Grilling kebabs is a ritual in most traditional Middle
Eastern houses generally when hordes of guests or relatives come home and has been prevailing from ancient ages (prehistoric earth oven and burnt animal bones have been spread across Middle East & Europe has been excavated and is believed to be atleast 250,000 years old). So from
a young age our friend Jaibat who is from Jordan has been helping his mother making kebabs and he
has been telling us that his kebabs ingredients are different and would taste
really good and would like to take few of us out for a kebab party.Thus started the plan for going to beach on a Friday
for barbeque few weeks back but then due to inclement cold weather and rains it
was getting postponed for over 3 weekend. Finally last few days had been quite warm
and hence we planned to go on 11th Feb, a national holiday here at Qatar
on account of National Sports Day. All plans finalized, vehicles and people
confirmed but for three or four persons from the original list who dropped out
of the trip.
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| Image Courtesy : Google |
On 11th morning the
wind speeds increased and bought in chill and yet our resolve of going ahead as
planned never got diluted in spite of Jaibat having doubts of success of this
trip and we all set out to a beach at Dukhan as one person stated that there
were picnic roofs with table and benches where we can have our BBQ grill. A
little history about the place - Dukhan is the center of Qatar’s onshore oil
industry and at the beginning of the 20th century had the only aircraft landing
strip in the country. The security-gated complex owned by Qatar Petroleum (not
open to the general public) consists of both residential and production areas
and includes the first oil well drilled in Qatar, in 1938.
We reached the beach around 12
noon as the same was around 80KM from Doha and we were very luck to find one
shelter which we occupied before anyone else could claim the spot and we
unloaded all the materials from Jaibat’s vehicle and the first thing we did was
to set up a wind barrier by using a mat which we tied across two posts of the
picnic roof area as the winds were blowing with a gusto.. later we came to know that the wind speed was around 45 KM/Hr
Once this was done the next
came the setting up the charcoal grill pan that was specially fabricated for
Jaibat in his earlier project. First the coal was burnt to make it red hot in a
separate container using the some accelerants and once the coal started glowing
it was poured in to the grill pan and evenly spread out and was now ready for
grilling the meat.
There were chicken and mutton kebabs and also samosas in
addition to onions and green peppers that were grilled.The mutton kebabs were out of the world and so was the samosas and
chicken and these were made out of special ingredients that Jaibat
learnt when he was young. Sumptuous lunch was
followed by fantastic tea prepared in a kettle over the charcoal and shisha
while sitting beside the grill pan which radiated good heat making it quite
pleasant as the weather was chilly and windy.
Normally grilling is a collective
effort but then majority of arrangements was done by Jaibat and he ensured all
of us ate well all through the lunch time without himself bothering of having
lunch. On
the whole all of us had an enjoyable day though it was cold and windy and we
now look forward to our next trip planned sometime later when the weather
becomes warm. I now leave you people
with few memories of this trip captured in images and videos .
