Vegetables
Barbecue University™
Sweet Corn Steps Up to the Plate
A company well-known for canned and frozen vegetables recently announced America’s favorite vegetable is . . . drum roll, please . . . broccoli. Sorry, but I’m not buying it. And not just because they only polled 4,000 people. What I am buying is sweet corn—from roadside stands, the farmers’ market, and when they’re selling fresh local ears, even the supermarket. Just-picked sweet corn is in season in many states right now, making it one of the best things about August and the dog days of summer. Corn has its...
Read more →Planet Barbecue
Chiles Rellenos Hit the Grill
Warning to all you carnivores out there. The following blog and recipe are vegetarian. But I promise you won’t miss the meat. Raichlen’s rule holds that if something tastes good boiled, baked, sauteed, or fried, it surely tastes better grilled. Case in point: chiles rellenos. This traditional Oaxacan dish—poblano chiles stuffed with cheese (and sometimes ground beef) and deep-fried in egg batter—puts 450 calories on your waistline and 37 grams of...
Read more →Barbecue University™
The Best Potato Ever? Smoke-Roasted Hasselback Potatoes
Steven calls them “potato chips on a bone.” That’s as accurate a description as I’ve heard for these accordion-cut potatoes, delectably crispy on the outside and creamy on the inside with an alluring hint of wood smoke. Invented by a chef at Stockholm’s venerable Hasselbacken restaurant in Sweden (founded in the 1700's and still in business), hasselback potatoes are one of the trendiest spuds to come down the pike in years. And they only take a few minutes more...
Read more →Hot Stuff
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...
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