day, she does not like any member of the kingfisher family.
If anyone in the world could dare challenge the Aussies at the barbie, it would be the South Africans with their “braai”. Boervoors, or any kind of meat, served with a good Cape wine, the braai is a lifestyle and a good excuse for people to get together and cook a meal over a fire.
In another part of Africa, the grilled satay-style chicken at the night market in Zanzibar is a treat to eat while sitting and enjoying the pleasant aromas from all the different grills wafting around on the evening ocean breeze. The “Kuku Pakka Lamu style” is almost as good as the Lobster thermador, which is saying quite a bit.
One memorable African Christmas Eve, during a cookout around a roasting fire, our Kenyan cook entertained us by recalling the Kikuyu male circumcision ritual, which had quite a dramatic effect on all men present when he described what happened to “de banana”.
I still get a little misty whenever I see a picture from the veldt.
In the jungles of Sabah, Borneo they have apparently only recently stopped grilling each other. The open-air night markets of Borneo’s port towns feature a wide variety of ocean fish and other local seafood on the grill, so you can eat the creatures you were scuba diving or snorkeling with earlier in the day. Try to avoid the crowded covered fish markets during the roasting hot daytime if at all possible. If you simply must be there, just don’t breathe.
Always exercise caution when approaching food stalls in South-East Asia. If it looks like a grilled bug of some type, it will be. Dried and fried in oil, mmmmmm good!
But you know what they say: there’s no place like home. At a recent outdoor mooseburger grillup, the hostess with the mostess, carrying the platter of burgers on an outstretched hand, tripped over a lawn chair and sent the patties flying. Barely missing a beat, she retrieved each and every burger and, explaining it was all organic anyway, shamelessly slapped them on the q. without spilling a single drop of wine.
