Asian improvisations on the grill: “Vietnamese” chops, sesame zucchini

A marinade seasoned with turmeric, ginger, garlic, Chinese five-spice powder and other spices gives Turmeric/Ginger Grilled Pork Chops big flavor with very little heat; Grilled Sesame Zucchini is delicious, smoky and impressive—and it’s easy to make. Recipes below.

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At times like this, I wish Blue Kitchen had a scratch and sniff mode. When I’d whisked together the ingredients for the marinade for the chops, it was so wonderfully aromatic that I wanted Marion to get a whiff of it before I added the meat and popped it in the fridge. I carried it to the study at the opposite end of the apartment where Marion was. She told me the big fragrance had preceded me.

The marinade is actually based on one used for a five-spice chicken dish in Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table. Pham is chef/owner of Lemon Grass Restaurant in Sacramento, California. Here’s how she describes the dish’s olfactory pleasures: “The best five-spice chicken I have had in mai-pham-vietnamese-table-smVietnam was made by a street food vendor in the port town of Hoi An in the central region. The vendor used a spice mix of freshly toasted star anise and turmeric. When she grilled the chicken, the whole neighborhood was perfumed with the most enticing fragrance.” Other seasonings adding their big personalities to the marinade include fresh ginger and garlic—plenty of each—and Chinese five-spice powder.

You may have noticed the quotes around Vietnamese in the headline. It’s not that Pham’s marinade isn’t authentically Vietnamese; she was born in Vietnam and left there just days before the fall of Saigon in 1975. And the recipes in the book come from a trip she made home 20 years later to connect with her roots. It’s more the way certain ingredients freely cross borders, especially in Asia. Continue reading “Asian improvisations on the grill: “Vietnamese” chops, sesame zucchini”

Kitchen, four hands: My Asian grilled chops and Marion’s Asian slaw play beautifully together

Two recipes this week, both Asian inspired—smoky, slightly spicy grilled pork chops in a simple marinade and a lively slaw bursting with fresh summer flavors and packing a little heat of its own.

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Our classical radio station recently played a Brahms piece for piano, four hands. The sound of four hands—two people—doing more with the instrument and the piece than two hands could have done reminded me of our occasional approach to working in the kitchen.

Marion and I both love to cook. On any given night, you’ll find one or the other of us in the kitchen whipping up something for dinner. Who’s at the stove will often be decided by who has time to cook or an idea to try—or whose perennial favorite dish we’re really, really craving at the moment. Sometimes we both get in the kitchen to put a meal together. Most often, one person is cooking the main course and maybe a side, and the other is called in—quite possibly at the last minute—to throw together a salad or some other side. Not only is having the extra set of hands in the kitchen convenient, it’s fun.

This past weekend, though, was one of those too rare moments when we were in the kitchen together by design. A true kitchen, four hands moment. It started with me wanting to grill something and Marion coming across a recipe she wanted to play with. Soon we were tweaking ingredients and techniques to create two Asian-inspired dishes that would complement and elevate each other—a smoky, slightly spicy pork chop and a lively slaw bursting with fresh summer flavors. Continue reading “Kitchen, four hands: My Asian grilled chops and Marion’s Asian slaw play beautifully together”

Five easy meals for summer

With the fourth of July weekend in the rearview mirror, summer is officially in full swing. And as much as we may like to cook, there’s no shortage of diversions ready to lure us from the kitchen. These five recipes run the gamut, from quick cooking to outdoor cooking to no cooking at all. Gathered from the Blue Kitchen archives, they’ll help you get great summer meals on the table with minimal time and effort in the kitchen.

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1. Tomato Basil Salsa Cruda with Pasta

Cooking doesn’t get much easier than this—salsa cruda is Italian for uncooked sauce. The only thing you cook for Tomato Basil Salsa Cruda with Pasta is the pasta itself. The hot pasta warms the salsa of raw, chopped tomatoes, basil, garlic and olive oil, filling the kitchen with a big, delicious fragrance. And the uncooked salsa slightly cools the pasta, making for a light summery meal.

