When we have our wine party every year, I try to do a variety of food for the party. Sometimes, I make whatever I want, but I’m trying to get better at following the theme of the wines. I select the wine theme in advance so guests can get wines that fit. We’ve done American wines that aren’t from California, southern hemisphere wines that aren’t from Australia, and anything goes.

This year’s theme was French wines, if you haven’t read anything else I’ve written about the party. Each couple was asked to bring two French wines, one red and one white. They were also asked to look up something about the wine to share, whether it’s about the vineyard, the grape, that particular wine, the appellation, whatever. (Appellations are distinct areas were grapes for wines are grown). It wasn’t anything too difficult, and Vince helped some by looking up their wines on his iPhone connected to our household wireless!

I talked about the foie gras I made for the party yesterday. Today, it’s grilled steak au poivre.

I’ve made steak au poivre in the past. It’s basically steak with a pepper-cream sauce, and it’s fun because I get to play with fire. Traditionally, though, it’s a dish made in a skillet on the stovetop. I wanted to mix it up a bit, though, and push it outside onto the grill. I thought the addition of wood-grilled steak would be a benefit.

There’s one problem with this approach… The fond! Fond is the stuff left in the pan after pan-frying, and grilling a steak means no stuff in a pan. What to do, what to do? I realized that, for the sauce, beef is beef, so I got a couple strips of cubed round steak and used that in the pan. It worked great!

So here’s the whole process:

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Here it is at last! The foie gras I’d been so looking forward to preparing and eating. The big question: was it worth it?

The answer: a definite YES!

This stuff is like heaven on a fork. Here’s the progression of how things went:

If you look at any posts this week, they’ll most likely be from our 2007 wine party. This was, I guess, the featured dish of the party (outside of the wine, that is). I’d been looking into whether I’m pro-foie gras or anti-foie gras in an earlier post. My conclusion was that I’m pro. So I put in my order, and the foie gras got here last Thursday.

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A while ago, I was contacted, along with several other bloggers, to review some American lamb, thanks to the American Lamb Board (http://www.americanlambboard.org).  They are the premier nonprofit promoter of American-raised lamb.

I promised to review the lamb, and I am finally getting to it!  I know several others have already reviewed it, and I’ll have trackbacks listed to some of them, too.  But on with the review!

The kit arrived well packaged and still good and cold.  The kit included basically a 6-8 lb. boneless leg of lamb, a probe thermometer and dried herbs from a great company, Penzey’s (one of my personally preferred spice sources).  It was nicely packaged, and it also included a great write up on American lamb, along with a variety of serving ideas.

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Everyone seems to have their lists of advice, so I figured, now that we’re well into the peak of grilling season, to add mine!

So, with no further adieu, here is Bucky McOinkum’s 9 Tips For Cooking Outdoors:

1.  Have a fire extinguisher handy.

Ok, first one is boring, but, really, have a fire extinguisher on hand.  You never know when you need it, and even seasoned cooks have issues.  When you’re cooking outside, you’re likely working with flame of some sort, and things do happen!

2.  Take the time to determine what tools you like to use.

This is somewhat different than I hear most people say; most want to tell you what tools to use.  However, I think people do things differently.  I’ll give advice now and then on something I happen to like, but if you choose something differently, that’s fine with me, too.

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As part of my last grilling class, I wanted to show mostly simple dished to grill.  I included steaks, asparagus, pineapple and onions.  But I also wanted to give the participants something that was a bit more upscale, while still not being anything difficult.

What I came up with was a favorite appetizer around my house: cedar planked scallops!
The ingredients are simple:

• Cedar plank, soaked for 2+ hours in water
• Very fresh sea scallops
• 1/2 as many prosciutto slices as there are scallops
• 1 Rosemary twig per each scallop
• Grey salt
• Black pepper

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I like to get back to basics now and then, but I typically can’t just do basic… So I wanted a burger, and decided to try some Wild Herb Nando’s Peri-Peri sauce for something different.

