Less than a day after the reverse sear ribeye I did the cover wasn't even back on the Weber so I decided to cook the evening's meal on it, well some of it. Mrs Wood wanted grilled halloumi with some cous-cous, I agreed on the halloumi and raised her a pitta with grilled peppers and asparagus wrapped in sliced pancetta.
The halloumi and pancetta-wrapped asparagus was done on the barbecue, and whilst I could have done the peppers too Mrs Wood is less of a meat and barbecue fan than me so I roasted these in the oven instead. I've tried wrapping asparagus in a variety of cured meats including serrano ham (not good!), streaky bacon, back bacon and parma ham, but none have been as good as sliced pancetta.
One word of warning. Pancetta is really quite fatty and as soon as these went on the grill the fat started rendering and I got some impressive flare ups. It was nothing unmanageable and in fact didn't mean the asparagus wasn't cooked, but they definitely benefitted from being offset from the heat (i.e. two-zone cooking) rather than directly over the heat source.
Houmous. It may be of interest that I served this with homemade houmous. I've only just started making this and cannot think why I never did this before, so cheap, really easy, fairly healthy and mega tasty. I put 2-3 tablespoons of tahini in a food processor with the juice of half a lemon, whizz these two together first to mix the oily tahini with the acidic lemon juice. When in a paste, add a 400g tin of drained chickpeas, a large clove of garlic, a pinch of salt and 2 tablespoons of olive oil and whizz until your desired consistency. (I have also tried this with pickled garlic cloves instead of fresh garlic and I believe these work even better, you can add 4-5 cloves of pickled garlic instead of one as the taste is less 'garlicky' but adds a whole new flavour dimension).
