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.