grilling season > soup season
15 weeknight recipes for faster clean-up.
Hello and welcome to the best time of the year to grill. The heat from the fire will warm you, but it’s not so cold out that you can’t feel your fingers. It does get darker earlier, and this is what headlamps are for.
This Thursday’s new recipe is a grilled chicken recipe (sign-up below to receive it in your inbox), and I thought as a little preview, I’d share some grilling recipes I really love. This is not an exhaustive list, just the first recipes I thought of this morning.
Before I worked on Paula Disbrowe’s book, Any Night Grilling, I had no idea how to light a chimney or what a chimney was. The grill was scary. But her kind, practical introduction to grilling made me love it—and see it as such a lifesaver of a kitchen tool.
The grill (especially a charcoal one) brings so much flavor to your food that you don’t really have to season ingredients beyond salt, pepper, and oil. Of course you can, but it’s not really necessary.
I don’t find marinating a good use of time or ingredients. Instead, light the chimney, go inside to prep your food, and by the time your coals are ready, the ingredients will be ready to grill. Clean-up eases up, too. All the mess happens outside, and the tools required are often limited to a sheet pan and tongs.
The grill’s almost begging you to meal-plan or batch-cook. Once I’ve grilled dinner, I look to my kitchen to see what I can throw on the smoldering coals while we’re eating, like beets, potatoes, or squash. (Or smoke pantry items, like Paula taught me in her follow-up book Thank You for Smoking.) And then when we’re done with dinner, the coals are ready for s’mores (or a s’mores sandwich).
If you don’t have a grill, the recipes can be adapted for indoor tools. Think of an uncovered grill as a skillet and a covered grill as an oven.
Gift links are provided for paywalled recipes; I’ll try to do this as much as I can. If you like this kind of recipe round-up post, let me know by liking this post. As my yoga teacher said this morning, everyone in the world has a reason to sigh today, so thank you for spending part of your day here.