Archive for the 'on the grill' Category
Check this out. Sometimes this all-encompassing obsession with food has its benefits. (Excuse me, please, while I pat myself on the back for this one. Although I’m quite certain someone somewhere has already thought of it – they can get equal kudos for their obvious culinary brilliance.)
So I was driving recently, or rather I was daydreaming in the passenger seat, imagining myself eating a meatloaf sandwich. Some fantasize about George Clooney; my mind wanders to meatloaf. Can you blame me, really? Meatloaf sandwiches are the best, aren’t they? I mean, they are more often than not my motivation for making meatloaf in the first place. That, and ketchup.
So it occurred to me that one could morph meatloaf and burgers on the barbecue. Although I am a longtime fan of the grilled burger, I don’t make them often at home. (This could be partly due to my underlying prejudice against homemade burgers, instilled at an early age when my Dad would broil patties made with extra-lean ground beef and oat bran in approximately a 50-50 ratio. He’s a gastroenterologist; I suppose this excuses him for being a particularly vocal advocate of fiber. Needless to say, my first fast-food burger was a mind-blowing revelation.)
But – meatloaf. You could bake a meatloaf, and then chill it, and then grill thick slabs to heat it through, brushing with barbecue sauce or the sticky glaze normally reserved for the top of a meatloaf. Couldn’t you? Oh yes. You sure could. Especially if you had leftovers.
Bonus: this relieves any pressure of whomever is in charge of the barbecue to ensure they cook the burgers through without overcooking them, as well as the need to break one or two open to see just how pink they are inside. Because hey, the meatloaf is cooked already.
If you need a meatloaf recipe, there are plenty to be found online. Cook it, chill it, slice it thick. If there is a glaze, save it to brush on while you grill. Then all you need to do is add a slab of aged white cheddar (or, you know, whatever) after the first flip, and close the lid so that it melts.
And so it has come to be that W will not carry a homemade burger prejudice on his shoulders into adulthood.
One Year Ago: Black Currant Sorbet & Ginger Ale Floats
August 15 2009 | beef and on the grill | 22 Comments »
Yesterday was Food Day, and the world’s longest barbecue. I caught wind of it last week – too late to really organize anything – I pondered calling a few neighbours over for an impromptu dinner when it occurred to me that cooking a nice meal on the grill for the three of us is just as legit as pulling together a block party. So I thawed a couple of beautiful bison T-bone steaks from a friend’s brother’s farm, cooked up some tiny new potatoes (which were then drizzled with cold-pressed canola oil from Highwood Crossing – Canada’s EVOO), sauteed some chard, and tossed a salad of lettuce leaves plucked from the pots on my back porch (YES! I DIDN”T KILL THEM THIS YEAR!), roasted beets (from another friend’s brother’s farm) and crumbled Fairwinds Farm goat cheese, drizzled with honey-balsamic vinaigrette. The bison steaks were unbelievable – so worth a try – but remember that they are leaner than beef (although these came across not one bit as such – so tender and juicy) so they need less time on the grill. These got 3 minutes per side and then a rest in a foil tent on the counter while I made the salad and finished the chard, and were a perfect medium-rare.
(I should mention breakfast, too: my sister and her kids – plus one friend – came for waffles – this recipe, made with a shake of ground flax and drizzle of flax oil, which they did not notice at all, and in fact the kids declared them the best waffles ever – topped with grilled peaches, blueberries, raspberries from the kids’ backyard, Nanking cherry jelly, Rogers’ Golden Syrup and maple whipped cream. Maple whipped cream is just cream whipped with a drizzle of maple syrup instead of sugar.)
After dinner the plan was to head next door for some sangria and mojitos – a good excuse to bake a blueberry galette. BC blueberries are cheap right now, and when I was shuffling around my freezer for room to fit more in, out fell a roll of puff pastry. I kept it out, and it made a perfect galette with under 5 minutes of actual work. That’s my kind of fast food.
It had just come out of the oven when the windstorm hit. You may have heard of it – and if you’re in Calgary, most likely experienced it. For us it was a little unexpected drama between dinner and dessert; gale-force winds trashing the back yard and forcing us all to rush in for cover. It took the power out for a couple hours, which only meant we’d have to wait for our whipped cream, and W couldn’t watch The Incredibles. We heard sirens in the distance – not uncommon during a storm – and only learned later of the horrific accident downtown, and the stage collapse at Big Valley Jamboree. How do you endure it? I just can’t imagine.
