Our friends the Keatings came over on Friday, with their kids. Luckily the kids are fantastic eaters, so I don’t have to play it too safe! Food + Wine this month was all about grilling, and I pulled a recipe for pork and bacon kebabs with sweet onion, bought some skewers and spices, and went to work.

The pork spent some time communing with mustard powder, paprika, garlic and caraway seeds. I’ll definitely do this again but leave out the caraway, which didn’t add much flavor after grilling but was unpleasantly gritty.

Very tricky to cut the onions so that they go on the skewers neatly, and I’d accidentally gotten the bacon cut way too thin, so it didn’t stay in place as well as one would hope. Still, this was a success–the meat was tender and flavorful, and the sweet onion and smoky bacon were great partners to the pork.

On the side I served steamed green beans with a squeeze of lemon and some olive oil (the 11-year-old polished off nearly all of them as we chatted after dinner), and another batch of Lydia’s pasta salad, this time with fresh mozzarella. I edited the post about the salad–fresh is definitely the way to go. For dessert I had ice cream sundaes, a fun assembly-only dessert choice, especially with kids. We had a few brownies on hand, I bought candied almonds, fudge and caramel sauces, brought out the leftover strawberries from the night before and whipped some cream. Yum!