Fires on the Fourth don't have to be exploding lights in the sky—they can be just as good, if not better, when they're cooking dinner in the backyard. To that end, here are a few items to put on (or alongside) the grill this Friday. These dishes may not be not typically American, but hey, this is a country that accepts and celebrates all cultures. Especially ones with tasty, tasty food.
Previous Grillfests
Memorial Day Grillfest
Father's Day Grillfest
What with all the fireworks and festivals, July Fourth is a holiday that especially lends itself to spending time outdoors. Maybe it's a Manifest Destiny thing. Or maybe it's just because it's nice and warm out. Either way, it's an excellent excuse to pull that picnic blanket out from wherever you put it on Memorial Day and enjoy lunch in the open air.
(And if these aren't enough suggestions for you, Mark Bittman has 101 more.)
You're facing a long holiday weekend with a good chance of scorching temperatures and intense humidity. A bowl of cold cereal sounds so much more appealing and easier than the thought of actually cooking. So what to eat to beat the heat and still keep you satisfied? Check out these no-frills, fuss-free recipes. More recipes for heartier fare after the jump.
Plenty of dads these days are the primary cooks in their families. And when I was growing up (not very long ago), my dad was part of that burgeoning group of guy chefs. But my father was not your typical backyard griller, lasagna maker or fricasée-er. His foodview was much more global—though he might emerge from the kitchen with something fairly normal like chicken soup or a batch of muffins, he was just as likely to whip up burekas, grape gazpacho, or Georgian cheese bread. He would take out Moroccan or Argentinian cookbooks from the library and read them cover to cover. When mangoes or curries came up in conversation, he'd refer to the class he once took with Madhur Jaffrey.
So I was raised eating turmeric and cumin, seaweed and sesame oil, nigella seeds and cellophane noodles, all of which I happily gobbled up. I'm grateful to my father for teaching me to be a food snob—I mean, to appreciate and understand foods of all nations—and for providing me with so many delicious home-cooked meals. And since that early exposure to gourmet and world cuisine is probably why I'm writing this right now, here (after the jump) is a Father's Day menu in honor of my dad, full of the dishes that I remember enjoying at our dining room table.
We did one for Cinco de Mayo. We did one for Memorial Day. And now, with Father's Day just around the corner, we just had to suggest another thematic bunch of grilling recipes. This menu will make dads happy with its subtle variations on old favorites, from potato salad with a kick to chicken legs soaked in buttermilk. Time to get Dad into that apron and start cookin'.
Each Saturday evening we bring you a Sunday Supper. Why on Saturday? So you have time to shop and prepare for tomorrow.
Our grillmaster, Josh Bousel, dropped two recipes on Serious Eats recently that have been haunting me. I think they're going to go on my Sunday table, since they're grillable and I've taken my grill out for the season. They appear first in the menu below. The second two round out the bill a bit. Here's my recommended menu for Sunday's evening meal.
Don't feel like venturing out for a picnic this weekend? Take advantage of your own backyard instead—fire up the grill for this appetizing array of dishes.
Photograph from uberculture on Flickr
What could be a better way to spend Memorial Day than a picnic in the sun? Shake out that red and white gingham tablecloth, fill up a cooler with the beer of your choice and maybe a pitcher of fresh lemonade, and load up your picnic basket with this delicious, portable lunch.
For me, reading cookbooks that emphasize “entertaining” has always been kind of like reading Vogue: the glossy worlds they present are attractive but have very little to do with the world I live in. Wearing clothes and cooking are two things I do every day but still feel surprisingly inexpert at. Although I would love to arrange my own flowers and cook beautiful dinners for twelve while wearing a Miu Miu frock, the truth is that the process of having even one person over—dispatching the apartment’s larger dust bunnies, buying and making the food, figuring out what we’ll eat on—is so challenging for me that I’m lucky if I can manage to change into a sundress inherited from my mother and put on some lipstick before the doorbell rings, even if all I’m serving is chili and cornbread.