So we ate our pie late, back outside, when the power came back on and we could whip the cream with some maple syrup. When I cut into it the juices ran out (I served it on a cheese board that was $6 at Winners) but not in an uncontrollable way – this is my fear, with berry pies, since that one I made as a kid that wallowed in a half inch of soup. This was runny in a way that kept it from being stodgy – although it was a bit of a trick to catch all the drips, I wouldn’t change a thing. The puff pastry wasn’t too puff, and was lovely pastry. (It was one of two rolled-up logs you get in a package of President’s Choice puff pastry from Superstore – easy because you don’t have to roll it out – and even though it was square, it still worked just fine. In fact, the points made it look even more cool and rustic.)
Blueberry Galette
inspired by this one.
1 pkg. puff pastry, thawed, or pastry for a single-crust pie
1/2 cup sugar
2 Tbsp. cornstarch
3 cups fresh blueberries
1 Tbsp. lemon juice
1/4 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp. salt
1 Tbsp. butter, cut into bits
1 egg, lightly beaten
coarse sugar, for sprinkling (optional)
Put oven rack in the middle position and preheat to 425°F. Line a large, rimmed baking sheet with foil, parchment or a silpat mat.
In a small bowl, stir together the sugar and cornstarch to get rid of any lumps. In a large bowl, toss the berries, sugar-cornstarch mixture, lemon juice, cinnamon and salt.
Unwrap the puff pastry onto the sheet, or roll regular pastry into a 10″ (ish) circle. Mound the blueberries into the middle of the dough, leaving an inch or two around the edge. Fold the edges over the filling, just enough to keep the berries from sliding out. It can overlap and look rustic, there is no need for neatness.
Brush the pastry with egg and sprinkle with sugar. Bake until golden, 25-30 minutes. If it’s browning too quickly, cover loosely with some foil. Cool for a few minutes before sliding out onto a cutting board to cut and serve. Serve warm, with whipped cream sweetened with maple syrup or vanilla ice cream. Serves 6.
Tonight’s dinner can be summed up in four words: SHAKEN’BAKE – DRUMSTICKS – AT – SHIRLEY’S.
One Year Ago:
August 02 2009 | bison and dessert and on the grill | 22 Comments »
Really, we have to stop meeting like this.
I was a very bad omnivore today. Breakfast was a cheesecake brownie (on the upside, it was from Brûlée) eaten with great guilt on the sidewalk in front of the gym I used to actually go to while waiting to cross the street. Honestly, why can so many calories be ingested in so little time? Then Mike brought me an ice cap, and later, fueled by panic and adrenaline over a looming deadline, I ate three chocolate chip cookies all warm and gooey from the oven. (They were for an event. Quality control is very important.)
Dinner was a Moroccan meal, the theme chosen by the highest bidders on me at an event to raise money for Brown Bagging for Calgary Kids. (Yes, I was auctioned off – tonight we coined the term “charity whore”.) I couldn’t have been sold to nicer people – they had nice friends, even, and made nice pomegranate martinis. I made a lot of things. Baba ghanouj, muhammara and fresh naan, Moroccan spiced olives, Spanikopita triangles, a Moroccan Vegetable Stew with Harissa Yogurt Sauce, spiced carrot salad, lentil-barley salad, grilled lemon chicken satay and a couscous salad I’ll definitely make again (except that oops – I just realized I forgot the cilantro); the couscous itself was quickly stirred into a simmering mixture of chicken stock, ginger, garlic, cumin, turmeric and cinnamon, along with a handful of raisins, then lidded and left to absorb all that flavour, fluffed with a fork and tossed with peppers, pea pods, cucumber, olive oil and lemon. Yum.
And lamb popsicles – a couple racks of lamb cut into chops, then doused in olive oil, lemon juice, garlic and bashed rosemary overnight and tossed on the grill for just a couple minutes per side. Dessert was my usual mini pavlova and spiced nut tartlets I made by using a butter tart recipe and adding chopped dates, walnuts, almonds and cashews and a pinch of cinnamon and nutmeg to the filling. And a pistachio honey cake that tasted a little too much like a sweet, gummy sponge, although everyone else seemed to like it.
No wonder I’m so bagged. And now it’s quarter to one AM, and I have to be up in around 6 hours to do some more whoring around.
