Grilling

At the end of June, I asked you all for your summer food suggestions. Here's the round-up (plus a few extra):

1. Salads
   We can move beyond typical salads (lettuce drenched in dressing) to look at chopped salads, bean salads, fruit salads (sweet or savory), potato salads, and pasta salads. Some of these can be made in large quantities that will keep for a while. Salads can easily become a main course, and they don't need to be raw. Quickly seared (or grilled) meats and vegetables work well for making a hearty entree salad. If they cook quickly, it isn't going to get too hot.
2. Grilling
   Yes, your grill gets very hot... but it is outside and shouldn't heat your house up. There's a reason we like to grill in the summer.
3. Stews and Braises
   Crimfan notes that a crockpot won't really heat up your kitchen. I'll expand that to include all sorts of low-and-slow cooking. We normally think of braises and stews as cold weather food, but (particularly if you skip the pile of root vegetables) they can certainly work in the summer as well. Think chili. A rice cooker is another tool that works well in the summer.
4. Raw, Fermented, or Cured Foods
   Consider meals that don't require cooking at all: bread, cheese, and fruit is a classic. Gazpacho. Sashimi. Carpaccio. Salamis. Pickled vegetables. Yogurt. There are many options.
5. Dips
   Thick tzaziki. Hummus. Babaganouj. Add something to dip such as raw vegetable, bread, or tortilla chips. Olives and cheeses might be appropriate as well. Also consider raitas, chutneys, salsas, guacamole...
6. Lessons from this past weekend
   When we were in South Carolina last weekend, my brother's best friend's wife and her mother (who are Guatemalan) made a ceviche variant. The end result was a gazpacho-like mix of chopped tomatoes, onions, and cilantro with cooked shrimp. A quick and dirty way of approximating this would be to take a mild salsa, add some fresh cilantro (and maybe a can of diced tomatoes), and some precooked shrimp (or uncooked shrimp that you've marinated in lime juice and/or vinegar). They served it with crackers, but a thin-sliced baguette would have been even better. You can easily substitute (or add) other sorts of seafood.

   We also had plenty of bagels this past weekend. I think my parents brought over 4 dozen bagels with them (for six people over about four days). Bagels with cream cheese, smoked salmon, and sliced onion and tomato is a classic. Variations are easy: add capers, substitute smoked trout for the salmon, try sliced/grilled vegetables with a bit of olive oil...

Image by Robert S. DonovanOver the weekend of the 4th, I was down at my brother's lake house in South Carolina with my family. It is a gorgeous place. His house looks out over Lake Wateree (a lake with a VERY ORIGINAL name). We watched an osprey catch fish. (It did better than my father.) There were fireworks out over the lake. There was, of course, grilling.

Unfortunately, while my brother's lake house is very nice, his grill is old and poorly designed. The coals sit on a metal plate without air holes. Without a good oxygen source, the coals burn cold, if at all. When I lamented the lack of a chimney starter to his friends who live in the area, they laughed, saying that they keep meaning to pick one up because they can never get the coals hot on the grill.

Since the local grocery store didn't seem to carry them, I decided to make my own. I looked around at what I had to work with. I found a plethora of empty boxes for holding 12-packs of carbonated beverages (the long, rectangular kind).

I grabbed an empty Orange Crush box and tore small holes near the bottom of the closed end. Then I opened up part of the bottom - not enough for the charcoal to fall out, but enough for air to get sucked up into it. I propped the box up so that it wasn't sitting directly on the flat metal plate (letting air get up under it) and filled it with charcoal. I used a bit of a paper towel (newspaper would work) as a wick, running it up through one of the holes in the bottom and out underneath.

I lit the wick and... well... fire happened. The box was gradually consumed. By the time it fell apart (nicely scattering the coals across the grill), the coals were nice and hot.

Even apart from the contrast with the previous day's weak coals, these coals were beautiful.

I love grilling. There's something magical about the communal nature of cooking outside along with friends and family. Of course, grilling usually involves large slabs of meat, and those you'd want to spend time with can include people who don't eat meat. While it is easy enough to throw in some cold vegetarian side dishes for them, that doesn't really allow them to share in the communal experience.

The solution? Grill up some vegetables.

Some people like to grill big portobellos. I'm not a huge mushroom fan. Instead, my personal favorite vegetables for grilling are broccoli and sweet potatoes (zucchini work well, too). The broccoli I cut into long spears, while the sweet potatoes (or summer squash) get sliced lengthwise into large slabs a bit less than 1/4 inch thick. These get marinated for a bit in a mixture that varies but is roughly 1 part sesame oil, 1 part lime juice, 2 parts honey, 2 parts rice vinegar, and 3 parts soy sauce. Sometimes it gets a dash of fish sauce or sriracha sauce. Other times the lime juice and honey might be replaced with orange juice... or the honey might be replaced with maple syrup. There are many possibilities.

Regardless, they get marinated for a bit and then tossed on the grill until they are cooked through and just start to char. The results are substantial, delicious, and far better for you than coleslaw and potato salad.

My other favorite is to grill up some green onions Mexican-style. Salt them with kosher or sea salt, grill them until they are beginning to char, and squeeze some lime juice over them. Eat them whole. The experience is transcendental.