I've always harboured the sneaking suspicion that food television only exists to raise people's expectations about food so high that they are too afraid to cook at home just in case the televised recipe goes pear-shaped, and thus instead go out and buy whatever prepared foods are advertised between the program segments. Which got me thinking: perhaps if I can replicate the results as seen on TV, then maybe I can singularly lower the bar for the home-cook and spread a wave of culinary underwhelmingness.

I'm no professional in the kitchen. The food industry jobs that I've managed to hold down (that don’t involve writing) can be typified as either agricultural or industrial, and nothing beyond the sort of job that if you applied yourself, you could learn well before morning tea. I like to think that I'm proficient at cooking but don't have the superb economy of movement that typifies a good chef, or the ability to control a team of good chefs like a truly great chef. My skill lies in being able to recognize these traits in others.

Mechoui

Mechoui is the Arabic word for "cooked over fire". You can use it equally to describe a salad of roasted vegetables or a whole spit-roasted camel, if the mood (or in the case of the camel, madness) takes you. The essential ingredient and single constant is flame; whatever you place over that fire is fair game. Mechoui does tend to be associated with cooking huge chunks of (and where possible, whole) lamb over an open fire, rubbed with the earthy North African spices indigenous to whichever burg in North Africa whence you find yourself.

In series one of Food Safari, Maeve O'Meara hits up Aziz Bakhalla of Manly's Alhambra Restaurant for his lamb mechoui recipe and while this site has the recipe for it, you'll notice in the video clip that Aziz is liberal in his interpretation. How many of Aziz's handfuls of cumin or paprika equates to an exact tablespoon?

I briefly considered phoning SBS to see if I could get in touch with Maeve. Maybe I could call up Maeve and ask her "how large are your hands?". From this I could make a rough comparison of her hand size to Aziz's and mine, and get some more accurate measure.

Failing this I followed the recipe.

As you can see I don't have the suggested cut of lamb. I've bought a weird cut that happens when the butcher can't be bothered slicing lamb chops into pieces. And I missed photographing the coriander, salt and oil. I mixed the ingredients and marinated.

One thing that I own and tend to lord over my fellow barbecue aficionados is a small rotisserie. It consists of a small steel drum with a hobby motor attached to turn the spit, just large enough to fit multiple chickens but too small for a whole suckling pig. Once you've eaten from the rotisserie, all other forms of roasting without fire are rendered meaningless. So after a few hours of lazy marination, I stuck the lamb on the spit.

After an hour rotating, I realized that I'd added a new element to the recipe, rendering it once again unattainable to the bulk of readers without a rotisserie, repeating the same central dilemma of food TV. But it was all the more delicious.