The fishmonger at Lund’s grocery store in Minneapolis did not want to sell these mussels to my mom. She tried to buy them a week earlier and arrived up north at the cabin only to report that the guy wouldn’t sell them to her if she wasn’t going to cook them that same day.

WTF? I mean, ideally, yes, you eat any shellfish two seconds after you take it from the sea, but you don’t have to. Bivalves, in particular, tend to close themselves up and can hang out for a bit before things get ugly. Plus, you can tell when mussels aren’t good anymore – either they are open and won’t close before you cook them or they won’t open when you do cook them. Either way, things are clear.

I asked Mom to go back, to not involve him in the schedule, to slyly ask how often they got fresh mussels into the store and when the mussels she was buying had arrived, and to please bring me some mussels (my love of mussels is long-standing and pure) – I would worry about whether they were good or not.

It ends up Lund’s gets mussels in everyday. That means the mussels I grilled on Friday night, that my mom bought Thursday afternoon, had most likely been out of the water for less than 48 hours.

My dad lit the grill. I picked over the mussels. We threw them on the hot grill and took them off as they were ready. My dad, my dashing husband, my son, and I proceeded to eat them one after the other as they came off the grill, happily burning our fingers on the hot shells. I insisted on grinding fresh black pepper over them as they cooked, but I’ll admit it was gilding the lily just a bit.

And my mom, who so nicely ran the mussels maze on my behalf? She doesn’t care for shellfish. Even mussels, hot of the grill.

Grilled mussels

The recipe for grilled mussels is this: put mussels on a hot grill and cook until they open up and are cooked to your liking. “Your liking” can cover anything from those who like their mussels barely cooked – still tenderly raw and soft – to those who prefer to leave them on the grill until they get almost smoked, their meat condensed and the edges almost crisp. Experiment, taste, and see what you like best. How many should you grill? That depends on how many you want to eat. About 1/2 pound per person makes a nice little snack. If they are the main event, however, you’ll want closer to 2 pounds each.

Grill bread is sort of like a pretzel and sort of like bread and a lot like crack. I dare you to take just one bite. One friend of mine – who particularly relishes its salty pretzel-like quality – once begged me not to make it. She was on a reducing plan and found the siren call of the grill bread too much to resist. On her, I take pity. For the rest of you: Enjoy.

Grill Bread

Make the dough a day ahead of time, stretch it out ahead of time and cover or simply stretch it right before you plop it on the grill.

1 teaspoon active dry yeast

1 cup milk

6 cups all-purpose flour

1 Tablespoon kosher salt

Olive oil for brushing

Coarse salt for sprinkling (don’t kid yourself, this is *not* optional)

Black onion seeds (nigelia) for sprinkling, optional

Dissolve yeast in 2 cups lukewarm water. Stir in 1 cup lukewarm milk.

Stir in flour and salt until a dough forms (this is great to do in a standing mixer with a dough hook, if you have one). If doing this by hand, you may need to turn the dough out onto a counter and knead it to work in all the flour.

Lightly oil a large bowl and put the dough in it. Cover with a clean kitchen towel and let sit to let dough rise until doubled in bulk, 8 hours or overnight.

Punch down the dough and let it sit another hour.

Meanwhile, brush your cooking grate with vegetable oil. Heat your grill to medium to medium-hot. You should be able to hold your hand about an inch over the cooking grate for two minutes second or so before it just feels way too hot. Don’t worry too much about this, however. Grill bread isn’t fussy.

Divide the dough into ten pieces. Work with one piece at a time and stretch it into a disk of some sort – oblong is cool, round is fine, crazy-shaped is always popular. Lay whatever shaped dough disk you have on the hot grill. Repeat with remaining pieces of dough.

Once all dough is on the grill, brush each disk with olive oil and sprinkle with salt and black onion seeds, if you’re using them. Cook until grill marks form and the disks release easily from the grill. I’m not going to give you a time frame because I know nothing about your grill or fire-making skills or how windy and cooled off it is on your balcony where the grill is. This could take 5 minutes or 15 – but that is not a time frame to follow! Just hang with the bread a bit, when it releases easily and has grill marks, flip it. Flip each grill bread and brush the cooked side with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.

Cook until grill marks form on the second side and grill breads are cooked through. Serve hot or at least warm.

It’s true. You can grill beets. Let me take that a step further: you should grill beets.

I learned this from my dashing husband’s college roommate. He’s a gregarious fellow who likes to eat. He likes to come to our house because I cook. I cook real food and plenty of it. He’s great to cook for simply because he’s so appreciative. A dinner of roast chicken, garlic buttermilk mashed potatoes, and a salad once elicited a wonder-filled “do you eat like this every night?!?!” from him.

During one visit to California from the chilly East a few years ago he was so excited about being here and about me cooking that he wanted to get involved in the kitchen. I had a meal planned. I am used to being the boss of our kitchen. I say “our kitchen” because I am a generous person. The kitchen at this house is mine. My kitchen.

My kitchen isn’t big. Two – even three – people can work in it (and four have done so), but those people need to be fairly aware of those around them. There has to be some communication at work. I say this with love, but this particular house guest, while a great talker and fun conversationalist, isn’t the best communicator I’ve ever met. He isn’t, in short, the very best of listeners. That made me wary about letting him help with the meal; it also made him fail to heed my initial reluctance.

Had our lend-a-hand visitor been my friend originally instead of one I inherited from my dashing husband, I might have said, “hey, let me do my thing” or forced a specific task upon him. He was *so* enthusiastic and his desire to soak up my cookin’ mojo was *so* palpable that I dug deep and found a morsel of generosity and empathy and let him peel and slice some beets and put them on the grill.

It was not what I had planned for the beets. But again, he was just *so* very extremely beyond belief excited, I felt like too much of a killjoy to stop him. Whatever, I thought, let him burn, undercook, and generally ruin the beets. Who cares.

Yes, that was my idea of generosity.

He didn’t burn them. He didn’t under cook them. He didn’t ruin them in any way. The grilled beet slices were tender on the inside, caramelized on the outside, with a nice bit of bitter char that off-set their sweetness beautifully.

Grilled beet salad

Peel beets and slice them about 1/4- to 1/2-inch thick. Brush them with oil and place them on a medium to medium hot grill. Cover the grill (especially if it’s a gas one), flip the slices after the beets get grill marks, 8 to 10 minutes. Continue cooking on the other side until the beets are tender and grill-marked on the other side. Put abut a beet’s worth of slices on a salad plate (or put all the slices on a family-style platter), dollop some soft, creamy cheese here and there (I used ricotta here, because that’s what was in the fridge, but a creamy chèvre would have been delightful). Some toasted walnuts or thinly sliced shallots wouldn’t have been out of place, if you wanted to add them. Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil, toasted walnut oil, or pine nut oil. Sprinkle with salt.

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.

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.

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.