Celebrating summer

Summer's finally here but for how long nobody knows, so we made the most of it by having a barbeque on our balcony on Saturday. I felt like having Eastern Mediterranean food so made lamb koftes by spicing lamb mince with a mix of harissa, chili, cinnamon,ground ginger, nutmeg and fresh coriander then binding it together with a beaten egg and some flour. To accompany this was a roasted garlic tzatziki where you mix the classic grated cucumber, yoghurt and mint with a few cloves of roasted garlic and a grilled aubergine, pomegranate and tahini salad. This is based on a Claudia Roden recipe from a newspaper article that I couldn't find anymore. I roasted the aubergine, let them cool and cut them into chunks, they were then mixed with pomegranate seeds, tahini, pomegranate molasses and some za'tar spice mix.

But the star are these new flatbreads that you bake on the BBQ. I got the recipe from a free Harvey Nic's magazine when I was in London last May and they are so easy, all you need is a bit of time, but if you start this before you make all the other bbq stuff it should be plenty of time. They are absolutely delicious and you can vary the topings/contents endlessly to make them go with whatever you're having. So far, we've used sea salt, rosemary and a mix of nigella (black onion) and cumin seeds and I've been thinking about sweet toppings or perhaps even fillings like in the Peshwari naans.

Flatbreads (about 16)
2 tsp dried yeast
450 ml water (luke warm)
750g strong white flour
2 tsp salt
black pepper
50 ml olive oil

Dissolve the dried yeast in 50 ml of the water. Put the dry ingredients and oil in a bowl and mix well. Add the dissolved yeast and then the rest of the water and kneed this for about 10 min, either with dough hooks but I prefer doing it with my hand. Cover the bowl and leave to rise for about 1-2 hours, if you want to speed up this process, you can fill the sink with lukewarm water and place the bowl in there. When fully risen, knock it back and divide into 16 balls. Roll them out on into thin pita shapes. Leave to rise for another 30 minutes then bbq on coals for about 1-2 min each side till brown.

To add flavours, either kneed what you want to add into the dough or wet the dough just after rolling it out, sprinkle over the topping and press it into the surface.