Swiss BBQ

Written: Saturday, May 21, 2005 @ 3:28pm

Last night I went to a Swiss BBQ. A friend’s birthday, she had kindly invited me to help her celebrate it (it’s actually today, so HAPPY BIRTHDAY!).
I’m not a camper or anything, so my only experiences with BBQs have been machines in people backyards and the few instances that we’ve BBQed on a permanent grill in a park. This BBQ would be different. In their backyard was a fireplace, and attached to it was a device that you could attach a grill to. It was so fantastic. Not only was the fact that there was a fireplace outdoors appealing (just think of how wonderful it would be to sit outside in front of the fire), but it was really neat to watch the grilling take place.
There was SO much food. Meat, veggies, potatoes, corn on the cob, salads, drinks, mini pizzas, this amazing dried mango that I have to ask where they got it from, ice cream, cake, coffee, champagne, chips and other snacks…it was fantastic.
Although we started snacking at 5:30pm-ish, we didn’t actually start putting anything on the grill until 9pm. By 11pm we were still grilling and eating. I could see the night continuing on for much longer, but I had to get home at a relatively decent time to rest.
I’m quite proud of myself. Of course the whole evening was conducted in French and I’m not very good at mingling and meeting people. I’m actually a really shy person (or at least on first impression). And then when friends get together (youthful friends especially), the chit chat goes faster and faster. I admit that I didn’t follow every single conversation that happened that night, but I think I did pretty well!

Because there was a fire, I was telling people about how we toast marshmallows (because I hadn’t seen any marshmallows here in Switzerland). In candy stores they have marshmallow candies, but not the plain ones for hot chocolate or for toasting. Conveniently enough, there were marshmallows in the house (the multicolored, twisted, candy ones) and so they thought it would be exciting to try to toast them. I was surrounded by a lot of skeptical people. The coals weren’t quite hot enough to toast the marshmallows, and I wasn’t close enough to the fireplace, so a toasting rookie awkwardly stuck some marshmallows on skewers into the fireplace not sure what to expect. I felt so bad for her. She was so confused. I mentioned that the coals probably weren’t hot enough, and we probably needed to get the fire going again. In the meantime, people experimented with tealight candles. Yup, it wasn’t too bad. Mine worked out pretty well I thought. Helpful hint: candy marshmallows lit on fire very quickly. But if you’re a toasting regular, you’ll know this isn’t always a bad thing. Let it char for a bit if you desire and just blow it out. There were a lot of panicked yelps and awkward laughing, because flaming marshmallows wasn’t in their comfort zone. How funny different cultures are. I tried to explain the novelty of s’mores, but I think it was a lost cause. They couldn’t understand why you would mix those three objects together. They also don’t have graham crackers here, so that didn’t really help. Any generic cracker/biscuit still seemed like an odd thing to meld with chocolate and marshmallow. Luckily we didn’t try to make any that night. I didn’t want to think us American/Canadians were too weird or anything. So the toasted marshmallow thing didn’t go over very well. The birthday girl seemed to really like them, but every one else just looked confused. One girl wouldn’t try them. I’ll blame it on the fact that we used the wrong kind of marshmallow, although I’m sure it really doesn’t make that much of a difference.

It was yet another wonderful experience. Seeing how a different culture runs a BBQ, what kinds of foods they eat, spending time outside relaxing and chatting and meeting new people, seeing the sky suddenly become dark, candles and of course the obligatory 15 minutes of rain and the mad dash to save everything from being soaked. The is what life is all about. New experiences.