A family favourite

It's a family dinner tonight - the grandchildren are having their last sleepover of the school holidays and one mum and one dad are having dinner too. Indeed dad is camping in the garden with his girls. Anyway the choices of what to cook are more limited and so I have turned to an old, old family favourite - a recipe from the late, great Robert Carrier, that I have modified a little over the years I guess. We just call it kebabs. Originally I think he gave it a name that was something like Indonesian kebabs and I found it in one of the English Sunday paper glossy magazines - back in the 60s. It later turned up in one of his first two cookery books called California Beef Kebabs, so you can see he was not married to the name. Indeed he often cheated and printed recipes in more than one book. Anyway - I cooked it way back then, just for the two of us, and because it was supposedly Indonesian I served it with rice - and I still do. It was a real taste sensation, quite unlike anything else we had ever tasted and I think possibly the first time we were conscious of the taste of cumin. We must have had cumin in Indian curries but there it blended in with all those other spices. Here it was on its own.

I kept on cooking it and the children even liked it, as do our grandchildren. Indeed when I came to create a cookery book for my sons of their top ten favourite foods - this was one of them.

So how have I modified it? Well I never barbecue it because you lose all the juices and everyone loves to slather the kebabs with the juices - even though, it has to be admitted, they are very oily. Over the years I have probably increased the amount of chopped onions I add - they love those too, and maybe the cumin a little bit too. I have a feeling my daughter-in-law has modified it even further and sort of stews the meat in the sauce, but I'm not sure about this.

I guess it was serendipity that I came across this recipe, and then that I actually made the dish. Once tasted though it was never going to be discarded. So here we are - waiting for them all to arrive - meat marinading. Rice to be cooked later. Or you could serve it in pitta bread I guess. So here are the marinade ingredients - for about 500g beef. I've never tried it with other meats, but maybe you could.

6 tablespoons olive oil, 2 tablespoons soy sauce, 2 tablespoons lemon juice, chopped onion (to taste - but I usually do 1), large crushed clove of garlic and 1 dessertspoon of ground cumin. The longer you marinade it the better it tastes. Grill, spooning the marinade over it as you go, and serve with the sauce. You'll need to stir the sauce before pouring it over them, so I serve it in a separate jug with a little ladle.

And here we are - a long time ago - me with my eyes closed as usual - about to tuck in.