Stephencooks

Grilled Halibut with Crab Sauce

 

Halibut is an interesting fish in that it offers both big benefits and big challenges to the creative cook. The benefits are that it's a big flatfish from which thick steaks of beautiful firm white flesh can be cut, with the large backbone and enveloping skin intact and no pesky little bones lacing the flesh.  These steaks are tailor-made for the grill or sauté pan, as they easily withstand the rigors of grilling or searing. The challenges of the fish revolve around the fact that even the freshest local-caught halibut is very delicate of flavor, verging on the bland, and therefore a successful preparation must use sauces or relishes which subtly enhance and complement the flavor without overwhelming it.

For years I've been serving grilled halibut with sauces adapted from the one suggested in The Thrill of the Grill by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby. Their  approach is basically a fresh tomato-basil relish, with a little olive oil, vinegar, lemon juice and garlic, seasoned to taste. This works especially well in mid- to late summer when the main ingredients are at their best: locally-caught halibut, fresh ripe tomatoes and fresh basil.

This adaptation adds some cooked shallots and celery for a slightly more complex flavor, and some fresh crab to complement and deepen the halibut flavor. It's especially good with a few ears of fresh-picked local corn.

Tea-Brined Grilled Pork Tenderloin with Raspberry Sauce

  

We're not passionate tea drinkers around here, though I do enjoy a cup now and then of English Breakfast or, for a special treat, Lapsang Souchong. (The water for my tea comes gushing out of the boiling water spigot of my Pasquini Livia 90 espresso machine, which may give a clue to which way my hot-liquid passions are oriented.) And I rarely use tea in my cooking, aside from the green tea ice cream that happens about once a year around here. But there is one dish I do that uses tea in a fairly unusual way: tea-brined grilled pork.

Brining pork before cooking is a traditional way to tenderize and add flavor to pork. This method has become more important in recent years as pork has been bred to be leaner and therefore has become tough and less juicy. I've been experimenting for years with various brining mixtures, and I found that this tea brine adds a subtle flavor to the meat while tenderizing it quite well.

The raspberry sauce is a recent addition to the presentation of this dish, inspired by the presence of a box of fresh-picked raspberries at my favorite local farm stand the other day. I usually serve this with a mushroom ragout and a mound of celriac remoulade on the side.

Celeriac Remoulade

  

An old favorite, I make this cooling salad from celery root and tarragon whenever I can find a knarly celery root ball or two. It makes a nice side to grilled meats, a component in a summer salad, or even a topping for a roast pork or beef sandwich.

1 celery root ball
3 T mayonnaise or non-fat yogurt
1 T lemon juice
3 T tarragon, minced
salt, hot sauce to taste

Peel the root ball and cut the celeriac in julienne strips. Blanche for 60 seconds in a large pot of rapidly boiling salted water, then shock in ice water. Drain, shake excess water from the strips and mix with the mayonnaise or yogurt, lemon juice and tarragon. Season to taste.

If possible, make this 6 - 24 hours before serving, to allow flavors to develop.

Pesto & Corn Pasta Salad

  

This recipe came about the way a lot of them do in my kitchen: E asked if we could have pesto pasta for dinner and I said yes (she likes to know what to look forward to while she slaves away at her computer). Then on the way home from a short business trip I noticed that my favorite farm stand was flying the CORN banner for the first time this summer and, as a midwestern boy, I love my corn: I bought a half-dozen ears. Now the problem was: how to meet E's expectations for pesto while incorporating the corn. As I drove home from the farm stand I was mulling this problem over: corn, pasta, pesto...and I remembered the Sheryl Julian and Julie Riven recipe for corn and pasta salad. I made a few adjustments et voila: Corn Pesto Pasta Salad. This is the way recipes are created: each one with a lineage that goes back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and with a list of cousins and ancestors a mile long...

Mediterranean Grilled Eggplant Salad

  

My daughter's mother-in-law, Nancy, has a big vegetable garden and last time she watched my granddaughter Madi she dropped off some eggplants and several beautiful purple peppers, fresh from the garden.  The next day, I was grilling salmon so I did the eggplant at the same time so we could have this salad the following day. The fresh peppers and tomatoes give this a summery feel, and the smokey flavor of the grilled eggplant gives it a nice outdoorsy flavor, so it's perfect as a side for a  summer meal on the deck, or on a picnic.

Grilled Salmon Sandwich

  

I'm in Rochester visiting my daughter Jennifer, son-in-law Craig and granddaughter Madi. Craig is a professional tuba player with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, so on Saturday evening Jenny and Madi and I went for a picnic on the lawn while Craig played a pops concert in the Shed at the Finger Lakes Permforming Art Center in Canandaigua. Salmon is one of Madi's favorite foods (she's two) so before we went I grilled some salmon for her and made sandwiches for me and Jenny and Craig.