I made a good sized burger (about 6 ozs).  One thing I find with burgers is that too lean is too dry, so I like to use something like a 70/30 mix of lean to fat.  I made this burger by simple pouring some Nando’s on the raw meat and mixing it by hand.  I used the Lemon & Herb because I didn’t want too hot, and I wanted to try the flavor.

I grilled some onion slices, too (Vidalias are SO darn good on the grill!), and grilled the burger over a medium hot fire.  I also grilled the bun a bit, which was a really good poppy seed bun.  The meat was cooked to 160 degrees, then rested for a few minutes.  I served it with dijon mustard, tomato and pickle, topped with the grilled onion slice.

The result was a burger with a really nice, bright flavor.  The lemon didn’t show through too much (a good thing), the herbs were there but not too strong, and there was just a pleasant lingering heat.  There wasn’t so much heat as to need to drink milk with it… It was just a nice touch of spice at the end.

Overall, this is a nice way to easily change the basic burger without going nuts trying to do anything fancy.

The weather has been warming up, until the middle of this week, at least.  When it’s warm, I want to grill things, and I decided, with my wife’s prompting, to do shish kabob one day.  This is a great meal to grill as you can do everything on skewers, minimizing the need for dishes to be dirtied. 

One thing I’ve found with shish kabob is that I don’t care to do everything on one skewer.  The reason for this is that things get done at different rates, so you have to be very careful to size everything just right so it all gets done at the same time.  Or you can do like I do and just do each item on its own skewer!

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Frankie is an Italian who puts Italian cooking with American barbecue/grilling skills.  He was kind enough to share his recipe and log of making his version of smoked pork shoulder.  His site, Barbecue for All, is worth visiting, and he’s added an English section to it for those of us that can’t read Italian.  He even writes with a bit of an accent!  I like to think I go all out to make some things, but wait until you see this!

This one is a long entry, but well worth it!

Hello everybody.
I’m so far from here. I’m Italian but I have a big ambition.  Melt American BBQ skills and Italian cooking style.  In Italy, BBQ as you know (low, slow and smoky) doesn’t exist.  In Italy we (THEY!) are used to cook meat over direct fire, without smoking and without marinades, rubs, sauces and so on.  First time I saw true BBQ was on a local food channel that was showing a [Steven] Raichlen series.  I was thunderstruck from this method!  Really!  I started finding wood chips in Italy but nobody sold smoking wood (I still spend a LOT of money on buying wood from a friends of mine in Salt Lake City) and trying all of recipes as I could.  I realize that smoky flavour makes me absolutely crazy!  Maybe a lot of people in Italy are waiting for somebody that help them on BBQ, so I started my own website.  This is http://www.bbq4all.it.  We speak Italian and English (spaghetti), and we are looking for some new friends. I’m visiting a lot of american websites in order to raise my experience.  Now I would wish your opinion over one of my own recipes that attempts to join Americans and Italians.

A whole smoked pork shoulder, marinated with green apple juice and prosecco served with salsa renetta

This is a whole pork leg. Shoulder, shinbone and feet.

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On the startup of Get Your Grill On, the editor, Robert Fernandez, has asked for photos of meat.  I thought about what post to send him pictures from, and I decided it would be a good time to just go through the last 10 months and pull out some good ol’ meat photos… So here they are!

The first photo here is what I consider the King of Steaks, prime grade porterhouse steaks on the grill.  The steaks pictured here were done for my wife’s birthday party back in July, along with basil butter grilled lobsters. 

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What is it about salmon?  I can hate it or love it.  I’ve found that the quality varies greatly, and that, to be good, I need to get better salmon.  To me, this means to look for 2 things:

1. Wild-caught salmon
2. Scottish salmon

First, Atlantic farmed salmon is listed by the Audobon Society to be avoided, while wild-caught is ‘green’, meaning safe to eat.  Second, the flavor is so much better.  Scottish salmon has taken some quality hits, mainly in smoked salmon, but the fresh, good quality Scottish salmon is organically raised and very high quality, on par in flavor with the wild-caught salmon.

I also think that salmon takes well to outdoor cooking better than about any other fish.

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