The beauty of barbecues is their unstructured, ever-unfurling quality that makes the affair less onerous for the cook, who can then afford to engage in the merriment every now and then, while the fire-lit coals take the shift. The other huge plus is everyone acts as cook, and so the blame for a fiasco is dispersed and people end up having a good laugh as a painless way of owning up to being one of the sods who mucked things up.

Also, from experience, barbecues seem to a lot of people as more a time for communion than hunger-sating. How many have you had guests stroll in an hour late to tell you they already ate and they'll just knock about and pick? This, together with their lazy protracted nature, leaves people nibbling away, too engrossed with sordid gossip to criticize the chicken wings you so fecklessly under-seasoned. Yes, they might point out your felony on the way out, but that is nothing several gallons of booze cannot handle. (I recommend fruity champagne cocktails followed by plenty of red wine and beer.)

To make the tone even more laidback, this is a poolside barbecue, so the arch priority for all will be getting soaked and sunned, unless you have paranoid guests hell-bent on showing up as beekeepers.

I do not think you need a carbohydrate centrepiece, not that russet or sweet potatoes wrapped snugly in foil and stuck into hot coals is at all begrudgingly effortful. But since this barbecue, as you will see, is very much Aegean in flavour,  basketfuls of pita or ciabatta and little saucers of olive oil and balsamic vinegar or dukkah (see a previous article) is most appropriate.

This is enough for 6 revellers, stretching to 8 but no further. Everything here is icebox friendly.

» Horiatiki
» Hummus
» Lamb chops with aubergine and walnut salad
» Lemon saffron chicken wings
» Shrikhand and mangoes

Stories and photos copyright © Bryan Koh, unless otherwise stated. Not to be reproduced without permission from the author.