Ginger-Steamed Cabbage with Little Dried Shrimp

  

This is an adaptation of a traditional method of preparing Chinese cabbage ("celery cabbage"), and it's become a regular guest at our table. It's quick, flavorful and versatile. It works as a side for a Chinese meal, of course, but also for grilled steak, pork or chicken. Chilled, it makes a great add-on for a quick and interesting salad. We've even had it as a topping on hamburgers, and I add it into other steamed vegetables like broccoli or green beans (with sesame seeds) to bring variation into otherwise routine vegetable sides. 

Tuscan Grilled Chicken Sandwich

 We had another sunset beach picnic with a group of friends, and our contribution was a simple Tuscan-inspired grilled chicken sandwich. Chicken breasts, marinated in vinaigrette and herbs and grilled, then sliced and combined with tomato, basil and fresh mozzarella on slices of rustic bread. What could go wrong with this?

Grilled Striped Bass with Lemon Butter Sauce

  

One of the more pleasant side benefits of living near the beach is that every once in a while you can pull your dinner from the sea. The other morning my friend Bill and I trudged down the beach at dawn with surf rods, chunks of frozen mackerel and lightweight lawn chairs. Three hours later we trudged back with the additional burden of a nice 3 -1/2 lb striped bass in our bucket.

Striped bass, caught from the beach or a boat, is one of a dwindling list of wild foods we can bring fresh to our table, and therefore justifies a 3-hour expedition for its capture. Virtually all our meat and poultry is produced as an industrial product, only dimly related to its free-range ancestry, and thousands of years removed from the wild version. Seafood too is increasingly farm-raised (fed on pellets with color additives so that the product will somewhat resemble the wild version) and a large part of the wild catch is transported thousands of miles to market, so the combination of fresh and wild is becoming quite precious.

Grilled Corn and Red Pepper Salad

 This is a wonderful dish that appears in our house every summer, and it comes with some history. Sometime in the eighties a friend clipped a recipe from the Boston Globe Magazine for me. It was a piece by the magazine's food writer, Sheryl Julian, that focused on grilled lamb, but also described a grilled corn salad as an accompaniment.

Ignoring the lamb, I went straight for the grilled corn salad, and it became a signature dish in my kitchen, to the point where when my daughter Jennifer asked me to do the food for her rehearsal dinner she specifically asked for "...that grilled corn salad you make..."

About five or six years after grilled corn salad entered my life, I was at a party in Newton, a near suburb of Boston, and the host told me that since the two best cooks he knew were at the party he wanted to introduce me to the other one...who turned out to be Sheryl Julian. I shook her hand and started babbling something about "that grilled corn salad you wrote about a while back..." She gave me a look I understand now that I'm married to a novelist: the Potentially Strange Maybe Dangerous Fan look. A slight backing away accompanies this look. (I've learned that while most Fans are okay, You Never Know. You really never know. This is why it's so hard to find home addresses of your favorite writers.) She offered a non-committal pleasantry (along the lines of "Yes, that is good, isn't it?") and edged away.

Time went by, life upheaval happened, and my cookbooks, grill and kitchen tools were in storage for a couple of years while I righted things. Cooking took a back seat. Way back.

When I started cooking again, set up the grill, etc., I couldn't find that yellowed clipping with the salad recipe. So I did what  cooks do every day: improvised as best I could from memory. Then a couple of years later I came across Sheryl Julian's wonderful book, The Way We Cook, written with her writing partner at the Globe, Julie Riven.  In their book I found a recipe for Corn and Pasta Salad, which I recognized as a close relative of my lost beloved grilled corn salad.

Fig Tart with Creamy Goat Cheese, Rosemary and Honey

 

Last month Sarah at The Delicious Life made a beautiful fresh fig tart and for a couple of days I couldn't stop going back to look at it. I was envious, because here in Southern Maine finding fresh figs is hit or miss, at best, but a few days ago I had a hankering for some wild boar meat so I stopped in at Savenor's Market one day when I was in Boston on business. (Yes, the same Savenor's Market -- albeit moved from Somerville to Beacon Hill and gone upscale --  that was Julia's favorite, and the home of her famous Jack the Butcher, but that's another story.) And there, nestled between the $69.99 per pound morel mushrooms and the $12.99 per pound French beans was a box of perfect fresh figs. I bought a small bag with no idea what I was going to do with them.

