One of the most popular activities in Sweden in spring/summer is to barbecue, as it allows one to make the most of the warm weather and the long days. While I’ve participated in my share of barbecues, I’d never really gotten around to barbecuing anything myself. Last summer, when my parents were visiting us, we even bought a simple barbecue grill, hoping to use it, but the extremely dry weather caused a total ban on outdoor fires, putting paid to my hopes of having a barbecue premier.

This year, we’ve had a relatively good spring, and the weather now seems to be getting better and better. Today, we decided to grill some sweet corn over coals, Indian style, and eat it with a dab of mint chutney and lemon. Armed with some lighter fluid, coal, cutlery, and the corn itself, we set out into the park which is practically nextdoor. There were a few people there, including a couple with their young daughter, drinking tea and relaxing, and they waved us a friendly wave in greeting. Before long though, it was clearly apparent to them that I was an absolute greenhorn, and I sheepishly but completely without any hesitation asked for help, and got loads of it.

The man was practically a neighbor, and he mentioned to me that he’d seen me practicing on my unicycle. He showed me how I needed to go about lighting up the coal and pointed out that I needed to wait a bit while it developed heat. He even had a small bellows which he used with good effect, to quickly whip up a small blaze. Before long (but what seemed to us then like an eternity), the coals were hot, and we placed our corn on it. Our helpful neighbor realized that it was just corn that we were barbecuing, and pulled my leg good-naturedly. “What, I helped you with all that just so you could grill corn and nothing else? No meat of any kind? Is this a joke?” he asked in mock dismay, and we all laughed.

Shruti and I took turns at fanning the coals, while she did all of actual turning. The corn was ready before long, and we offered our neighbors some, but they smiled and politely declined. It was the perfect Indian ‘butta’ and both Shruti and I enjoyed it thoroughly. It’d been a while since we’d eaten it, so this was a rather good treat. Now that we’ve had our first experience of grilling, we look forward to more such experiences. It definitely makes more sense to cook for more than just the two of us, particularly given how long it takes to get it going, so we hope to have some friends over, the next time. We can bring in a variety of different Indian/Western vegetarian ingredients like Paneer (cottage cheese), aubergine, beetroot, and halloumi, and have some fun grilling together.