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Healthy Grilling: A Dietician’s Menu
I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again: Barbecue (more specifically grilling) is the ultimate health food. Grilling adds flavor through smoke and searing, while simultaneously melting out fat. Historically speaking, the discovery of cooking food with fire was mankind’s single greatest discovery and it gave us a competitive evolutionary edge that sustains us to this day. It gives me great pleasure to introduce today’s blog, written by my step-daughter, Betsy Klein. Betsy...
Read more →Strategies and Recipes for Healthy Grilling and Smoking
Photo by Rob Baas. Whether you’ve resolved to shed a few pounds picked up during the holidays or have committed to making lasting lifestyle changes, your grill or smoker can be an invaluable ally. We know what you’re thinking—that some of barbecue’s most ardent practitioners are more Buddha-like than buff, that the only thing “shredded” at their table is the pulled pork. (We watch BBQ Pitmasters, too.) But chalk that up to overindulgence or bad genes. The truth is, live fire cooking is actually...
Read more →Grilled and Smothered Artichokes from the Vegetable Butcher
From The Vegetable Butcher. Photo by Matthew Benson. You may be able to carve meat, but butchering vegetables...? Today’s guest blog post comes from fellow Workman Publishing author, Cara Mangini, who wrote a fabulous book called The Vegetable Butcher. Yeah, I know, most of you are unrepentant carnivores—me too—but these gorgeous and unbelievably tasty grilled artichokes sure made me sit up and take notice. We’re talking top-ten-dishes-of-the-year delectable,...
Read more →In Defense of Poblano Peppers: Floyd Cardoz’s Flavorwalla
Photograph copyright © 2016 by Lauren Volo. From time to time we run guest blog posts from my fellow authors at Workman Publishing. If you love skirt steak as much as I do, you’ll go crazy for this fire-seared beef with poblano chiles and horseradish from Indian-born chef Floyd Cardoz’s fantastic new book Flavorwalla. –Steven Mexican food is a lot like Indian food: generally easy to prepare and based on very appealing flavors. Mexican cooking also...
Read more →5 Recipes and 12 Tips for Grilled Jalapeño Poppers
Photo by Rob Baas. You may know them as jalapeño poppers, armadillo eggs, rattlesnake eggs, or even ABTs. Whatever you call them, stuffed smoked jalapeños rock the grill across the U.S. A bite-size variant of Mexican chiles rellenos, poppers have been around since the 1970s. Early versions were typically stuffed with cheese, then breaded and fried. Naturally, it didn’t take barbecuers long to discover these babies were even better when grilled. A Facebook query on the...
Read more →Grilled or Smoked: Our Best Thanksgiving Side Dishes
In most households, turkey is the rock star of Thanksgiving dinner. Smoke-roasted whole and brought to the table with fanfare, it is the enduring symbol of this uniquely American holiday. But have you noticed, once plates are piled high, our forks tend to go to one of the side dishes? We can’t get enough of our herbed stuffing/dressing, candied yams, corn pudding, smashed potatoes, and inexplicably, old-school green bean casserole. Without straying too far from the prescribed path, may I suggest that...
Read more →Gazpacho Hits the Grill
Photo by Richard Dallett. Triple digit heat across the Midwest and Europe. Drought in California. Wildfires throughout the West. 2015 is shaping up to be one of the most torrid summers on record, and that’s before you factor in the heat of the grill. For years, I’ve relied on a simple remedy from the garden to beat the heat—a sort of a cross between a cold soup and salad. The Spanish call it gazpacho. I call it the most refreshing...
Read more →Not Your Usual Barbecue: 10 Offbeat Foods You Should Grill Right Now
Guilty as charged. Of grilling the same familiar foods over and over—you know, steak, salmon, bratwurst. We all do it (even me), when the wide wondrous Planet Barbecue beacons. It’s time to break out of your comfort zone: to try some different foods on your grill and new techniques for grilling them. To get you started, here's my top 10 list of offbeat foods to fire up your grill for right now. Halloumi: This snappy salty white cheese from Cyprus is designed not to melt at high temperature. Which...
Read more →Greens, Meet Grill: Grilled Salads
Reprinted from The Barbecue! Bible. Photo copyright © Ben Fink. When I was growing up, barbecue meant meat. Preferably steak. And more steak. The idea of grilling a bell pepper or a portobello mushroom, or (gasp!) lettuce would have seemed as foreign as landing a man on the moon. Meat went on the grill outdoors. Salads were prepared in the kitchen. Period. Well, we did land a man on the moon, and we do now grill salads. We’re not alone. For centuries, Italians...
Read more →Sweet Corn Around the World: 10 Globally Inspired Recipes
I grew up in Iowa where we harbored rather provincial ideas about sweet corn. As far as we were concerned, there was just one way to do it: fill a speckled enamel pot with water and a spoonful of sugar, put the pot over a quick flame, then trot out to the garden to pick and husk the corn. We’d boil the ears for three minutes, then remove them to a platter with tongs. At the table, we’d jab the ends of the ears with twin-pronged corn holders, impale a cube of cold butter on the end of a fork, and run it over the steaming, tightly packed kernels. A sprinkle of table salt and black pepper, and you were...
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