The Dinner Files

Yep, back to the grill. I’ve made these before. Many times. I’ve used the recipe my pal Jessica developed for Sunset. Not this time. This time I didn’t have any pancetta. I did, however, have prosciutto.

A small step for me, a great leap for halibut kebabs.

The pancetta never did crisp up quite enough for my liking without sacrificing the just-done texture of the halibut. Don’t get me wrong, if you follow the recipe and actually use “paper thin” pancetta, it works great. But the pancetta I get isn’t always paper thin…. But prosciutto? Which is almost universally cut at least almost paper thin? It made a perfect crispy salty coating for the Alaskan halibut I cut into bite-size pieces, tossed with olive oil and chopped rosemary (and bread crumbs), before threading onto skewers with pieces of prosciutto interlaced between them.

I didn’t even have that much prosciutto, so I had to cut it into quite thin strips. Having larger pieces to actually wrap around each piece of fish would have been ideal. But this isn’t about the ideal, this is about dinner.

I also followed my own principal of threading the different ingredients on different skewers. I tossed everything together, and rubbed the bread cubes with the prosciutto to impart some porky goodness to it, but put the halibut and the bread crumbs on separate kebabs. Yet another giant leap for halibut kebabs. I was able to cook the fish to perfection while also toasting up the bread properly.

Everything was then un-skewered onto a warm serving platter together, mixed up a bit, and served with a plate of sliced and salted tomatoes. The people, they were happy.

In true Labor Day tradition, the grilling never stopped. Nor did the work.

When I was a kid, Labor Day still marked the official end of summer. The Tuesday after Labor Day was the first day of school and Labor Day itself was the day we closed up the cabin for the summer. The fridge was cleaned out, the docks taken up onto land, the boats driven to the marine, and the water turned off. We wouldn’t go back up until the opening of fishing season – which always fell on Mothers Day weekend leaving moms and kids alone in the city while the fishermen headed north for putting in docks, fetching boats, and some fishing worked in between card games and generalized debauchery.

That world is long gone, which is a funny thing to say about a world I knew well when I’m still in the process of pushing forty. Cabins are mostly winterized, so the whole opening and closing for the season aspect is less clear when it happens at all. I’m sure most of the fishermen who head up north in Minnesota in mid-May are still men, but when I looked around the lake this summer when I was there it seemed that there were just as many women casting into the still waters next to fallen trees as there were men.

But I digress. I hadn’t grilled halloumi, that firm salty Greek cheese you can grill, in a long time. I made halloumi and veggie kebabs – the key being separate sticks.

Why separate skewers? Simple: veggies, meats, shrimp, cheeses – whatever you’re grilling – probably each cook at at least slightly different times. By putting the different items on their own skewers, you can cook them each properly. But what about each person having their own skewer, you ask? I do the table and my guests the service of taking everything off the skewers first – it’s always so awkward at the table to have these giant metal swords – and putting the offerings on a platter so everyone can take what they like.

It works great. The separate skewers are especially useful should you forget to oil either the halloumi or the grilling grate. Then you can let the veggies cook properly as you grab the cheese off  the grill and artfully wield a metal spatula to salvage bits from the grill to maintain a semblance of a balanced and complete dinner.

If you spent the day digging up bushes you’ve never liked and creating piles of branches as tall as yourself from all the pruning you’ve done and transplanting unruly potted palm trees and cleaning out a storage area on the cement slab to one side of your yard and falling backwards onto the same cement slab as a wood deck chair crashes on top of you which leaves you slightly beat up and traumatized, scraping bits of burning cheese off your grill may not be super-duper fun. I’m just saying.

So brush the halloumi with olive oil, skewer it with some olives for yummy fun, and make skewers of whatever vegetables you like grilled (we did mushrooms, zucchini, red peppers, and chiles – and we would have had red onion wedges and cherry tomatoes if we’d had them). I served the whole skewered, grilled, and de-skewered mess with lemon herb orzo.* Lovely lovely end-of-summer dinner.

While the cheese or meat and the veggies all end up being more precisely and perfectly cooked (again, as long as you oil something) with the single-item-on-a-skewer method, I will admit that I miss the strategic threading that was one of my favorite ways to help with dinner at the cabin as a kid. There were often gobs of grandparents and aunts and uncles and first cousins once-removed and friends and fiances around for dinner, so kebabs were a popular dinner item. Making sure each skewer had an equal allotment of each item, and placing them for what I believed to be maximum flavor impact (onion next to meat, for example), kept me delighted for what seemed like hours. A young cook-in-the-making or an early display of some mild OCD? I’m guessing it was both.

