¼ kg shrimp, sautéed in garlic and chile, or a single kebab of chicken, or a couple skewers of barbecued pork, Vietnamese-style (aka Xa Xiu ), or a bit of grilled tofu
mix all the dressing ingredients in a bowl and whisk until mixed. It’ll separate, and it will separate faster if chilled, so leave it room temperature if you didn’t make it the night before.
Salad Directions
grill kiwi slices, 5 minutes on one side, undisturbed. They should be brown on the bottom, just beginning to caramelize
place kiwi slices on plate, browned side up
if you need to sauté the shrimp, put a little oil and garlic into the pan to loosen the fond from the kiwis, and then cook the shrimp
Just a basic side-dish. The good part is that you can do most of the prep work ahead of time, and then toss them on the grill in order to have something besides meat to eat. They take a while to prepare, but most of that time is spent waiting for something to finish, so you can do plenty of other things at the same time. Also, you can make them hours ahead of time, and they will keep until you're ready to cook.
Ingredients
3 medium to large potatoes.
1 Cup vegetables (corn, peas, green beans, carrot or mix).
One medium-size white onion, chopped.
One bell pepper (green, red or yellow, any will work), chopped.
One clove garlic, chopped finely.
Olive oil.
Salt and Pepper to season.
½ Cup shredded cheese (optional).
Directions
Microwave potatoes for 10-15 minutes. You don't want to cook them completely, just enough that the skin has started to loosen.
Put potatoes into cold water, and then into the fridge. Let them cool for at least a half-hour.
If you try to cut up the spuds when they're too hot, they'll crumble. If you let them cool enough, they'll slice like butter.
Cut potatoes into ¾ inch (2 cm) cubes or ⅜ inch (1 cm) thick slices.
Set out a 9 x 15 inch piece of aluminum foil.
Place potatoes in an even layer on the foil, leaving a couple inches all the way around.
Add vegetable, onion, peppers, and garlic to potatoes.
Drizzle a tablespoon or two of olive-oil over the lot.
Add salt and pepper to season. You can also add herbs such as basil, parsley, etc.
Place a second piece of aluminum foil over the top, and fold in the edges, sealing in all the bits. You should end up with a 6 x 10 inch (or slightly larger) packet.
Place in the cooler or in the fridge until it's time to go to the ball-game.
When you've got the grill going, place the sealed packet on the grill. If the grill is at the right temperature for doing hamburgers or bratwurst, they'll take about 10-20 minutes to cook.
Flip them over a couple times as the rest of the meal is cooking. When they're done, just serve directly from the foil.
If you want to get fancy, put about a half-cup of shredded cheese over the bits as soon as you pull them off the grill and let them sit for a minute or so for the cheese to melt over everything.
Serves four
Preparation time: 10-15 minutes of work, about an hour on the clock total
Cooking time: 10-20 minutes, depending on how hot the grill is
Grilled rainbow trout are a real treat, and the light herbs enhance the flavors nicely. The only tricky part is flipping the fish without breaking it up. You want to flip them just once if possible.
Ingredients (per trout, 2 trout will feed 3 people)
1 cleaned rainbow trout (about ½ lb), with head on
6 mint leaves, chopped finely
finely chopped parsley, same quantity as the mint
a pinch of finely chopped sweet basil
1 tbsp butter
juice from one small lemon
salt and pepper to season
Directions
Chop herbs and mix into butter and lemon juice.
If you're using salted butter, no additional salt will be needed, otherwise add about ¼ tsp salt to the mix, plus pepper to taste.
Gently rub skin with a small amount of butter and herbs.
Fill fish's body cavity with remaining butter and herbs.
Grill 5-7 minutes per side. When the eye that's down turns white, that side is done.
A tasty side-dish that can be finished on a barbecue grill. You can prepare them well ahead of time without too much worry. Because everything in the stuffing is pre-cooked, you just need to warm that up and cook the pepper on the outside, so they're quick and easy to bake or grill. Originally from August 2001.