I’m going to be lazy – one last bag of Pike Place Roast coffee and a $25 Starbucks card is up for grabs this week. (One of my very favourite things to get, come to think of it – fresh beans and free coffee!) Starbucks is very first on my agenda tomorrow morning. (Congrats to Aimee, who got a copy of Big Bad Bantam Rooster last week, and Carolyn who won some goodies for her no-knead bread idea, and Nancy who got a copy of the new Grazing.) Lets go back to posting what we had for dinner last night. (Unless you want to tackle one of W’s questions of the day: What do rhinos think?)
One Year Ago: Pizza and Chocolate Sorbet
June 12 2009 | lamb and on the grill | 54 Comments »
The very first thing I did this morning was drop $280 for an hour in the dentist’s chair getting my teeth scraped with a variety of picks. I would have preferred a new pair of John Fluevog boots, or a flight to Vegas, or something. The day got more expensive from there: a $5000+ estimate on near-future dental work, and the same from the roofer. I think somewhere along the way I forgot to marry rich. Who came up with the phrase love OR money, anyway? (One of the downfalls of being self-employed: no dental plan. I think I need a dentist boyfriend to see on the side. Mike would totally understand. So if anyone knows any available dentists, you know, I’m game. Too bad crowns aren’t exactly a fair trade for cookies.)
So dinner was on the cheap. Awhile ago I grilled far too many vegetables (or did it too late in the evening, after everyone had had too many mojitos and cared only about the prime rib), and so after a couple grilled veg sandwiches I pulsed the rest in the food processor and froze it, thinking I’d sneak it into some future pasta sauce. Instead I pulled it out and turned it into an easy pizza topping.
It was also a great opportunity to make pizza on the grill again. A lot of people talk about this, but it seems to me even more are freaked out by it, thinking (and rightly so) that the raw dough is going to fuse to the grill, or sink down between the slats, or do something weird. It doesn’t. If you fire up the grill, crank it up and leave it until it’s nice and hot, then slap a big rolled out piece of dough directly onto it (brush the dough with some oil first if it makes you feel better, but you totally don’t have to), it will cook up all nice and crusty and grill-marked. Pizza dough makes great flatbread to serve with dips – simply flip it over, brush with garlicky oil and when it’s toasty on both sides, take it off and cut into pieces or break into shards. Otherwise, flip it over and spread the browned side with pizza sauce, toppings and grated cheese; turn the heat down a bit and close the lid, creating an oven environment that will melt the cheese and heat the toppings through just like your inside oven would. The grill is the best way to cook frozen pizzas, even – the bottom gets nice and crisp, never soggy with that high, direct heat – and you don’t have to heat up the house.
Basic Pizza Dough
Plain or flavoured pizza dough also makes great breadsticks – roll the risen dough into sticks as thin or fat as you like, sprinkle with coarse salt or grated Parmesan cheese and bake until golden.
1 cup lukewarm water
1 pkg. (or 2 tsp.) active dry yeast
1 tsp. sugar or honey
2 1/2 – 3 cups flour – all purpose, whole wheat, or any combination of the two (I usually use about 2 3/4 cups)
1 tsp. salt
a drizzle (1 tsp. – 1 Tbsp.) olive or canola oil
In a large bowl, stir together the water, yeast and sugar; set aside for 5 minutes, until it’s foamy. (If it doesn’t get foamy, either your water was too hot and killed the yeast or it was inactive to begin with – toss it and buy fresh yeast or try again!)
Add 2 1/2 cups of the flour, salt and oil and stir until the dough comes together. On a lightly floured surface, knead the dough for about 8 minutes, until it’s smooth and elastic, adding a little more flour if the dough is too sticky.
Place the dough in an oiled bowl and turn to coat all over. Cover with a tea towel or plastic wrap and set aside in a warm place for half an hour to an hour, until doubled in bulk. If you want you can let it rise more slowly in the refrigerator for up to 8 hours.
Roll the dough out into one or two pizzas. Spread the pizza dough with tomato sauce or paste, sprinkle with desired toppings and bake on a preheated pizza stone or cookie sheet at 450F for 15-20 minutes, until bubbly and golden, or cook on the grill (see above).
Makes enough dough for 2 – 9” pizzas, or one big rectangular one.