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2. Spicy Turkey Burgers

In the days before air conditioning, a separate summer kitchen was sometimes added to homes to keep the heat of cooking out of the house. Today, the ubiquitous grill Continue reading “Five easy meals for summer”

Healthy eating with your iPhone, grilling tips for the 4th and all the Blue Kitchen that’s fit to print

A Blue Kitchen round-up: Look and Taste launches an iPhone app for healthy eating, award-winning grill master Neil Strawder shares his secrets and a Blue Kitchen recipe is featured in the Chicago Sun-Times. How cool is that?

look-taste-iphone-appOkay, a Luddite confession here. My cell phone is a phone. It makes calls, takes messages and, when absolutely necessary, sends text messages. No camera, no Internet connection and certainly no “apps” [as in applications—the kids are crazy for them].

Apple’s iPhone is a veritable playground for apps, as my iPhone-wielding colleagues are only too willing to demonstrate. Essentially, Apple created a certain number of apps, then told independent Web developers to go nuts. And nuts they went. Continue reading “Healthy eating with your iPhone, grilling tips for the 4th and all the Blue Kitchen that’s fit to print”

Cumin and cinnamon add Middle Eastern flavor to grilled goat kebabs

Goat is a mild-mannered stand-in for lamb in these flavorful kebabs marinated in cumin, cinnamon, oregano and pomegranate molasses. Recipe below.

Goat Kebabs

What is it with Americans and goat? Goats were one of the first animals domesticated by humans, 10,000 years ago or so. An amazing 70 percent of the red meat consumed in the world is goat. But while goat is the most widely consumed meat in the world, for some reason, it’s been slow to catch on in the United States. Continue reading “Cumin and cinnamon add Middle Eastern flavor to grilled goat kebabs”

Borrowing from Japan, China and Toronto: Maple-Miso Grilled Chicken

Maple-Miso Grilled Chicken raids Asian and North American pantries to produce subtle, satisfying depth while claiming no one nationality. Recipe—and some ingredient substitutions—below.

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I OCCASIONALLY TALK ABOUT THE VARIED PLACES INSPIRATION COMES FROM when I’m cooking. The inspiration for this subtly flavored grilled chicken came from these very pages, sort of. In last week’s Five fresh reasons to check out my blogrolls post, I included Maple and Miso Scallops from Kevin’s Toronto-based Closet Cooking. When Marion saw that recipe, you could almost hear the wheels turning. Soon she was saying, “I bet those flavors would be good with grilled chicken or maybe some pork.” Soon after that, she was emailing me some recipes she’d found. And a dish and a post were born. Continue reading “Borrowing from Japan, China and Toronto: Maple-Miso Grilled Chicken”

Flank steak: Going against the grain, beautifully

Slow marinating [in a mix of coriander, cumin, cinnamon, fresh ginger and garlic] and quick grilling make flavorful flank steak moist, tender and even bigger flavored. Recipe below.

Beef. It’s what’s for dinner.” When actor Robert Mitchum so beautifully uttered those words in a TV commercial voiceover, backed by Aaron Copland’s always stirring “Rodeo,” this is the kind of meal he was talking about.

As much as I talk about the blank canvas a chicken breast presents cooks or the underlying sweetness of a pork chop, there is something so satisfyingly rich and meaty about a good piece of beef well prepared.

And beef doesn’t get much more flavorful or meaty than flank steak. Also called London Broil or Jiffy Steak, this lean, flat cut is particularly known for its robust beefy flavor. With the right cooking and serving, it can be tender and moist too. Flank steak lends itself beautifully to marinating and then quickly grilling, broiling or pan searing. Don’t overcook it, though—that’s a sure way to make it chewy and tough.

I think it’s this reputation for potential toughness that unfairly puts a number of cooks off this delicious cut of meat, me included. Not anymore. Turns out there’s no voodoo to cooking juicy, tender flank steak—just two simple steps. I’ve already given you the first above: Don’t overcook it. Medium rare is perfect.

The second step is just as simple: Carve it across the grain after you cook it. According to Ask The Meat Man, it’s the only steak containing an entire large muscle. And unlike most other steaks, which butchers slice across the muscle fibers, flank steak fibers run the full length of the steak. You can see the fibers running across the tops of the slices in the photo above. So when you’re ready to serve the cooked steak, slice it into thin strips, cutting across the grain. Most sources suggest angling the knife blade at 45 degrees.

I can’t even remember now what suddenly put flank steak on my radar, but the more I read, the more I found recipes recommending marinating it, usually in some kind of spice rub. Not only does marinating it add to the already robust taste, it helps tenderize it. Some recipes call for a mere hour of marinating, but most said longer. This shouldn’t be a deal breaker; it just means you can’t do flank steak spur of the moment.

