Cooking

Cooking / Vegetables — 2 Comments
11
May 10

Turn Up The Heat: Grilling Vegetables On Outdoor BBQ Islands

Don’t be a burn and leave your vegetarian friends out this grilling season. If you have friends who are vegetarians or if you are a vegetarian yourself than learning how to grill up vegetables is an absolute must. Before you heat up your outdoor BBQ Islands and grills, consider adding some healthy vegetables to the menu this summer. Follow our advice and you will have perfect veges for you and all your friends and family.

Vegetables are more time sensitive than meat. Meat is more forgiving when left on its own, but you never want to leave your vegetables unattended. Vegetables continue to cook after they are taken off of the grill, so you do not need to cook them until they are really soft.

With vegetables just like meat you must make sure that you clean them before cooking. Before grilling vegetables you should also brush them with a marinade or oil. This will add flavor and help keep them from sticking. It is also a good idea to clean and grease the grates of BBQ Islands and stand-alone grills before cooking. You do not want to season this years treats with last years seasonings.

A lot of people like to use vegetables to cook colorful and flavor packed kabobs on their BBQ Islands. When putting your kabobs together cut the vegetables a consistent size so that they will cook evenly. Drizzle the kabobs with olive oil as well. And make sure that you soak wooden kabobs a minimum of 15 minutes before using them. Remember that vegetables grill fairly quickly and cook best over medium heat.

You can grill just about any vegetable and it’s an extraordinarily simple process. Some of the most popular vegetables to grill include corn on the cob, portobello mushrooms, and eggplant, but you can also grill onions, garlic, tomatoes, and so on. For thicker vegetables like eggplant and potatoes, soak them for 30 minutes in cold water before brushing with oil and grilling. For smaller vegetables like tiny mushrooms you can invest in a grill basket to cook them in.

With built-in BBQ Islands heating up any sauce or marinade to use on your vegetables is easy. If you have a stand-alone grill then heat up your marinades before grilling. Since vegetables are so much more time sensitive than meat, having to leave them unattended while you run into your house to grab something is not a good idea. Marinades and sauces will add a punch of flavor to your vegetables, but they are also great with just a drizzle of olive oil.

Now that you are a bit more informed about grilling vegetables, it’s time to heat up your BBQ Islands and grills, throw on an apron, and get cooking.

Cooking / Diet — No Comments
5
Mar 10

A Vegetarian Diet is Boring (but doesn’t have to be)

Well, it doesn’t have to be…but mine is. I’m not a good cook and I feel like I don’t have time to learn. No one else in my family is a vegetarian so any recipe that I try is a shot in the dark.  The result is that I pretty much have 10 meals that I rotate through based on what I feel like eating each particular night.

I don’t feel like this is a vegetarian problem; it’s more of a lifestyle problem.  Luckily, I think my problem is solvable.  I just need to be open to new ideas and trying new things.

If you’re suffering from the same dinner plate boredom, here are 6 ideas to spice up your vegetarian meal plan!

1. Try a new recipe from a book you already own

You know, the books over there gathering dust.  You purchased them with the best of intentions, but after an occasional glance the first couple days you never mustered up the courage to give that daring recipe a try.  I’m not the stocked kitchen kind of guy, but I’m sure that you can find one in there that you already have the ingredients to.

2. Get creative with a potato

Start with a baked potato.  Take a look in your cabinet and assess the situation. Select one can of beans of the type you have the most of.  Select a vegetable that will also accompany the meal.  This is where you get to be creative. Beans aren’t creative, but the type of vegetable you pick can be.  Go wild, choose something you don’t think will go well on a potato.  Now that you’ve made your selections, cook all three items separately, spicing as desired, and then top the sliced baked potato with your beans and vegetable.  Add other potato toppings as desired.

3. Focus the meal around an unusual item

The problem new veggies have with cooking is that they used to prepare a meal by thinking of a main item (that being the meat) and then thinking of items that go with it.  You can still think the same way, you just have to focus on a different center item like I did with the potato above.  For example, imagine three of the most delicious slices of tomato lying in the center of a plate. What two or three other items could you mix in or add on the side.  Personally, I think I’d chop the tomato and mix it with spinach, chopped potato, and a small amount of salsa.

4. Add flare to one of your regular meals

Choose something that you eat fairly regularly, but haven’t had in a couple of days. Substitute one of the regular ingredients or add in something extra.  I quite often eat spaghetti with marinara sauce.  It’s easy to make and cheap, but it’s not exciting anymore.  To spice it up I could add veggie crumbles (a vegetarian ground beef substitute) or do something as simple as switching to spiral noodles.

5. Speaking of which, don’t be afraid of meat substitutes

…to create your old favorites. Although I in no way crave animal products anymore, I still have brushes of desire for specific meals that my mom prepared when I was growing up. Use substitutes to try to recreate the recipe.

6. Trust your instincts

Remember when your grandmother would just grab a pinch or handful of something and throw it in the pot?  I was always baffled, but she had the confidence to know that it would turn out well. Pretend as if you absorbed that ability.  Don’t be afraid to toss some corn into that pasta dish or add a spice that isn’t on the recipe card.  The worst that happens is you learn not to do it next time :)