The Great Aussie Barbie Fast and Easy Cookbook

Introduction
Don't get me wrong – I LOVE slow-cooked food.
BUT we don't always have half a day or more to devote to dinner, especially around the barbecue, when a meal is just part of a life that includes ferrying kids to soccer, ballet or netball, not to mention birthday parties (how many friends can one kid have?), as well as a bit of time for yourself to go to the footy, the hairdresser, the hardware store, the movies, or for a drink with some chums.
Which is why I have written The Great Aussie Barbie Fast and Easy Cookbook.
It's my fifth tome in as many years and it seems to be what people want these days: quick, easy food that is both delicious and a bit more interesting than just steaks and bangers on the barbie. What's more, for these recipes you don't have to scour the shelves of specialist shops for esoteric ingredients. I'm not saying that everything will be at the two major supermarkets, but 90 per cent will.
Having said that, I do encourage you to buy your meat from a quality butcher and your seafood from the markets or the best local fishmonger that you can find. Talk to your meat, seafood and fruit merchants about what's fresh, and what they think is the best product in their shop. Barbecuing, like cooking of any kind, is so simply all about the quality of the ingredients.
You should be able to cook virtually everything in here in about half an hour, without being silly and putting a stopwatch on the process. The exceptions are the recipes that call for marinating, which is dead easy and just allows you to insert a soccer/ballet/ hairdresser/movie option in between.
We covered a lot of the basics in my first book, The Great Aussie Barbie Cookbook, so we won't repeat all that here. Most of my tips come down to common sense or just giving things a bit of thought.
Make a shopping list. I make a list with columns for fruit and veg, the butcher, seafood, supermarket, specialty things, booze and pantry items. It's hardly the highlight of my week but it sure beats multiple trips back to the shops.
Soak your sticks. Because little sticks of wood are pretty good at burning and we use little sticks of wood to skewer food on the barbie, you need to soak the wooden skewers in water for a couple of hours before you use them. If you prefer, you could use metal skewers.
Keep a spare gas bottle. It is a real pain in the neck to run out of gas with a house full of people and a barbecue covered in half-cooked steaks. As you are driving to the service station to get a replacement, a spare gas bottle seems like a pretty good idea.
Think about the time. Work out how long the meat will take to cook and how long it will need to rest and then figure out when you need to, say, grill the vegetables so they'll all be ready at the same time. Also, it is worth thinking about all the non-food things that you will need on the day, like plates, platters, glasses and so on and have them all out so you're not running around while your steak is getting cold.
Use the right oil. Olive oil, especially expensive extra virgin olive oil, is great for salad dressings but wasted splashed on a barbecue. Use ordinary olive oil on hotplates, and what I call neutral oil – in that it doesn't impart any flavour of its own – for shallow-frying and stir-frying. Good examples of neutral oils are peanut oil, vegetable oil, safflower oil and canola. Buy young olive oils – old is generally bad and 'Lite' olive oil is nonsense.
Finally, if all else fails, follow Kimbo's Ten Barbecue Commandments, on the opposite page.