As usual, my spice rub marinade was the result of combining a couple of different recipes and then tinkering with them. In a somewhat unusual move for me, I resisted adding cayenne pepper or any other heat sources I frequently turn to. The spice rub mix smelled promising; my only concern was the meat itself. I needn’t have worried. The result was a delicious, complex complement to the rich beef flavor without any fire—and steak that was wonderfully tender. Continue reading “Flank steak: Going against the grain, beautifully”

Barbecued chicken, ’Bama style

Mayonnaise, cider vinegar and horseradish come together in the surprisingly subtle, tangy Alabama White Sauce first created by Big Bob Gibson in 1925. It adds great flavor to pork, beef or—as you’ll see here—grilled chicken. Recipes below.

SEEMS I’M ALWAYS QUOTING COMEDIAN STEVEN WRIGHT’S LINE, “It’s a small world, but I wouldn’t want to paint it.” Recently we were at our friends Allen and Sharon’s house for a barbecue. When I asked about the origin of the promising-smelling Alabama White Sauce Allen was slathering on the chicken, he said it was from Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q, a fixture in Decatur, Alabama, since 1925. We’ve not only been to Big Bob’s, Marion has an oversized T-shirt from there that she sometimes uses as a sleep shirt! Continue reading “Barbecued chicken, ’Bama style”

Grilled sausages by the book, er, magazine

The juices of Italian sausages flavor red bell peppers and onions when they’re all cooked together on the grill. Recipes below.

I said last week that I like cookbooks with lots of photos. Let me amplify that statement: I like cookbooks with lots of color photos. Printed on slick paper to bring out every nuance—flecks of herbs, the sheen of cooking juices on a roast, the trail of a bead of condensation on a chilled wine glass. So imagine how less than interested I was in a cooking magazine that features line drawings and black and white photos on non-glossy paper.

I know, I know. Cook’s Illustrated is one of the best cooking publications out there. They’re America’s Test Kitchen—it says so right there on the cover. They don’t just cook something a time or two and call it close enough for government work. They cook it again and again and again—I’ve heard “a hundred times or more” bandied about—until they get it exactly right. Food bloggers everywhere rave about it.

But there’s just something so Highlights for Children earnest about its look to me that I’ve never been able to get past. Visually, it’s the sensible shoes of food magazines for me, singularly uninviting.

Still, when our neighbors Tom and Michael raved about it over dinner recently, I thought it was high time I got over myself and check it out. What I found, of course, was a wonderful new [to me, at least] resource. Picking up the current edition shown here, in addition to a recipe for Better Grilled Sausages with Onions and a couple of variations on the theme that led to my own variation above, I found secrets for great grilled chicken, tips for keeping produce fresher longer, an exhaustive comparison of silicone spatulas, a baker’s dozen of quick tips and a whole lot more. All packed into 52 pages refreshingly bereft of restaurant reviews, travel articles and other distractions that crowd the pages of more and more supposed cooking magazines. Also bereft of advertising. Since that’s what I do for a living, I was somewhat ambivalent about that.

But what I really liked about my first issue of Cook’s Illustrated is that they don’t only tell you how to cook something, they tell you why certain steps and techniques work. And for that matter, why some don’t. So you don’t just learn to cook a dish, you learn techniques and tips you can use elsewhere.

Of course even though the title for this post says by the book, I had to tamper with the recipe. No big changes, mainly just treating the red bell pepper differently to integrate it more into the dish. If you want to see the thoroughly tested version of the recipe, pick up the magazine. Continue reading “Grilled sausages by the book, er, magazine”

Bawdy chicken: Spicy Grilled Chicken Paillards

Cumin and paprika add plenty of flavor to Spicy Grilled Chicken Paillards, but not much heat, as do orange juice, lemon juice, honey, cinnamon and red pepper flakes to the sauce. Recipes below.

MARION HAS ACCUSED ME IN THE PAST of being a culinary Francophile. And I’m the first to admit she’s right. Casting about for some grilling ideas for this week’s post, I came across a chicken recipe that called for chicken breasts sliced or lightly pounded into flattened pieces. If they’d used the modern term for this thin cut of meat, cutlet, I probably wouldn’t have given it a second glance. But no, they used the older French term, paillard [pronounced pah-YAHR], apparently named for a late 19th century Parisian restaurateur. Okay, I was interested. Continue reading “Bawdy chicken: Spicy Grilled Chicken Paillards”