Grilled Veggie Skewers

While I am down the shore I like to have grilled food since I don't have a (real) grill at home. I was cooking for only myself, using only what happened to be around, and I ended up making these grilled veggie skewers.

Recipe:
1 small zucchini
1/2 onion
1 baby eggplant
6-8 mushrooms
Italian dressing

Directions: Soak skewers so they don't catch on fire. Cut up zucchini and eggplant into pieces that can fit on a skewer without breaking. Cut onion layers into square-ish pieces. Skewer everything in whatever order you feel like. Put in a dish and cover with Italian dressing (try to get some on everything).

Pretty self explanatory, and you can use whatever veggies you like. I don't love zucchini, but we have so much. I don't know when is the last time I had eggplant, and I don't think I've ever had these little ones.

I made a box of garlic & herb long grain and wild rice to go with this. I like this kind of thing because you just toss it in the pot and leave it alone. But don't forget to check it every few minutes, because for some reason mine cooked very fast today, even though I turned it down almost all the way. I also started to get a little discouraged when my veggies didn't seem to be cooking. I was under the impression that they would cook really quickly on the grill. But when I finally just left them alone for a little while, they cooked very nicely. I think the eggplant pieces could have been a little smaller though. I was very surprised that I liked the zucchini and eggplant much more than I thought I would. Since they are in season I will have to make some more stuff with them.

This stuff just about fit on 4 skewers and with the rice it was definitely enough for one person for dinner. Yummy!

Salmon Packets

For 4th of July weekend, we went to this sweet party on the beach and had salmon in grill packets. Oh wait, no... that was Giada, not us, and we just watched it on TV. But it looked really good, so we planned to make it this weekend down the shore. (You can find the recipe here.) After we went shopping on Thursday night and bought frozen salmon, I found out that my mom was having some family over and I wasn't allowed to cook while she was cooking. I somehow managed to convince her that our menu of salmon packets with grilled asparagus was genius, despite the fact that she hates salmon, and is allergic to asparagus (it makes her sneeze). I also convinced her that we needed "real" salmon (as opposed to the frozen salmon that I had).

Ken agreed to help me with this, which was great since I now was making 4 times as many salmon packets as I had planned. We opened the salmon to get started, and saw that it still had the skin on. We didn't think this would work well in packets, but also couldn't figure out how to fillet it. Luckily, my dad (who also had no idea how to fillet) helped Ken out and they managed to get the fish in packet-size skinless pieces. I didn't actually touch any salmon. Yuck.

We brushed each piece of salmon with olive oil and placed each on a piece of foil, and then I added all the ingredients - salt, pepper, rosemary, lemon slices, lemon juice, wine, and just a few capers since we don't really like them. (My distaste for capers stems from a cooking disaster that occured a few years ago and made me have no desire to cook until now.)

Then, we folded up the packets. This was difficult because there was quite a bit of liquid in each and it wanted to escape. We put them in a pan in the fridge until our guests arrived and we were ready to throw them on the grill.

My mom cooked some chicken first, then told us it was our turn to grill our salmon. We put it on the grill and came back in ten minutes to check on it. We opened a packet and... yuck. It smelled like wine and was definitely not cooked. My mom had turned the grill off just before she turned it over to us and since it was still hot, we didn't notice. Oops! No problem though, we just turned it back on and cooked them for the ten minutes (again).


Once we finally got them cooked, everyone was hungry and attacked! I don't have any finished pictures, since they went so quickly. The finished product looked a lot like these pictures, just the cooked color of salmon instead. Luckily, everyone said it was great!

The filleting didn't go all that smoothly since we had no fillet knife or knowledge whatsoever, so we had some salmon left on the skin. We grilled it today with just olive oil, salt and pepper on it, and it was delicious. Salmon skin crisps up very nicely. It mostly came off the skin, but it was still good. I added a few pieces of salmon to my salad as well, which was delicious.