The figs were very ripe and sweet so I thought Sarah's honey mascarpone filling might be too much, but the idea she had of using a savory herb intrigued me so I made a quick trip to the garden for some rosemary and then rummaged around in the refrigerator and found some goat cheese and a leftover cup of whipped cream. The frozen puff pastry sheets in the freezer were calling my name, begging to be used up, so in about ten minutes we had our figs and cheese. (Wait -- I forgot to mention the honey! The figs were so sweet that I hardly needed any, but the combination of honey and figs is so good as to be compulsory, so I drizzled.)

Not nearly as beautiful as Sarah's tart but very satisfying from an eating point of view...!

Linguine with Sausage and Oregano

 

This is quick and good. We were going out to hear some music so I was going to take a night off from real cooking and boil up some of the wonderful homemade ravioli that we buy frozen from a local pasta maker, but with the water boiling and the salad made I found that it's time to inventory the freezers again: no little bundles of pasta joy in there. But there were a couple of the sweet Italian sausages...so I threw some linguine in the pot, simmered and chopped the sausage and tossed them with about 1/4 cup of minced sage and oregano from the herb garden, a couple of minced garlic cloves and a minced fresh little red hot pepper. A little parmeggiano reggiano and we were good to go.

Smoked Shellfish Terrine

 

I smoke shellfish whenever I have the smoker going and some space on the rack, so sometimes the problem is: what to do with the resulting goodies?  This is one of my favorites...

Broccoli Salad

 

This salad is so quick and easy and always good. I frequently make it when I have leftover steamed broccoli on hand. 

1-1/2 C steamed broccoli, cooled
8 grape tomatoes, sliced
2 slices red onion, separated
8 slices cucumber, cut in thirds
1 T toasted pine nuts
1 T fresh tarragon
2 T olive oil
1 tsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1/2 tsp salt
1 small garlic clove, smashed
hot sauce, to taste

Place the vegetables in a bowl. Whisk together the oil, vinegar, tarragon, mustard, salt, hot sauce and garlic clove. When ready to serve, remove garlic clove, add dressing to salad and toss. This salad is good with any number of other dressings as well.

Smoked Shrimp and Calamari Salad

There are many satisfying ways to serve smoked seafood. This is one of my favorites is this easy, refreshing and addictive salad. A good choice for a summer lunch on the patio or an easy supper on the deck. 

Serves 4 as a side salad or appetizer. 

Ingredients

• 2 tablespoon fresh oregano, minced
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 2 tablespoon prepared horseradish
• 1 tablespoon lime juice
• 1 tablespoon red wine vinegar
• 1 teaspoon fresh hot red pepper, minced
• Zest of 1 lime
• 1 clove garlic, minced
• 1/2 pound smoked shrimp, squid, or scallops 
• 1/4 cup thin-sliced fennel bulb
• 1/4 cup thin-sliced red onion
• 4 Greek olives, pitted, chopped 
• 6 grape tomatoes, sliced
• 1/4 cup fresh parsley, minced

Method

1. Whisk together the oil, oregano, horseradish, lime juice, vinegar and hot pepper. 

2. Place the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and pour the oil/oregano mixture into the bowl. Toss to mix.  

3. Correct seasoning (smoked shellfish is usually brined before smoking, so salt is not likely to be needed). 

Tip: For best favor, refrigerate overnight and bring to room temperatuire before serving. 

Variation

Toss with 8 oz (dry weight) cooked pasta, 1 additional clove minced garlic, 1 tablespoon minced fresh dill weed and 1 tablespoon additional olive oil. Serve warm or at room temperature. 

Print this recipe.

Smoked Shellfish

  

When I've got the smoker going I don't like to waste rack space, so the other day when I was doing a smoked pork shoulder I also did some shellfish. In this case it was shrimp and squid because I had some of each in the freezer.  Shrimp I've done many times and it's a favorite around here, but I think this may have been the first time for squid. It won't, however, be the last. Between the brining and the smoking, the squid texture and taste were both improved significantly. I had some European squid the other night at Fore Street, grilled over a wood fire, and was blown away by the taste and texture.  Wood smoke really does a nice job on squid!

 

Smoked Pork Shoulder

Well, there's nothing easier than this, and it's pretty hard to beat. Boston butt is cheap and the result is irresistible. Some people brine the pork but I just throw it in the smoker for about 10 - 12 hours. Serve with some barbeque sauce on the side, soft hamburger buns and maybe a little spicy cole slaw. Life is good.

Ingredients

4 - 6 pound untrimmed pork shoulder (sometimes called Boston butt)

Note: Pork butt is sometimes sold in smoked, precooked or cured versions. You don't want any of those for this recipe!

Method

Smoke, fat side up, by by indirect method (200 - 225º) about 10 to 12  hours. Meat should be starting to fall apart when finished.

