National Spam Appreciation Week - Spam and Halloumi Kebabs

As I already mentioned in an earlier post, I was sent some Spam to review ahead of National Spam Appreciation Week. I had a look at the Spam website for some recipes and thought the recipe for spam and halloumi kebabs sounded nice. I adapted it to make a honey and balsamic vinegar rather than chilli dressing and put a few different things on my kebabs with the Spam and halloumi cheese. 

These are very simple to make and you can use whatever ingredients you fancy, such as red or green peppers, mushrooms etc. I began by chopping the Spam into cubes.

 

I also chopped some halloumi and red onion, and par boiled some new potatoes.

To make the dressing, I mixed 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar with 1 tbsp runny honey.

Thread the Spam, halloumi, red onion and potato - or whatever you are using - onto cubes and pour over the marinade. If you have time, you could also marinade the ingredients in the liquid for half an hour.

Grill, turning a couple of times, until the onion has browned and the cheese has softened a little. Serve with a green salad or pitta bread.

These kebabs were very enjoyable and the Spam went well with the halloumi cheese, and the saltiness of the cheese contrasted perfectly with the sweeter dressing.

Russian Shashlik Kebabs

You may already have noticed that my birthday party had a Russian theme this year... I made a vodka and lime cake shaped like a Russian doll, some chocolate vegan cupcakes decorated with Russian doll wafers, and some sugar cookies (which also happened to be vegan) which I decorated to look like Russian dolls.

I also wanted to make some savoury food as we were going out in the evening to the local greyhound stadium (I thought we'd do something a bit different!). It needed to be something that wouldn't take too long to prepare, since I had to do all the baking as well, and also be easy to make vegetarian and meat options - oh, and ideally be finger-food as I barely had enough room for everyone to sit down! I also wanted to tie the food into the Russian theme of the party so had a look online and found all sorts of  'interesting' Russian foods I could cook... then was very pleased to discover this recipe for Shashlik kebabs, which are apparently Russian.

It's a simple recipe that essentially involves marinading chunks of lamb in a mixture of onion, garlic, shallots, parsley, cayenne pepper and pomegranate juice. I'm not entirely sure to what extent this is Russian, or why, but it sounded nice and fit my requirements, so I decided to make it, and thread the lamb chunks onto skewers with mini potatoes and vegetables as well.

I decided to make some garlic mushrooms by marinading mini button mushrooms in a mixture of garlic puree and melted butter, though I used dairy-free margarine so these were suitable for vegans.

I then followed the recipe and mixed onion, garlic, parsley and pomegranate juice

Marinading cubes of lamb in the mixture

I threaded the lamb onto kebabs along with mini onions, red, green and orange peppers, the garlic mushrooms and mini baby new potatoes which I had pre-roasted. Rather than grill the kebabs I oven-cooked them as it meant I didn't have to worry so much about keeping an eye on them. They were pretty tasty and it was good to be able to combine different items for meat eaters, vegans, and people who are just generally a bit fussy!