Feeling as if my insecurities had led me to cop out by cooking such simple, everyday things from Entertaining, I decided I had to “do” one of its proposed menus in full. “A Country Pie Party for Fifty” was off the table, but the Valentine’s menu for two seemed eminently manageable (and with its strawberries and watercress, more suitable for May than February anyway). I made the dessert one evening, cooked calmly for three hours the next afternoon, and voila: cream of watercress soup, rack of lamb, zucchini coins, potatoes dauphinoise, and coeur à la crème fraîche with strawberry sauce. If I had made the soup the evening before, too, maybe I could have mustered the energy to bust out the china and silver. As it stands, I’m happy to report that everything tasted plenty good on the everyday plates and with dust on the bookshelves.
Because I rarely think about color when I’m planning what to cook, I always feel guilty when I read about how important it is to one’s enjoyment of a meal. The thing is, I’m not sure how true that is for me. One of my favorite things about my family’s Thanksgiving is that everything on my plate is unapologetically brown, white, and delicious. And when my Tuesday night dinner at home has already taken twice as long as I thought it would to prepare, taking the extra ten minutes to clean and chop a dusting of green herbs or red peppers or yellow lemon zest almost never seems worth it.
I do have a soft spot for vividly or oddly hued foods, and I do try to get a lot of different colors in over the course of the week; I just don’t manage to make every night’s plate look like a color wheel. As a child I was fascinated by page 117 in Martha Stewart’s Entertaining, which features a bowl of pepto-bismol-pink iced borscht framed by spring flowers and garnishes. My desire to eat pink soup was matched only by my determination never to consume a beet, and there the matter stood for most of my life.
Having in my ripening become quite fond of beets, I finally made that soup the other day, and…the color was not right at all! Instead of being spring-tulip-pink it looked, alas, like normal borscht, the shade just past hot pink and before magenta. Since my soup was also not nearly as glossy as the model, I’m wondering if they stirred in some heavy cream, or maybe they used those beautiful candy cane beets instead of the plain old dark ones.
In any event, here is a colorful menu for springtime, all adapted from Entertaining:
I would have paid a lot more attention in high school chemistry if "Br" stood for dessert brownie instead of bromine, and "Sm" was mesculun salad with honey mustard, not samarium. At the Miracle of Science bar and grill in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a normal paper menu is replaced with a chalkboard periodic table. Drinks are apparently served from beakers and tables resemble lab benches. MIT isn't too far away, so there's plenty of chic geeks drinking to their patron saint Dmitri Mendeleev. [via Laughing Squid]
Japanese restaurants already have the habit of displaying menus in the form of realistic plastic models to give customers a clear idea of what they're ordering. What's the next step? Tables with LCD touch screens that display 3-D pictures of the food. It's the future.
If you knew each take-out menu you kept was worth $2, would you collect 10,000 of them like Daniel Rayas did for allmenus.com? Newsday profiles Rayas and his rise as a menu collecting master while scouring the streets of New York City and beyond. He's picked up a lot after four months of menu hunting, such as the best way to repair his worn-off shoe soles (cement), what the most common restaurant name is ("Great Wall"), and that Jamaicans don't believe in printed menus. Oh, and $20,000 for all the menus that he has collected, which allow him to live in the city and take care of his granddaughter.
Europe may be his next menu-collecting destination. If only he had a blog or, better yet, a film crew to document his foot-powered travels.
About ten years ago, my brother and I invented the now-infamous Ordering Game.
The Ordering Game, at its inception, was benevolent—a public service to those long-suffering waiters who had had to deal with our parents' incompetent ordering practices for years of Sunday breakfasts. While otherwise normal, considerate, and competent people, my parents cannot order to save their lives. And, maybe because we've both waited tables in our time, Charlie and I find their amateurish restaurant antics cringe-inducing.
My father is fussy—"half a cup of coffee, please, with skim milk; dry toast—and can I get fried tomato instead of bacon?"
Our mother, meanwhile, is a ditherer, who has the annoying habit of not even glancing at her menu until the server appears to take her order. When he does, chaos ensues. "Hm, what have we here? That looks good ... do you recommend the omelet? Oh, but that’s pretty tempting, too ... hmm, let’s see ... I just can’t decide."
My brother and I are forced to look on in mute anguish and shame.
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