summer chicken, veggie and mango salad

OK, sometimes you take a gamble with dinner and lose. I once decided it was better to toss an entire corningware dish than to attempt to pry of the lid, burned on by starch. I was never able to open that dish to find out if the chicken finished cooking, but the pizza we finally at at 9pm was delicious.

Other times you take a gamble with dinner and score. This was one of those times. I made lemon cilantro dressing for my salad for lunch, but on the salad it was only so-so. For dinner, I had leftover skewers that my family loved, but not as many as we would need. I did have some potatoes for filler, but re-heated chicken and potatoes just didn't sound good. And so this salad was born, with the dressing to coat it. Even picky Lizzie ate it.

Oh, and I'm working on a lettuce-based salad that would be perfect with the lemon cilantro dressing - new salad recipe coming soon!

perfect chicken skewers

Perfect for a potluck, a picnic, or hosting a summer BBQ, these skewers are full of flavor and don't need any extra dressing up. The flavor of the marinade doesn't overpower the dish, yet brings plenty of tenderness and spunk. This is meant to make lots -enough for a fun summer chicken salad that I'll post soon.

beer glazed pork chops

You're welcome for this recipe. While it's a bit of a travesty to pour a perfectly good beer into a pot for cooking on a hot summer day while the smoke & aroma of pork on the barbie fill the air, this glaze is completely worth it. Not that I wouldn't recommend poppin' a couple tops while dinner's on the grill. Or with dinner. Heck, have 'em after. And this works perfectly for grilled chicken, too.

One word of caution: I used an amber bock that we really like to drink, and the flavor of the beer came through perfectly. I'd skip lighter beers and use an amber or stout, and go for one that you actually enjoy drinking. As the saying goes, "If you wouldn't drink it, you shouldn't cook with it."

Oh, and one more word of caution: the glaze goes from almost perfectly-reduced to burned in about 2.7 seconds. So once it gets close, just park yourself next to the stove and pay attention. Trust me on this.

tuesday tidbits - grilling

I'm not sure what it is about the grill that intimidates so many, but it seems like we are quick to confess our grilling inadequacies and then give up altogether. And yet, we long to grill all sorts of things.

We've lived in 2 upstairs apartments that had no a/c, with concrete block walls and no attic to deter any of the heat. I learned a long time ago how NOT to use the oven OR the stove, out of a desire to sleep in a room that was lower than 100 degrees. We've made all sorts of things on the grill - from pizza to enchiladas, burgers to brownies. And we've learned some tips along the way. Here are some tips on grilling meat. Tips on grilling seafood & stove-top-type food will come later on.

ultimate burgers

May gray left, and it's been warm & toasty by dinner time, which means one thing - lots and lots and lots of grilling! To kick off the start of summer, this week is all about the grill. First, the ultimate burgers. A bit of seasoning with some Worcestershire sauce, cheese on top, and bacon. If I hadn't just finished this for dinner, I'd be drooling over my computer.

Regular burger buns are fine, but an open-faced burger on toasted bread, with mixed greens, feels like an urban grill with white linens and industrial decor and funky plates and mango iced tea. Right?

street tacos

Happy Cinco de Mayo!!!
The beauty of street tacos is that they can be filled with just about anything because any kind of meat tastes good inside a corn tortilla & topped with cilantro, onions, and tomatoes. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are street tacos in TJ that are filled with stuff that wouldn't even qualify as meat in the States.

But sometimes you want real, honest-to-goodness, marinated steak street tacos. And that's why I copied this recipe from Mission Tortillas (don't get me started on how cheesy it is to copy a street taco recipe from a gringo company like that - but it's honestly a really good recipe). I didn't follow the directions for cooking the meat; my process is below. But the marinade was perrr-fect.

grilled salmon

Dubbed "Patrick's Salmon" by my mother, who always had my brother make the sauce & then grill the salmon, this came from Sunset Magazine in June 1994, before Al Gore invented the internet (kidding!), so I can't link it. But there's my credit where credit is due, and I believe it comes from some restaurant named Pietro's. We love salmon, and probably couldn't eat it this way every single time we eat it, but almost. It's just so dang yummy. And easy. And it has brown sugar, so really, how can you go wrong? That's what I thought. Enjoy!

bbq pork kabobs

More produce from the in-laws = more recipes created. But this one really shouldn't be a recipe. It's more like a list of 4 things that get skewered. It does look scrumptious though, doesn't it? I was looking around at my 2 red onions (we don't eat much red onion), my 5 kiwis, my pork chops, and my... well, that's about all we had, when it hit me: bbq sauce & red onions like to have the occasional fling. Put them with the pork, and we'll have some jazzed-up bbq pork. Skewer them & call them kabobs, and my desperation combo will look intentional (see? I wasn't kidding).

And yes, there's a reason that nothing's charred. I was waiting and waiting for Mr. Improv to finish what he was doing so he could take over on dinner and I could head out on a run. And when he finally came out, the skewers were already on the grill. And I was faced with either missing my run or missing my photo op.

I chose to flip those practically raw skewers, slather just enough bbq sauce on them to look legit without igniting a fire for Mr. Improv, and then headed off on my run. So the pic is a bit different because, well, when you actually cook food, it ends up looking, you know, cooked. Ahem.