BBQ-Meister!

I mentioned a couple of weeks back that we would today be holding a reunion of former members of my research group at our home. There are quite a lot of them these days: the earliest joined in 1965, and the final ones in about 2003! Each year, we try to find a day when as many as possible can come along, and we always have wonderful time meeting up with old friends, and recounting all the stories of laboratory mishaps, wild social occasions, and the like, that we experienced together as a team.

About 25 of them turned up today, plus spouses and sundry offspring. I guess that we had about 50 to 60 mouths to feed... The guests brought some delicious things to eat, and I believe that we provided an adequate supply of material for the carnivores. In my photograph, you see Carlos cooking Merguez sausages from France. Carlos hails from South America, where barbecue skills are renowned, and always generously allows himself to be pressed into service to run the barbecue, from which he delivers sausages, burgers, chicken legs, pork spare ribs, pork chops, etc, etc, all afternoon.

Since most people looking at the BlipFoto pages will not know any of the participants, I thought that this picture of Carlos wearing his laboratory safety spectacles and tending the sausages would be more entertaining than shots of people (humans and children!). However, you can see here some more of the photographs that I took during the afternoon.

As a postscript to the "Merguez from France", I decided to try making some of the burger meat into something similar to what goes into the sausages. So I added garlic, cumin, harissa, other spices and fresh and dried herbs to the mix. For the cumin, we were lucky that a friend had recently brought us a quite large consignment of "Berber Cumin" back from a trip she had made to Morocco. It was just the job for this task. According to the eaters of this concoction, the result was both tasty and fairly authentic in flavour. So we might tread down this path again before long.