My wife Renate and I have lived in Italy for two years now, but we still keep finding new veggies at the local farmers’ markets. Like these eggplants, which would be more appropriately named sausage plants! In Italy they’re called “melanzane perline”, or just “melanzane lungo”.
Grilled Garlic: Appetizer Crack
Leftover garlic is a crime. Or, in my case, a myth. It’s my catnip. Whenever I have some lying around after grilling or barbecuing, I’ll make whatever excuse I need to cook it up and eat it. Like any honest addict, I eventually gave up the pretense and started mainlining it. Instead of a spoon and lighter, though, I use a grill and a spatula for mainlining my drug of choice. Grilled garlic is one of the easiest appetizers ever.
Caribbean Sun-of-a Beach Hot Pepper Sauce
If there were a typical eastern Caribbean hot sauce, this might be it. It has hints of Trinidad, Barbados, and even Grenada. To be perfectly authentic, you should buy or grow the red habaneros so popular in that part of the Caribbean, called Congo or bonney peppers.
Iced Heat: Freezing Chiles
Freezing chiles is an excellent way of preserving them. Chiles that have been frozen retain all the characteristics of fresh chiles except for their texture. Since the individual cell walls have been ruptured by the freezing of the water within each cell, the chiles will lose their crisp texture.
Southwestern Stuffed Red Bell Peppers
Over at our big sister, the Fiery Foods and Barbecue Super Site, there’s a great article called Ground Unbound. It’s a collection of uses for ground meat. You should go check it out. First, though, here’s one of the recipes.
Greek Lollipops
This recipe is a classic in German BBQ forums (I believe credit may go to Thorsten in Wesel). It goes like this: Brushed with olive oil, thinly sliced zucchini strips are softened on the grill.
Grilled: Sriracha and Apricot Preserves’ Love Child
Friday night I crossbred Sriracha with apricot preserves. While that statement sounds like I created a bogus sex ad on Craigslist, then bopped the red rooster on its head when it showed up, it’s actually less creepy than that. Search the internet for “wouldn’t it be cool if” and you’ll find all kinds of video for dumb ideas gone wrong. Sift through video after video of ER trips in their infancy, however, and you can find some good ideas that turned out pretty well. This is one of those times.
