Well this is a book made for summer and BBQs, and it helps if you have a kitchen! Luckily this summer we do - this time last summer we had our kitchen replaced - see I'm not sure I was ready for this - and while we were living on BBQed food, it wasn't anything fancy as we had nowhere to prepare food.

52 Cookbooks: the challenge is to cook a

new recipe from one of my (many)

cookbooks each week for a year...

But now we do. And we have summer for two years running!

So I'd better make use of this rather fancy Barbecue book by Stéphane Reynaud. I say it's fancy but not all of the recipes are and anyway it's nice to push the BBQ boundaries every once in a while.

I quite fancied these Pineapple Chicken Skewers but MOH was less sure, I mean sweet and savoury... Yes, almost like a Hawaiian pizza dear...

But without the pizza, and with chicken instead of ham... So anyway we had Pineapple Chicken Skewers.

The cubed chicken breast needed to marinate in coconut cream, lime juice, lime zest and chilli powder. The recipe said 24 hours, but in the end I managed 8 hours or so.

Now creamed coconut is an odd thing. I had some in sachets which needed to be immersed in hot water for it to soften. It was still quite hard and mixing it with the other marinade ingredients wasn't easy and this was another candidate for scrunching it all together. Anyway, with that done I left the meat in the fridge.

Several hours later when I took it out of the fridge it has fused into a large coconut ball. Not sure if it was supposed to do that as the recipe was quite brief. I wondered if I should have put it into the fridge (remembering I'd needed hot water earlier to soften it).

But reasoned I should, as BBQs tend to take place when it's warmer and there's no way anyone would leave chicken out for 24 hours to marinade, would they?

I've since learnt that creamed coconut and coconut cream are not the same thing, who knew? Oh well, it was too late for this dish...

So I broke it up and skewered the chicken along with fresh pineapple pieces, here it is ready to go onto the BBQ.

It cooked for 15 minutes over a relatively low heat before being served alongside potatoes, salad, some hot tomato chilli sauce I'd made last October (from a glut of tomatoes) and some lime on the side for an extra squeeze.

The verdict:

Good - the pineapple was great BBQed and gave some zing to the chicken.
They did blacken (and smoke) quite quickly so keep an eye on them.
MOH liked them and seemed to clear his plate in double quick time and was looking (unsuccessfully) for seconds.
I'd add pineapple to other kebabs too, it made a nice change.
I'd cook them again but would just use cream of coconut (like the recipe says!) and perhaps more chilli.