Steel Wheel Barbeque (African style)

Ingredients                                        Preparations

1	1	Steel wheel	1	Acquire a suitable steel wheel from a vehicle.
2	3-5	Steel rods	2	Find a good welder to construct your steel wheel barbeque.
3	2	Steel handles	3	Do a test with a bag of charcoal.
4	1	Grill
5	1	Bag charcoal

Andreas misses his good times in Australia,
so has decided to introduce a "barbie" to life in Entebbe.
The aim of the excercise was to make one of these:

 

A professional ozzie, would of course have gone for one of these:

 

But in life, it's always good to keep things simple.

Less is more!

First of all find a car,

possibly one parked illegally outside your house...

Then take a good look at the wheels....

Seriously, we do not recommend the 458 spider ferrari
for conversion into a barbeque.

The Toyota pick-up has had a serious puncture last week.
However, do not be tempted to borrow the wheel for the weekend...

Here is the Toyota Rav4.
Sorry, also not suitable...

The Mitsubishi Pajero?
Getting better...

This is really the design you need - lots of small holes to let in the air,
but not so big that the charcoal falls through.

The standard saloon car wheel is the right size for a family.
If you need to feed more people, consider a tractor wheel.
For small tribes, you may even consider something bigger!

Get a welder to mount the steel wheel at the right height
with three legs, as shown below.

View from the top.

Note the small air holes, and handles.

Side view.

Note the steel tray below to catch any ash that may fall through.

The steel wheel BBQ is portable, even when filled with charcoal.

To start the BBQ,

build up the charcoal with a few pieces of wood in the centre.
Start it with some paper.

You can use the steel tray to keep food warm.

If the fire gets too hot, you can add two bricks to lift the grill.

It is perfect for grilling your standard family size fish...

...and you can of course use the coals like a normal stove to cook your rice,
as demonstrated here by Valence...

Credits: Design adapted from Andreas's barbeque developed in Ghana (2002).
Note that the standard Ugandan design is used for smoking fish, and has a
basal plate welded to the bottom of the wheel. In order to work, this design
has holes cut into the sides of the wheel to let in the air.

Sicilian Seawolf (Fish)

  Ingredients (2 persons)                        Preparations

1	2 x 250 g	Seawolf		The sauce:
2	3 tab.sp	Olive oil	1	Cut / Chop all ingredients in little cubes
3	1 cube	butter	2	Heat oil (add some salt against spattering)
4		Salt, pepper	3	Low flame: Add tomatoes; Stir 10 min.
5	1/2	Lemon juice	4	Add onion, garlic. Fry gently.
6		Flour	5	Add anchovies, olive, capers. Stir every now and then
7	2	tomatoes	6	Add wine + last 50% of lemon juice
8	1 small	Red onion	7	Add crumbled block of bouillon-cube
9	2 nuts	Garlic	8	Add fresh spices (thymian, basil, parsley); stir
10	½ jar	Anchovies	9	Take off the fire
11	8	olives	10	If the sauce is too thick: ASdd wine; briefly cook.
12	Hand full	Capers		The fish:
13	1 glass	Dry white wine	1	Fish + salt, pepper, flour + 50% of lemon juice
14	½ cube	Fish bouillon	2	Heat butter + Oil
15		Thymian (fresh)	3	Fry fish on both sides (first one side, then the other;
16		Basil (fresh)		Do not turn repeatedly)
17		Parsley (fresh)

Suggestions for Serving:

Accompanying dishes:                             Spaghetti & Tomato salad

Preparations for serving:                          Fish on plates; Spaghetti; Sauce over fish

                                                                  Tomato salad on side dish.

Get the ingredients together - a tidy desk is a tidy mind...

 

Fry some olive oil with a pinch of salt.

The salt will stop the oil from spitting.

 

Add the tomatoes, and fry them for 10 minutes.

Strategically get a glass of white wine ready.

We will need it (much) later in this recipe.

Frontera will do. Thank you Chile! (hola Pablo).

Add the garlic and onions.

 

Conteplate the meaning of life, while it all simmers into a lovely sauce.

 

Add anchovies, chopped olives and capers.

 

Wait some more. This is slow (and healthy) food, not fast food.

 

...it has evaporated all the juice... add some white wine...

and some fish stock...

 

Time to squeeze some lemon juice.

 

More white wine...

and the spices...

set the sauce to one side...

 

Get the frying pan going with some olive oil and butter.

 

Cut up the fish into 3cm pieces.

 

And get them frying...

 

Start the tomato salad. Chop two tomatoes & prepare vinegrette.

(olive oil, vinegar, salt, pepper, thyme, basil, majoram)

 

The fish is looking nice...

  

Put the fish on a plate and re-heat the sauce.

 

Add the sauce on top of the fish...

 

It's dinner time!!!

Cheers!!!

Ginger beer - Gemberbier (Suriname)

Ingredients                                         Preparations

1	300g	ginger	1	Grate the ginger, cut open the vanilla pods and scrape out the marrow.
2	2	vanilla pods	2	Put all ingredients in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Cook until all the sugar is dissolved.
3	4 L	water	3	Allow to cool and place in refrigerator overnight.
4	2 kg	sugar	4	Strain the ginger beer the next day with a clean cloth.
5	10	cloves	5	Keep it in the refrigerator.
6	4	lemons	6	Serve ginger beer diluted with water and lots of ice.

Andreas found some vanilla pods on the market. Did you know that vanilla is the second most expensive spice after saffron? Here in Entebbe a pod goes for 500 shillings, which is currently worth about 0.25 Euros.

Vanilla is an orchid native to Mexico and could only be cultivated in places like Uganda, when Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old slave who lived on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, discovered that the plant could be hand pollinated in 1841. So this blog entry is dedicated to Edmond for being such a smart kid, and of course Ramon Beuk who is the author of this recipe.

Having bought the vanilla along with the usual week's shopping, Andreas decided to look for a recipe on how to convert it into his favorite drink - beer. Luckily the boss, Hans, had left a copy of the June 2011 zin  magazine on the dining room table before he left for The Netherlands.

For the non-Dutch speakers among us, you could either get the dictionary out and look up any words you do not understand, or try using the wonders of modern technology:

1. Scan the page, and make sure you enable OCR recognition. OCR stands for optical character recognition.
2. The scan of the recipe above can now be copy-pasted into other applications. Go to http://translate.google.com/ and let some computer in the US translate the text for you. Not bad at all!
3. There may be some mistakes in the OCR if your scan settings were not detailed enough, so you may need to do some manual corrections for Google to give you the correct english translation.

So now that we have a recipe we can read, we find out that kruidnagels actually means cloves and not some sort of herbal nails. The next step is to disturb Hans on his holiday in sunny Portugal and find out where he put those kruidnagels!

After some time....

Get the ingredients together.
Let's start with a modest quantity... (2kg sugar???)

Convert everything into a much larger surface area/volume ratio...

...and bring to the boil until all the brown sugar has dissolved.
Then let everything cool down, and let it rest in the fridge over night.

The next day (Sat 17 Sept 2011)...
Find a cloth. If it is currently being used to clean the floor,
we recommend using the coffee filter...
You will also need to find a suitable container to hold the Gemberbier.

 

Keep the Gemberbier nice and cool in the fridge.

Note how the bottle of Bombay Sapphire is multi-tasking
as an alternative light source.

 

Perfect for a refreshing drink on a summer's day,

or every other evening during Entebbe's power cuts...