Ingredients
2 green bell peppers
2 small potatoes
¾ Cup corn
1 golf-ball sized onion
4 strips bacon
½ Cup mozarella cheese
salt and pepper to season
Directions
Wash potatoes and microwave them on high for 4-6 minutes, until cooked.
Meanwhile chop bacon and onion and fry together until onions have gone translucent.
Boil corn in water until tender.
Cut top out of peppers and remove seeds and white innards.
Mash potatoes with bacon and onions.
Mix corn with potatoes.
Use mix to stuff peppers nearly full.
Top peppers with cheese.
For bbq cooking, wrap peppers in aluminum foil, for oven cooking, just place them in a baking pan.
You can test the peppers for doneness by gently pushing against the side of the pepper. It will still feel firm until cooked, at which point it will feel much softer.
Serves: 2 or 3
Preparation Time: 15 minutes
Cooking Time: 15-20 minutes on the grill, 10 minutes in an oven (350F-ish, but use whatever temperature your main dish needs)
Stolen from Todd without permission, because he let fibblesnork.com lapse, and the recipe needs to be preserved.
Ingredients
1 (one) 32-oz. jar Claussen® half-spears (For top quality, use only Claussen pickles, found in the refrigerator section. Do not use any other brand unless they are uncooked and refrigerated. Cooked pickles are limp and soggy. Uncooked pickles (like Claussen) are firm and crunchy. If you know of any other uncooked refrigerated brands, I'd like to hear about them.)
2-3 Habenero peppers, sliced
4-5 Serrano peppers, sliced
2-3 Jalapeño peppers, sliced
24 cloves garlic, pressed or finely chopped (That's not 2-4, as in 2-to-4, that's twenty-four cloves — a whole head of garlic.)
1 tbsp. crushed red pepper flakes
Directions
First Day
Drain and discard 1 oz. picklewater from jar.
Remove pickles from jar, cut into ¾″ slices, and return pickles to jar.
Add garlic and peppers to jar.
Cover jar (close lid tightly) and shake vigorously for 2 minutes.
This is a sauce I made up to put onto pork chops, to avoid the same-old same-old syndrome. It's not quite perfect, but I'm relatively pleased. It's based loosely on a recipe from “Cooking With Fruit” that I originally found on the About.com cooking site (but which redirects to a fish recipe on TheSpruceEats now – this is why I keep copies of my own versions of recipes). Originally from July 2002.
Ingredients
about a cup chopped rhubarb (½ – ¾ lb)
¼ Cup water
2 tsp ground ginger
⅓ Cup apple cider vinegar
2 cups water
1 cup finely chopped sweet onion
1 green bell pepper, chopped finely
1 tsp ground cayenne pepper
2 tsp fish sauce
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp lemon juice
4 oz. crushed pineapple
Directions
Put rhubarb, ¼ cup water, and ginger in a small saucepan, heat and simmer for 5 minutes
Set rhubarb aside
Bring 2 cups water and ⅓ cup vinegar to a boil in a saucepan
Add chopped onion and green pepper
Boil onion and green pepper for 2-3 minutes
Drain onion and green pepper, then add them to the rhubarb, mixing well
At this point, I started doing things to taste, trying to achive a reasonable balance of hot, sweet, sour and salty
Add cayenne (hot) to taste
Add fish sauce, and soy sauce (salty) to taste
Add lemon juice (sour) to taste
Add pineapple (sweet & sour) to taste
Preparation time: ½ hour
Smear this on pork chops you're going to barbecue or fry. You could also bake them in a casserole dish bathed in the sauce. When you're adding things to taste, you should try and remember that you're trying to get the four main flavors roughly in balance, so none of them predominates. Start by adding about half of each of the cayenne, fish & soy sauces, lemon and pineapple, and then adjust accordingly. Even with all the other stuff in this sauce, you can still tell there's rhubarb underneath it. You could also use strawberries, raspberries, or a number of other fruits, too. Heck, use whatever's in season.