*Lemon Herb Orzo

Bring 3 cups chicken or vegetable broth and 2 cups water to a boil. Taste it – it should be plenty salty, but if it isn’t about as salty as sea water add enough salt to make it so. Cook a 1-pound box of orzo until tender. Drain and toss warm orzo with 3 Tbsp. delicious olive oil, the zest of 1 lemon, the juice of 1 to 2 lemons (to taste), and whatever fresh herbs you have around and sound good. I’m a particular fan of adding about 1/2 cup of minced mint to the whole thing, although others may find that a bit much. About 1/4 cup minced parsley, basil, cilantro, and/or mint is a good amount to start with – you can always add more. Serve warm, at room temp, or even cold (although you may want to add both more olive oil and more lemon juice that way).

It was so good that Ernest asked why, exactly, it was so delicious.

I explained how the salmon came from a place that is very good for salmon, that the people who caught it took such good care of it. He looked over at me like I was a complete fool.

“I don’t think that’s why it tastes good, Mama. I think it’s because you took it off the grill at the right time.” Snap.

If that’s your point-of-view too, here you go – I grilled it using this super-simple method: I heat the grill to a medium heat (you can hold your hand about an inch over the grill grate for 3 to 4 seconds), I sprinkle the fish with salt, I brush vegetable oil on the grill grate and the fish skin, put the fish skin-down on the grill, I cover the grill, and I cook it undisturbed until the fish is done to my liking (I go by 10 minutes minimum, and figure about 10 minutes per inch if it’s thicker than an inch). If the fish has no skin or you’re worried about sticking, simply do the same thing but put the fish on a piece of tin foil with plenty of small holes poked in it. With salmon I always buy skin-on and cook it directly on the grill to crisp it up because if there is anything my dashing husband and inquisitive son love more than crispy crunchy salmon skin I don’t know what it is.

You can add marinades or rubs or whatever you dig, but did you notice that the fish does not get flipped? That, I think, is the key to happy fish grilling. And those fish-grilling baskets? I don’t have a place to put one, but when I tried them in the Sunset test kitchen I was not impressed. Sure, the fish didn’t stick to the grill, but it always made a bit of a mess in the basket itself.

So I grilled this Copper River sockeye salmon using the above method and it turned out perfectly – we all agreed (partly because I took my dashing husband’s fillet off the grill way before mine or Ernest’s because he likes his salmon pretty much not cooked). And next to it? It’s this fattoush salad minus the feta and olives. The lemony dressing and cumin seeds were fab with the plain grilled salmon.

Sure, the potatoes I threw on the grill got a bit, shall we say, dark. They really weren’t burnt though, I swear. Well, maybe a tiny bit – but that was just on the skin! The outside got a nice thick layer of crisped and crusty potato chip and the inside became a soft, fluffy mass of mashed potato.

As much as I left them on the grill a bit too long, I also put them on the grill a bit too early.

I know – what was I thinking, right? Whole chicken and little potatoes on the grill at the same time? I was distracted by other parents who stopped by to pick up their child and we got to talking… when I went to check, the potatoes were done. So I took them off and let the chicken sit there, over its pan of water to catch the drippings, next to a pan of wood chips to make it smoky, coated with plenty of butter and salt, until it turned the most perfect crispy brown as if it had spent the summer in St. Tropez in the 70s with a bottle of baby oil improved with drops of iodine.

Of course, I forgot to take a picture. You’re going to have to take my word for it: it was glorious.

There were, however, a solid 4o minutes between when I removed the potatoes from the grill and when the chicken was ready to eat. Did I keep them warm by tenting them with foil? Put them in a low oven? No. Instead of these sensible, grown-up options, my dashing husband and I stood around our tiny Ikea kitchen cart “island” sprinkling salt and stuffing the hot potatoes into our pie holes.

Want to make them yourself? Toss small potatoes (these were russian reds – yellow finns would be awfully good too) with a bit of olive oil and salt. Throw them on a hot grill until they are cooked through. How long that takes depends on your grill, how much cool Pacific wind is whipping towards your house, and how engaged you are in a discussion of cricket, summer camps, and home renovation. If you think to turn them, that would be cool, but my experience demonstrates that’s an optional move.

We started with these:

Lake trout, two fillets sprinkled with salt and pepper and drizzled with olive oil (for the record, this was my suggestion on how to prepare them) and one lightly spread with hoisin sauce (for the record, not my idea and not, in the end, the best combination).

