When it’s time to grill outside, grilling your entire meal is a good habit to get into. Don’t run the oven and stove along with the grill – it’s a huge waste of energy. Grill your meats, grill your vegetables, bake potatoes, and even a head of romaine lettuce which you will quarter and serve with Caesar dressing. Grill it ALL. The key is to let the grill get hot before putting your food on it. But, in order to be thrifty, you don’t want to be idle while the grill gets hot; it’s a waste of gas. So time things perfectly and be ready to grill the instant that the BBQ is hot enough to grill perfectly – full heat. Turn it on and crank it to full heat. Leave the lid down, if it has one, and let it get as hot as possible. Make sure that all of the items you want to grill are dry and ideally at room temperature (yes, even meat), before they go onto the grill. It will make for a consistently cooked product and won’t cool down the grill too much. Be careful of meats that have been marinated with too much sugar; they will burn. Happy grilling!
Thin, inexpensive strips of beef marinated in miso and grilled are to die for - get some!
Here’s a list of foods that you may not have considered grilling:
- Romaine lettuce
- Corn on the cob
- Fruit: peaches, apples, pears, mangoes, pineapple, bananas,
- A whole chicken or fish
- Squash
Note: to create great vegetable side dishes on the BBQ, simply fold your vegetables (i.e. broccoli, beans, carrots, asparagus, etc.) with a little butter, maybe some lemon, salt and pepper, in a tinfoil pouch and place on the BBQ with your meat or fish. It’s important to fold a solid seal along the top of the tinfoil pouch so that the vegetables will steam and cook more evenly. Remember, the vegetables won’t take as long as the meat, so put them on the grill towards the end (i.e. the last 5 to 8 minutes) of your meat’s cooking time or, if your BBQ has one, put them on the upper shelf and away from direct flames.
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