(See Grill Basics for information about smoking equipment, setup and methods.)

Barbeque Sauce

Adapted from "Basic All-American Barbeque Sauce," The Thrill of the Grill, by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby, this sauce has a smokey, slow-burn kind of heat, as opposed to the sharp, in-your-face fire of some of the more aggressive blends. Also, with almost no oil or butter, it has a cleaner, fresher taste than most. If you are going to paint this on meat while it is still on the grill, do it only a minute or two before you remove it from the fire or the sugars will burn. Personally I don't like to mask the flavor of the slow-smoked meat so I serve it on the side and use it sparingly, as an accent rather than as the center-stage flavor element for my barbeque.

Grill Basics: The Cook'N'Kettle

 We're talking about charcoal and hardwood here. I do have an indoor gas grill but I only use it if there's a howling Northeaster going on, or (more frequently) to finish meats begun on the charcoal for a dinner party. Basically, gas is good for home heating, dryers and cooktops - but for barbeque you need a fire that produces smoke.

My father, William Stanley Smith, was a brilliant surgeon, researcher (he had a hand in some of the basic science that led to hip replacement), and teacher. All of these things about him I know based on reports from others. But I had direct experience with his expertise at grilling and smoking and, though he's gone, I still have that wonderful gift.

Around 1960 a friend introduced Bill to the Cook'n'Kettle, a cast iron kettle grill on a stand. He applied his scientist's mind to the problem of the perfect steaks, smoked turkeys and roasts, and after a few years of taking measurements, timing carefully and keeping records in a notebook, he had it down. While most guys were timidly poking at a burned steak on their grills, he was in the den, watching the Tigers on TV. When my mother asked when the meat would be done, he'd look at his watch and say, "eight and a half minutes," without missing a pitch. The results were spectacular.

About fifteen years ago, after a lifetime of apartment living, I moved to a place where I could grill outside and got a Cook'n'Kettle of my own, and one afternoon I sat my father down to extract the secrets. (My three brothers also have them -- one has two -- and my daughter does too. We're featured in the Cook'n'Kettle marketing literature -- "Three Generations of Cook'N'Kettle." At last count, our extended family owns six Cook'N'Kettle setups.) I'll be revealing Bill's secrets as time goes on in Stephencooks.com, but this post is about the tool.

Spinach Tart with Eggplant, Roasted Tomatoes and Olive Cream

 

This was my first try at the Paper Chef competition, a fun web event modeled on the Iron Chef competitions on the Food Network: a group of "secret ingredients" are announced on the first Friday of each month and participants must submit a recipe using those ingredients within 72 hours. This challenge is in its eighth incarnation and was invented by Owen of Tomatilla! Unlike most other web food events, it's an actual competition, with a winner and losers: usually the winner of the previous month's Paper Chef picks the next one to display the coveted "Paper Chef Winner" badge.

This month's judge is Sarah of Delicious Life, who won the job for her Paper Chef #7 triumph with the spectacular Feta Cheese Souffles with Walnuts, Dates and Feisty Greens in a Honey Lemon Vinaigrette. As you can see if you followed that last link, Sarah's a gifted and humorous writer, too, so a visit to her site is always a pleasure, for the wit as well as for the food and the general LA lifestyle she's got going on there.

This month's secret ingredients were announced on Friday, July 1: spinach, olives, cheddar cheese and a choice of either potatoes or cream.

Spinach, olives and cheese immediately suggested something Mediterranean, possibly Greek-influenced. The question was how to incorporate cream or potatoes.

A spinach-cheese quiche studded with olives seemed a little too obvious, even though it fit into my initial conceptual framework, so I worked out a way to stay close to that idea, with an interesting twist. Taking the cream out of the quiche, I thought of a cheesy little spanikopita, laced with olives and that sounded like a possibility. But what to do with that cream (or those potatoes)?  After a little brainstorming and fooling around in the kitchen it came to me: eggplant and tomatoes -- traditional Mediterranean vegetables -- roasted with rosemary and mounded on top of a cheese/spinach tart, topped off with a delicious spoonful of whipped cream laced with tiny bits of Greek olives.

It took a little doing to figure out how to uniformly incorporate the olives into the cream, but after a couple of false starts I found the key: freezing the olives so they can be pulverized like nuts. (Because of the salt content they don't freeze really hard but they do get stiff enough to resist the blade, which is all you need to make particles instead of paste.) It turned out to be well worth the effort, as the salty flavor of the olives blends magically with the cream and complements the spinach, eggplant, tomatoes and cheese perfectly...at least according to me! (Think olive cream cheese, only lighter, much lighter, and creamier.) Anyway, I had a great time with my first Paper Chef entry and I can't wait to do another one next month.