Mouth watering Kebabs - barbeque party

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 11^th 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.

Image Courtesy : Google

On 11^th 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 .