They were caught and cleaned by:

My Uncle Denny, griller of chicken and smoker of fish. In this case he merged these impressive skills and helped my father and my husband (how many dudes does it take to grill some lake trout? it ends up quite a few more than you may have guessed) cook the fish thusly:

And then we had:

I made the coleslaw and the potato salad (my trick for such delicious potato salad? dress the warm potatoes with vinegar and let cool to room tmeperature, then add whatever else you like in your potato salad – be it mayonnaise and hard-boiled eggs and bread-and-butter pickles or olive oil and capers – and serve at room temperature without ever refrigerating the potatoes), my mom made her famous corn pie. It involves canned corn and canned cream of corn and corn meal and it is very corny and quite amazingly delicious.

The extra nice touch is that we ate the lake trout that my uncle caught and cleaned and helped grill on placemats his wife, my Aunt Nancy, made and gave to us more years ago than any of us might care to calculate.

My Uncle Denny has been featured here before. Or at least his famous smoked salmon has been. The other night he held a little shin-dig for his cousin (my first cousin once-removed – I figured out the difference between once/twice-removed and first/second/third cousins at a family reunion years ago). He invited a mess people over and cooked up six chickens all snug and cozy on his little Weber charcoal grill. They’re about half-way done here. He was a bit reluctant to open the grill, since part of the secret to the deliciousness of the final chicken is leaving the lid on to capture all the smoke and get it into the chicken meat. If they suffered I almost wouldn’t want to taste the more perfect birds – the chicken he served up was smoky, juicy, and fabulous. Just salted and peppered them, and put them on the grill as crowded as can be, and let them cook until golden and “done” from what I could tell. He seemed to spend most of the party in a lounge chair nursing a margarita without a chicken concern in the world. I should have asked more questions, but by the time I knew how good the chicken was, I was busy eating it.

Note: My cousin (technically another first cousin once-removed, the sister of the guest of honor) Jajie* really wanted to make the blog. She talked about it and made a fuss but then refused to stand still for any picture-taking. She made this awesome salad, however, which I then re-made, tweaked for the dressing, and posted a recipe (Blueberry Blue Cheese Spinach Salad) because it was so pretty and tasty and easy:

*You wonder what kind of name “Jajie” is? It’s short for Janet. You can’t really hang with the Watson clan and not have your named turned into a diminutive ending with a long “e” sound. Even Schuyler ends up being called “Schuylie” half the time.

Do you think creamy cole slaw has mayonnaise in it? I did. That’s what I thought until I was 29 and visiting my friend in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. We made cole slaw and I learned that the good stuff – that creamy, luscious kind that reminds me of the little container that would come with my Kentucky Fried dinner as a kid – is actually creamy. As in, it has cream in it.

I’ll let you take a moment to recover – this comes as big news to many people who never make cole slaw. Of course, I’m sure there are plenty of mayonnaise-laden versions out there, but the good stuff? Cream. Heavy cream.

You mix a little bit of cream with vinegar and the acid in the vinegar thickens the cream into a dressing-like, some may say mayonnaise-like, consistency. Some celery seeds, if you like, some salt, some pepper, and maybe some sugar if you’re one of those people who like sweet cole slaw, and you have the best cole slaw ever. I posted a full recipe for Creamy Cole Slaw over at Local Foods. It only gets better if it sits in the fridge for a bit and it could serve you very well this summer if you get invited to many potlucks or barbecues or, if you live in the 1960s, “patio parties.”

I had the chance to make some cole slaw last weekend – perhaps it will fit into your weekend this week. We had a couple families over for a last-minute cook-out. I thawed a bunch of delicious homemade sausage I still had in my freezer (I’m telling you, my dashing husband’s largely vegetarian diet is really cutting into my meat consumption) and, in a last-minute moment of utter and complete panic that 21 sausages would not be enough for six adults and four children (one of whom isn’t quite two), little patties I made for the kids out of some bulk sausage I also had (upper left corner of the grill). In what world would 21 sausages not have been enough?

Indeed, we had a few sausages leftover at the end of the evening – but not as many as you’d think. Just three of the lamb sausages,* which were spiced and just the eeniest teeniest bit dry. I cut them up, sauteed them in olive oil with some garlic and spinach and a few basil leaves, tossed the whole thing with pasta shells, and topped each serving with black pepper and grated goat gouda cheese. The resulting dish was surprisingly delicious – not like leftovers at all – and I like to think demonstrated a real rise on my part to the challenge my dashing husband unwittingly made when he said, “We have a lot of food, but none of it goes together.” A sentence guaranteed to make me say, “Ha!”

* Since the kids ate the four patties, that means the six adults ate a whopping 18 sausages – that’s three a piece. Me? I had one and a half. I’m a lady.

