I just finished reading Food & Booze, which I mentioned here. It's an awesome book, by the way. I had gotten it from the library, but I'm now going to buy it. Each essay has a recipe with it, so it's like you get a whole background story to each recipe. Awesome. Steve Almond's contribution was about grilling, and concluded with a chicken salad recipe that I will be trying this summer. Here is an excerpt from Almond's essay, "My Soul Upon the Grill:"
Specifically, I’ve developed certain spiritual ideas, emotional biases, what my analyst would term – if I ever spoke to him about the grill, which I do not – an ideological fetish.
It begins like this: Human being are inexorably drawn toward fire, which has, for most of our formative evolution as a species, been the fundamental source of warmth, safety, and nutritional gratification. Stoves are, in the grand scheme of things, an infantile domestic prop. (I shall not even begin to express my contempt for microwaves.)
The sensual signifiers of fire – the orange snap of the flames, the smell and taste of the smoke – are hardwired. It is for this reason that cooking over a fire, which most of the world still does, triggers certain vestigial limbic impulses, in my case a desire to lick tendrils of grease from the grill.
Steve Almond, My Soul Upon the Grill
Here are some recipes for grilled stuff that I hope to try:
Grilled Lime Chicken with Black Bean Sauce
Adobo-Marinated Pork Tenderloin with Grilled-Pineapple Salsa
Asian-Style Grilled Cornish Hens
Jamie Oliver's Grilled Monkfish with Black Olive Sauce
Indian Style Sheekh Kabob
And to help us get into even more of a grilling mood:
-a mouth-watering flickr grilling group.
-an Amazon Listmania list "All-Time 15 Greatest BBQ Books"
-another Listmania list "The Absolute Best Grilling Books"
-Alton Brown's Grilling Essentials Kit. I think this is a great deal!
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