Yesterday was gorgeous here in Ohio, but I didn’t cook out at all.  My wife and I ran around doing some errands for a bit, and ended up at a great local market chain.  If anyone is in the Dayton, Ohio, area, make sure to try out Dorothy Lane Market.

It’s kind of a specialty market with both a good and bad reputation.  The good reputation is that they have the best of everything they can get.  Top quality beef, lamb, pork and chicken; wild game; restaurant quality seafood; a GREAT bakery, making Killer Brownies (they even ship these); and the freshest produce around.  They also have a very good wine department and a better variety of soft drinks that aren’t just more soda pop than anyplace close by.  The bad rep is that they’re considered very expensive.  And they are!  Lamb chops are something like $22 per pound.  Actually, regular groceries are about the same as anywhere else, and they started one of those card deals pretty early, giving very good prices on some items.

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Ok, I did this several months ago, but I didn’t have very good pictures of what I’d done, so I thought, since I was having it for dinner, I’d go ahead and go over it again.

It’s VERY easy to make tuna this way.  The only thing I wish I could get is tuna that’s cut more in a square cross section, but, in Dayton, Ohio, I’m just glad to get really good tuna!  And that’s the secret to this dish… Sushi grade tuna!

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This is semi bbq related… Robert at White Trash BBQ prompted this with his blog entry yesterday.  It’s a new phenomenon over the last decade of the chef being a celebrity.  The Food Network has had a lot to do with it, but they, like HGTV, DIY, the History Channel and many other cable channels owe their starts to PBS with Julia Child, Jeff Smith and others that led the way.

iVillage even has an online test to find out which celebrity chef you are.  And I found a good article on NPR (not a fan, but I might as well take advantage of my tax dollar expenditures now and then) on celebrity chefs.

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Yesterday was my wife’s birthday.  I won’t say which one, but I will say she doesn’t generally like birthday parties, though she loves birthdays.  She decided it would be nice to have some people over, though, so we had about 8 people over to help celebrate.

I let her tell me what she wanted for dinner, and she decided on lobster.  I decided on grilling then, and that was a good choice, as it was a really hot day (around 90), and I didn’t want to steam up the house.

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Ok, the winners are in, and we have 5 of them!  The winners are:

Todd
Ed
Ron Templeman
Mark Nelms
Ken Blacklidge

I’ve contacted all the winners… Thanks for posting!

Only today through Friday to post comments to win a jar of sauce!  It’s really pretty good stuff, but so far, only three different people have posted.  So all you need to do is post a relevent comment or two, and you’re likely to get a bottle of sauce mailed to you free o’ charge! (unfortunately, this is only valid for US readers, as there may be issues sending food internationally).

My sister, Heather, lives in Manhattan (or is that on Manhattan?). Anyway, she spent the weekend patiently standing in line at the 4th Annual Madison Square Park BBQ Block Party. She was kind enough to get some photos of the event as well as an eyewitness account of what she saw there.

Pitmasters included some famous barbecuers:

• Chris Lilly of Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q, Decatur, AL (also the hose of OLN’s All Start BBQ Challenge)
• Paul Kirk (no need for anything but the name here)
• Bryan Bracewell of Southside Market & BBQ, Elgin, TX
• And a bunch more.

Heather’s account follows…

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We all have them: the foods that we go to when we have something emotional happening in our lives.  And they’re all different.  We can pick out what we think sounds like a comfort food, but, really, our comfort foods are more personal than that.  And we have them for when we’re happy as well as when we’re sad.

This is a topic we ALL can relate to, I think.  In setting up a comment contest for barbecue sauce, I figured it was only fair to post something that we can kind of discuss.  I’d REALLY love to hear from some of the European readers, as I bet your comfort foods are a bit different than what people in the US or even Canada consider comfort foods.

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We all know how great a steak right off the grill is…  The grill marks, the seared outside, the juicy interior… There’s just nothing like it!

I used to believe the myth of searing a steak to seal in the juices.  I figured it out before Alton Brown’s Myth Smashers show that this is false, but there are still benefits to a well seared steak…

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I tried to get you all to write a comment before, but only a couple of you did.  I think I came up with another idea… Let’s see if you all fall for it… I mean go along with it!

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