May 2007 - Great Grilled Garlic Bread

Here's a few shots of a quick and easy way to make great looking and great tasting garlic bread. Of course its just garlic and butter, but the green stuff is finely chopped parsley. It takes only a few minutes on the grill and is the perfect compliment to a 4 (or more) serving meal:

April 2007-A full grill

Having a full grill going with different spots cooking different foods simultaneously is fun and also challenging.

This day, for a party of four, I made the following:

• Bacon wrapped shrimp



• Marinated Shrimp



• BBQ Chicken Wings



• Stuffed Zuchinni

Bacon Wrapped Shrimp

While I agree, the taste is great; the process is not so great. First of all, you cannot put raw uncooked bacon around a shrimp and grill it. The cooking time for the bacon is too long compared to the shrimp. That is why proscuitto is used. It's much thinner and cooks a lot quicker (but is much more expensive). I tried cooking the bacon half way, ahead of time and while that helped, I found the whole grilling experienced....forced. This is not my first attempt, and now I am thinking that (a) proscuitto is the way to go and (b) shrimp on the grill is simply better in a marinade.

In these pictures, there are some shrimp that do not have bacon around them. These were marinated in a delicious tequila lime marinade. They were much more tasty and easier to manage on the grill. Of course, the skewers were soaked for an hours, but that soaking quickly evaporated and the skewers got sk(r)ewed. In the future, with shrimp, it would be better to go with a marinade and basting sauce, and forego the skewers.

They turned out fine, just not as good as expected. With shellfish, you have less room for error.

BBQ Chicken Wings

The wings turned out great ! No marinade. I simply basted them with sauce late in the cooking process to avoid the dreaded carmelized sugar burnt skin. Much like squeezing a fat burger of all its generous taste, its hard not to baste too soon. These were easy and delicious. A must repeat for a group as appetizers.

Stuffed Zuchinni

The way this works is: you grill the zuchinni for a few minutes, then scoop out the soft center of each, combine that in a mixture of garlic, bread crumbs, cheese, and whatever else you like (personally the combination of parmesan or PG with lemon or basil is hard to beat) then place that mixture back in the center of the zuchinni to grill some more.
These would have been perfect but I made a mistake: I over-grilled them. The zuchinni turned out too soft. Like asparagus, zuchinni should come off the grill with some firmness left in it. In terms of skill and preparation, I get a D. In terms of taste, it was really good, but could have been better.

May 4th - Oysters, clams & tilapia

As stated in my 2007 goals, I wanted to do more fish so I finally took the leap and made some oysters, clams and tilapia. The clams were unspectacular. The oysters were great and the tilapia far exceeded my expectations.

OYSTERS

The oysters were put on the grill for about 6 minutes and once they began to open, I pried them open, and dropped in some butter, garlic, lemon juice and Frank's hot sauce, topped with some cheese. They would have been ok without the cheese, but the other ingredients were essential and the taste was uniquely wonderful. These Pacific Oysters were large and quite filling. Oystes are very high in cholesterol but provide a good source of This food is a good source of Vitamin C, Riboflavin, Niacin and Phosphorus, and a very good source of Protein, Vitamin B12, Iron, Zinc, Copper, Manganese and Selenium.

CLAMS

Put the clams on the grill, tried to save the juices. Made a mixture of sauted garlic in butter with chopped parsley. As the clams came off the grill, I placed them in the sauce and mixed them. They were alright; but after the intense flavors of the Oysters, the clams paled a bit in comparison. I think it would be better to do just oysters and no clams. A couple of pounds of clams can be $10-$15 and the yield wont be that great.

Tilapia

Marinated the tilapia in lemon infused olive oil, balsamic vinegar along with some cilantro and parlsey, garlic, pepper. Turned out superb. If anything, the balsamic was a little overpowering, so next time, I will use less in the marinade.

April 15th - Bar-be-cue Sauce, Georgia Style

Today, in anticpation of the next rib session, I made some bbq sauce. This one is a Georgia sauce; it contains a combination of molasses, cider vinegar, worcestershire sauce, mustard, brown sugar and some other seasonings. Its a ketchup based sauce but its not ketchupy like a Kansas City sauce. It is also not a mephis or texas sauce; I guess its somewhere in between. It turned out pretty good, but not great. It worked well for chicken wings but was a little weak for the ribs.

April 14th - Lemon Pepper

Today I made the lemmon pepper from Raichlen's recipe in his ribs and sauces cookbook. It is very simple, but instead of drying the lemon peels in the oven, I did it in the BBQ. The smell was fairly pungent and none too pleasant. Better to do it outside. Plus you can infuse some smoke.

Combine with peppercorns of your choice (I only had black. I would have preferred white or even green):