This is the description of how Alton Brown recommends to butterfly a chicken. I don’t entirely agree with it, as it’s pretty easy to end up with some breast-meat that’s underdone, but if you don’t mind overcooking the dark meat, it works pretty well. The classic technique is what I use. Originally written January 2006.
Ingredients
One broiler/fryer chicken – roughly three pounds
Directions
Wash chicken, remove giblets and pat dry.
Place the chicken on its side on a cutting board, and use a pair of shears or a boning knife to remove the spine from the chicken.
Flip the chicken so it’s breast-up and cut out the keelbone, which is also known as the breastbone.
Press the bird flat, like a butterfly.
When cooking the bird on a grill, start it skin-side down and place a couple bricks (wrapped in tin-foil) on the bird to keep it flat. Cook for 12 minutes.
Flip bird, put the bricks back on, and cook for another 15 minutes or so, until done.
Let chicken rest for at least ten minutes before serving.
This is the description of how Jacques Pépin recommends to butterfly a chicken (its technique #145 in Complete Techniques). I find it works better for me than Alton Brown's method, but I skip the steps to secure the leg. I originally wrote this in January of 2006.
Ingredients
One broiler/fryer chicken – roughly three pounds
Directions
Wash chicken, remove giblets, and pat dry.
Place chicken on its side on a cutting board, and cut through the backbone on one side of the neck with a sturdy knife.
Pull the chicken open and separate the backbone by cutting on the other side of the neck bone, down to the tail.
Place the chicken skin-side down, and flatten it with a meat-pounder.
Remove the shoulder bones that stick up by cutting at the joint.
Remove the rib cage from each side of the chicken.
(optional) Make a small cut at the joint which separates the thigh from the drumstick. Don't cut all the way through, but you can cut down to the bone.
(optional) Cut a hole through the skin between the point of the breast and the thigh.
(optional) Push the tip of the drumstick through the hole to secure the leg.
Cook on a grill or in a broiler about 15 minutes per side (at 450F).
A fairly simple breakfast sausage mix. This is based on AB’s Breakfast Sausage, with a few tweaks I made along the way to make it work better with the ingredients I had on hand, my schedule, and my taste-buds. Since you can’t taste it until after it’s ground and cooked, this is the kind of recipe where keeping notes is extra-handy.
Ingredients
2 pounds pork butt (2½-3 with bone) cut into ½ to ¾ inch cubes
1 tbsp kosher salt (AB calls for 2tsp, but at that level I had to salt the patties, which led to a much higher salt level overall)
1½ tsp freshly ground black pepper
2 tsp dried sage (I’ve doubled this and liked the results)
2 tsp dried thyme
½ tsp finely chopped rosemary
½ tsp grated nutmeg
1 tsp red pepper flakes
1 tbsp brown sugar
(Optional) ½ pound pork fat, if you got a really lean pork-butt
special equipment
meat grinder
directions
Chop, grind, and otherwise prepare spices. Dump them into a 1 gallon zip-top freezer bag.
Cube meat, dropping it into the bag. If the meat is really lean (less than 20% fat), add up to ½ pound of pork fat. Getting the lean/fat ratio right might require some experience, but an untrimmed pork butt is about right. If your butcher trims it, asking him for extra pork-fat and explaining that you’re grinding your own sausage will help him help you get the ratio right.
Mix everything in the bag thoroughly. You want to get some spice coating every cube of meat.
Refrigerate meat and spices at least an hour, preferably overnight.
Grind meat with coarse blade of grinder.
Put meat back into zip-top and chill for a half-hour in freezer, or for an hour or two in the fridge. The goal here is to get the fat to firm up again. If the fat melts during second batch of grinding, you haven’t chilled things enough.
Grind meat with fine blade of grinder.
Package for storage. I use one quart zip-top bags, putting about ¾ pound in each.
This recipe will give you about two pounds of finished breakfast sausage. It’ll keep for about a week in the fridge, or for a few months in the freezer. Cook it just like you would the factory-made stuff, except with more mouth-watering good smells from the pan.
