Recipes By John Willoughby and Chris Schlesinger
19 recipes found
Sweet Corn Tartar Sauce
Simple Slaw
Clean and simple. Eight ingredients — apple cider, cider vinegar, cabbage, mustard seeds, celery seeds, sugar, salt and pepper to taste — combine into what ought to be a staple of your repertoire. You’ll need to cook the cider down by half before using it, but everything else goes in raw, and the combination matures over the course of a few hours into a side dish that can accompany just about anything grilled or roasted, pulled or hacked.
Grilled Cherry Tomatoes With Curry and Golden Raisins
A bright favorite of summer, cherry tomatoes get an unorthodox treatment here. Instead of being served plain or as part of a salad, they are tossed with salt and pepper and skewered and grilled until slightly soft and a bit blistered. The tomatoes are then dressed in cool yogurt with mint and golden raisins and spiced with curry powder.
Spicy Grilled Chicken With Tomato-Cucumber Relish
Chicken thighs meet with a mellow mix of Indian spices and are grilled into weekend dinner excellence. In Indian cooking, most spices are toasted before they’re used, a process that brings up their aromatics and mellows and rounds their flavors. Here they’re then rubbed onto chicken thighs and grilled, which gives them an additional smokiness that pairs beautifully with the tomato-and-cucumber relish.
Grilled Lamb Kebabs With Smoky Peaches
Taking a cue from the hot-weather regions of the world, John Willoughby and Chris Schlesinger go heavy with the seasoning here, but the key is when that happens. Instead of a marinade, or a spice rub, they grill the lamb and season it after with garlic, basil, vinegar and Tabasco sauce. It’s a great way to add big flavor without spending all day in the kitchen.
Grilled Skirt Steak With Smoky Eggplant Chutney
This crusty, succulent steak is flavored with a powerful mixture of coriander, cumin, mustard seed, chile powder and cinnamon. Take care not to overcook the meat; rare to medium rare guarantees tender beef. For even more flavor, serve the steak with a smoky eggplant chutney, which comes together quickly.
Spicy Latin Chicken Wings
Sweet Potato and Apple Hobo Pack
The hobo pack, a self-contained, foil-wrapped meal cooked in hot coals, is an easy option for outdoor cooking. Though this recipe includes a lot of fall flavors, it is great for summer cookouts, a change from the usual suspects. The key to success is to be sure the foil packet is tightly sealed so no juices leak out. Be aware that the intense heat of the coals will deeply char some of the food that’s right up against the foil, but to us that’s the best-tasting part.
Grilled Baby Back Ribs With Spicy Peanut Shake
Marinating, it’s said, not only adds flavor and moisture that will stay with the food through the rigors of the grilling process, but also tenderizes whatever you’re about to put over the coals. There’s only one problem with this comforting culinary scenario: It’s mostly not true. These ribs are grilled naked, save for some salt and pepper. Afterward, they are cut into individual ribs and tossed with hoisin sauce, soy sauce, orange juice and ginger and sprinkled with a spicy peanut shake. You get the ease of last-minute preparation and brighter, clearer, more direct flavors and you can show off a bit for your guest as you mix and toss at the last minute.
Grilled Chicken Skewers With Deconstructed Pesto
Budget-friendly boneless, skinless chicken thighs are paired here with a version of pesto that is closer to salad than paste. For grilling, the thighs are tossed with olive oil and salt and pepper and threaded onto skewers. But they are not jammed together, so they cook fairly quickly. Simply toss with the pesto ingredients — fresh basil, olive oil, parmesan, pine nuts and garlic — and serve.
Outdoor Fish Fry
Frying fish at home can be intimidating, not least because it’s messy and can leave the house smelling like a grease pit. Here, though, is a recipe that takes the cooking outside, to a large pan set over a propane hob or, as subsequent testing has borne out, to a large roasting pan filled with oil set over a gas grill. Simply heat the oil until it is very hot but not yet smoking, and add to it very fresh strips of fish dipped in a mixture of flour, salt, pepper and Old Bay, then into egg, and finally into panko, and fry until golden brown on each side, super-crisp, with a moist, tender and perfectly cooked interior. Buy a lot of fish. This is one of those recipes where people tend to want seconds and thirds. Serve with slaw and, if you like, tartar sauce.
Simple Lamb Kebabs With Greek Flavors
In days gone by, Italian dressing might have been a go-to marinade for lamb. After you soak, say, some lamb skewers in this dressing for a while and then grill them, what you get is grilled lamb with a kind of vague mix of vinegar, oil and faded herb taste. Contrast this with grilling the lamb, then putting it in a bowl and adding an acidic flavor, like lemon juice or vinegar, the oil and whatever herbs you choose. You’ll get the smoothness of the oil, the sharp hit of the acid (in this case, lemon juice), the aroma of the herbs (in this case marjoram) and the sweet meatiness of the lamb, each distinct flavor complementing and reinforcing others.
Fried Scallops
Use large sea scallops, which are often labeled “u/10” or “u/12,” which stands for under 10 or 12 to a pound. And try to get dry scallops as opposed to wet ones, which have been treated with chemicals to extend their shelf life and add moisture. Dry scallops exude much less liquid when cooked and have better texture and flavor. These untreated scallops often tend to be less bright white, but your fishmonger should be able to tell you for sure what you’re buying.
Smoky Eggplant Chutney
Thai-Style Baby Back Ribs
Pork ribs are often found under layers and layers of sauce and seasoning. In this recipe, stripped down to tropical-climate easiness, the ribs are grilled after being sprinkled generously with salt and pepper, not marinated or spice-rubbed. The infusing of the flavors — fish sauce, soy sauce, lime juice, jalapeños, ginger, garlic and lemon grass — comes after the cooking is done. It’s pretty neat how good that tastes. The recipe makes three or four entrée servings, but it also makes a good appetizer for six to eight.
Malaysian-Style Ginger-Chile Crab
Steamed crabs are great. But this recipe takes them a step further, into the luxurious, spicy territory of Malaysia, where the cooked crabs are sautéed fiercely with an enormous amount of chopped ginger and chiles, garlic and curry powder before you serve them under a spray of sliced scallions. Eat with your hands. All but the most fastidious eaters should consider wearing a bib.
Hush Puppies With Crab and Bacon
Make sure you pick over the crab meat well to remove any shells for these delicious hush puppies, which come together in a snap. The bacon must be cooked before they are assembled, but that’s the only other bit of prep work. Keep them warm before serving, and make sure to offer plenty of good butter to gild them.
Tomato Steaks With Crab-Corn Relish
Grilled Shrimp With Wilted Spinach and Peaches
The first principle of Indian spice cookery (and of spices in general) is that spices are best when bought whole and ground fresh, as happens in this recipe. Toasting and then grinding the spices — peppercorns, coriander, mustard seeds and cardamom pods — used for the spice rub helps to even out their flavors so that they blend with the mild flavor of the shrimp. Serve them over fresh ripe peaches and tender spinach wilted by a hot mixture of ginger, vinegar, orange juice and curry powder.