Spring is here! (salad)

very nice, kiwi - we do a similar salad in the spring and summer here, using grilled chicken with mediterranean herbs and flavours. like you, we prefer to assemble them a plate at a time, or set up an assembly line where people start with a bed of greens and then add whatever toppings they desire. i'd like to give this version a try with the eastern flavours.

the seeds you see there are pumpkin seeds that got a little over toasted - that bread caught the heat for a couple minutes too many I'd say. Still good, though.

Yes but a BBQ here isn't what you call a BBQ there :) We use direct fired, normally gas rather than charcoal or wood, and normally uncovered and cooked FAST. Most BBQs have at least half of the area taken up by a large iron hot plate, which is probably used more than the grill plate. My favourite ever meal is BBQed breakfast on a crisp summers morning of the sort you can kinda tell is going to get stinking hot later in the day. Bacon, eggs, fried onion, grilled tomato and rosemary, fry the bread in the bacon juice, avocado, fresh orange juice and good coffee. Hard to beat.

I do a lot of that, and a lot of backcountry cooking when out in the bush. I'm a pretty good campfire cook (not as good as my old man though, he's a pro) but most of my backcountry cooking is done on my multifuel burner, which leaves me free to build a nice fire for light / warmth without worrying about preparing it for cooking.

I guess the other outdoor cooking would be my little hot smoker, but that isn't used all that often, just whenever I get a hankering for smoked fish or shoot a fish best cooked that way.

Kiwis barely ever coldsmoke anything.

It actually feels like the season is already here. I've just moved up from the south, so I'm used to cold etc. Here it's currently doing the tropical thing, sunny, hot and humid, get a heavy downpour every afternoon, then suddenly sunny and humid again. Interesting change.