I’m not even kidding. I grilled cabbage. How drives a person do such a thing? Well, first, one reads a tempting post by Heidi Swanson over at 101 cookbooks about grilling fava beans and one thinks to oneself, “Heidi usually knows what she’s talking about and as nutty as it sounds to grill fava beans I bet they’re pretty good.”

Then, one attends a conference about sustainability at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and spends two days sequestered in a room with people who think a lot about a) how the planet is going to hell in a hand-basket, b) how to perhaps at least slow down if not stop the planet from going to hell in a hand-basket, or c) how to get people, at the very least, to eat more sardines and less imported farmed shrimp. As one learns that a 10 year-old has lived through the burning of a quarter of the carbon ever burned and a 22 year-old has seen one half of it used up, that breeding bluefin tuna will be gone from the Atlantic Ocean in about 3 years, and that 2020 is the new 2050 in terms of climate change and general horrific-ness* because things are moving faster than originally projected, one speaker makes an off-hand comment about pulling up a daikon radish from the field on his bio-dynamic farm and grilling it with a bit of olive oil. And, since one is, at this point, looking for something – anything – else to fixate on besides the fact that people might just be destined to keep using up resources like bacteria on a sugared petri dish, one wonders, “hmmmm, what does a grilled daikon radish taste like?”

So one asks the person next to them if they’ve ever grilled a daikon. The answer is no, but that person, it ends up, is also pretty intrigued by Heidi’s grilled fava beans.

And one goes home, and it’s hot in San Francisco, and using the stove or oven or any other heat-making device in the house seems like a bad idea, but, after three days of conference food and rich chefy offerings, cooking one’s own food seems like a good idea. So the grill gets fired up and the fact that a person can grill pretty much anything (i.e. fava beans, daikon radish) is right there, at the top of one’s mind fully and completely available for consideration. So one takes a cabbage, removes the outer leaves, cuts it into 8 wedges, puts them on skewers, brushes them with olive oil, sprinkles them with salt, and grills them until they have lovely charred edges, with some soft and tender leaves and some still somewhat crunchy salad-like leaves.

* Many thanks to Sam over at Chewswise for his post about the positive changes that are happening, the glimmers of hope that are shifts in consumer preferences that came out at the conference. Remembering that how we at and the food choices we make can all make a difference is part and parcel of how I sleep at night.

Last night we BBQed it up at a friends’ house in Mill Valley (a town whose name still brings BJ Honeycut from M*A*S*H to mind for reasons that escape me). Ernie was pretty excited to go–party? check; kids will be there? check; drive across the Golden Gate Bridge? check. Any one of those things is a pretty big draw to the lad, so the hat-trick was as much as he could handle. Until, that is, until he saw the chickens.

Our friends keep six chickens in their yard and the first hour of the party was spent by them being chased, caught, held, and petted by a gang of kids. At first everyone seemed happy. Then we asked the kids to at least not pick up the chickens any more. Then the chickens were returned to their coop. The kids, eyes gleaming, turned to the cat. At least that fight was fair (one kid got a big scratch to show him just how fair), and the cat eventually just sequestered herself under the house.

Along with burgers and sausages and lamb chops (oh my!), as well as my award-winning potato salad (well, it should win awards) and recipe-demand-inducing spicy sautéed corn, we enjoyed some egg salad crostini from the host, made from eggs from the very birds our children were torturing with love and attention. Man, eggs that fresh are awesome.

So my interest in getting chickens was re-ignited, and it has now met and combined with Ernie’s new absolute adoration of the creatures. I’m don’t know how much longer my dashing husband’s entirely reasonable stance of “absolutely not” can hold back the masses.

Anyone out there have chickens? Thoughts? Advice?

Here is my biased, unsolicited advice: If you are going to invite a food writer to a barbeque and if you are also going to ask said food writer if the tri-tip is done and if said food writer tells you that yes, in her opinion the tri-tip is at that exact moment grilled to absolute perfection, if all of these things are true, take the goddamn meat off the grill.

You don’t need to invite her (although she sure likes it when you do) and you don’t need to wave her over to the grill away from delightful conversation and put her to work at your party (although she really doesn’t mind), but if you do,  listen to her. Don’t, after all that hassle, over-cook the beef anyway.

Luckily, the beef wasn’t too terribly overcooked, just a bit more towards well-done than most people would probably like. The crowd was a forgiving one–former colleagues from Sunset–who I have witnessed dig into uncooked cake and burnt turkey. Everyone seemed too engrossed catching up and comparing the competing slaws to worry too much about the meat.