Per slice (based on 12 slices): 111 calories, 0.7 g total fat (0.1 g saturated fat, 0.3 g monounsaturated fat, 0.2 g polyunsaturated fat), 3.2 g protein, 22.5 g carbohydrate, 0 mg cholesterol, 1.1 g fiber. 6% calories from fat
To make flavored pizza dough: add a generous pinch of chopped fresh or dried basil, rosemary or oregano, a clove of minced garlic, a few finely chopped olives or sun dried tomatoes (if they come packed in oil, use it in place of the olive oil) or 1/2 tsp. freshly ground black pepper along with the flour.
At 6:20 I realized I had to be at a meeting on the opposite end of the city at 7, and had promised to bring something edible. Oops. The last few spoonfuls of grilled veg went into the food processor with about half a dozen slow-roasted tomatoes from the fridge, a few pieces or leftover roasted broccoli and cauliflower, some grated Parmesan, a spoonful of pesto, glug of olive oil and drizzle of balsamic. It was kind of a weird vegetable tapenade of sorts – people said they liked it, but were very possibly just trying to be nice. I think it would have been fine on pasta though, with a little crumbled feta or soft goat cheese swirled in.
(It is unfortunately one of those foods that is almost impossible to photograph without looking regurgitated.)
One Year Ago: Bagels
June 10 2009 | on the grill and vegetarian | 26 Comments »
Tomorrow night, I get to play chef at an outdoor barbecue in Glenmore Park. In preparation, one of the hosts dropped off some lamb for me to prepare. Some beautiful 4H lamb. Thirty-eight pounds of lamb. An entire lamb, more or less. Minus the identifiable bits.
It’s all cubed for kebabs, but since there will only be 20 in attendance there’s a little surplus here to play with. I thought I’d grind some up in the food processor and make lamb meatballs as a starter. Rather than do my usual feta-oregano-currants-mint medley, the bottle of tandoori spice mix I just picked up (from a friend who just started his own spice company) caught my eye, and I shook a good dose of that over the meat instead, with a few cloves of garlic and a glug of olive oil, and then pulsed it to grind the lot.
And so just to make sure it was edible, since it is technically for company, I shaped some of the meat into patties, making them a little concave in the middle so that they don’t come out all domed, and grilled them as I would any burger. The tzatziki on top ensured we would all have garlic burps for at least the next 24 hours.
Except for W, who ate frozen blueberries and leftover cold and leathery quesadillas.
(With black beans squished in with the cheese. Sucker!)
P.S.: Good News! The Hillhurst-Sunnyside Farmers’ Market is open again, every Wednesday between 3:30-7:30 until Thanksgiving! Yahoo!
P.P.S: My sister is shaving her head (bald) tomorrow for the Kids Cancer Care Foundation of Alberta. (She is a grade 6 teacher, and letting her students do the shaving.) I was just re-reading her email about it, and think it’s worth sharing:
I had the honour, recently, of visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. As I walked through the museum, I reflected on the importance of bearing witness – on the value of seeing and knowing and empathizing, and of carrying that knowledge with me as I complete my life’s work. Leaving the museum, I was profoundly grateful never to have experienced those horrors in my own life – to have come so far without having suffered the tragedies experienced by others. Of the great many powerful images, personal accounts and words of wisdom I saw that day, one quote really resonated with me. Just at the end of the museum, there was the famous quote from Martin Niemöller which said – First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out — ?
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out — ?
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out — ?
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.
Every year, the school where I teach hosts a charity head-shaving event to raise funds for cancer research and to send kids with cancer to camp. Every year I watch with pride as our brave young students step up to do their part to make a difference. I’ve never participated because my life has never been touched by cancer –
I am not a mother of a child with cancer;
I am not the daughter of a parent with cancer;
I am not the sister of a woman with cancer;
I am not the teacher of a student with cancer.
There has never been any particular reason for me to stand up to support those whose lives have been struck by the tragedy of this disease. This year, I looked at the opportunity to participate with a different perspective – I may not be a mother of a child with cancer, but I am a mother. I am a daughter. I am a sister and I am a teacher, and when I see the images and read the accounts of people battling this terrible disease, I know the wisdom of the saying, ‘There but for the grace of God go I’.
This year I am giving my hair in thanks – an act of gratitude for being so lucky as to have my children healthy and whole, my parents well, my sisters strong and my students thriving. It is my way of bearing witness to the suffering of others and to stand up, in some small way, to make things a little better. Just because I can. How fortunate am I?
One Year Ago: Roasted Chicken and Potatoes
June 03 2009 | lamb and on the grill | 18 Comments »
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