Grilling

PAT I absolutely love making my grilled hot wings. Gina calls me the grill master: I’m a grill king and a wingman. There is nothing better than wings with a smoky grilled flavor mingling with a sweet, spicy, and creamy dipping sauce. One of the best things about living in Memphis is that we can grill year- round, even on a 35-degree day (which is the normal temperature on Super Bowl Sunday). Grilling wings can be completed in a 10-minute period outside, so even if it’s chilly out, you can stand it!

Mackerel is a rich fish with fabulous texture and depth of flavor. Though it’s not traditional, preserved lemon adds a piquant, salty touch to a rustic pounded sauce. To make sure the potatoes are crispy when you serve the dish, grill the fish first and fry the potatoes right before serving. Parboiling the potatoes makes it easy to get them crispy, while ensuring they’re cooked through.

Though this recipe sounds straight out of a Coen brothers’ movie, the name refers to the fact that you chop off the squids’ arms and stuff them inside their own bodies. Trust me—this is my kind of punishment. I use cooked Controne beans as a binder instead of breadcrumbs, ensuring the filling is creamy and light, and I add slab bacon for a hit of smoke and texture. When you grill the tentacles, remember that you’re just precooking them and don’t leave them on the heat too long. Another key to this dish is ensuring that your filling is at room temperature before you stuff the squid. If it’s too cold, you’ll overcook the bodies while you heat the stuffing through. If you want to stuff the squid earlier in the day, just take them out of the fridge about a half hour before grilling.

This is a dish to transport you to the Italian Riviera—the freshest sardines, simply grilled, splashed with lemon, briny olives, and the sweet anise flavor of the season’s first fennel. This is also finger food, so get out a big stack of napkins and don’t eat them with those who are excessively dainty. They don’t deserve them anyway. It would play into the whole relaxed-by-the-sea thing if you have your fishmonger scale and clean the sardines.

A 3-pound T-bone makes a pretty fantastic, nearly Flintstonian presentation when you bring it to the table, marked from the grill. If you can, use your charcoal grill for this one—you’ve just spent a tidy sum on this gorgeous hunk of meat, why not give it the best flavor? Think of this as slow roasting—you’re not cooking a hamburger here. A 3-pound steak gives you about 2 pounds of meat, 1/2 pound per person if you’re feeding four. That’s a good bit of steak, but somehow I don’t think you’ll have leftovers. The creamy Controne bean is known as the “no-soak” bean because it lacks a hard skin. You could also use marrow or cannellini, both of which will require soaking, but try seeking out Controne beans in Italian markets.

Veal cheeks make the most delicate braise. Using a combination of water and wine for the braising liquid allows the sweet, subtle taste of the veal to really shine through. As a side, you need nothing more than the spring’s first ramps and some gorgeous porcini, kissed by the grill. Some years, it just so happens that the ramp season runs long, or perhaps the porcini season starts early, or both. When the two magically coincide, some amazing things happen. Using foil as insulation for the delicate ramp tops gives the vegetables a simple char on the grill. The veal needs time to become fork-tender, a few hours in all, so plan accordingly.

This is your grown-up chance to play with your food! Frenched lamb chops, also known as lamb lollipops, just beg to be picked up and gnawed on because the clean bones make lovely handles. Even the veg gets in on the interactive eating, with tender spring favas sautéed in their skins. Besides being fun finger food, there’s an added perk to cooking them this way: because they’re not blanched, the favas stay extra-sweet and firm. Just pick them up one by one and pop them into your mouth, like edamame served in Japanese restaurants. Don’t bother setting forks or knives at the table, but I recommend providing plenty of napkins.

If you were Venetian, and therefore Catholic, and were forbidden to eat meat on Fridays, you might choose instead a delicious whole wheat pasta tossed with rich sardines and fennel for your supper. Aren’t you lucky, then, that even if you are a Swedish Lutheran, you can happily take part in this lovely ritual? Bigoli is yummy fresh, but it can also be found dried in Italian markets. Although you could substitute other types of pasta, the depth of flavor of the whole wheat really holds up to the intensity of the fish.

Seattle summers are our best-kept secret—with long, lovely days just hot enough to make you want to stay out of the kitchen and linger outside. The perfect appetizer for a patio barbecue, grilled polenta is easy, crisp, and luscious, and is played to its best advantage when topped with juicy heirloom tomatoes brightened with garlic and anchovy. If you like, substitute basil or another favorite tender herb for the mint. This would also be nice served with a handful of baby greens on the plate.

When you pour out the polenta to chill, don’t worry about making it pretty. Do what we do at the restaurants and use a cookie or biscuit cutter to create even shapes, or cut out wedges or squares—use your imagination. Grilled or sautéed polenta makes an excellent accompaniment to meat, game, or poultry. Try a couple of disks nestled next to a pork chop, roasted chicken, or guinea hen. Firm polenta should be crispy outside, soft and creamy inside, like a good French fry. In short, everything you could want.

Make this with homemade ricotta and you will be rewarded with a starter that is rich, pretty, and piquant. It is perfect for entertaining, because you can prepare the crostini, ricotta mixture, and salsa verde ahead of time and put the bruschetta together when your guests arrive.

Not an authentic bruschetta (you’d never eat this dish in Italy), this appetizer is damn good all the same, with the garlicky aioli making a rich bed for the crispy grilled crabs. Look for soft-shell crabs in May through July, when blue crabs begin to molt and shed their hard shells. Once they do, it takes about four days for their new shells to solidify, and it’s during this window that they are perfect for eating whole. It’s best to buy soft-shell crabs live and kill and clean them yourself, but you may have them cleaned at the fishmonger and cook them as soon as possible once you get home.

Tongues have an awesome richness that goes completely underappreciated because people don’t serve them, fearing a food that can taste them. That’s silly. Tongues are cheap and delicious, and enjoyment of this unique cut is all in the preparation. Once I found a reliable tongue source, I was elated, and I started putting them on the restaurant menus in an attempt to win more converts. For this dish, the meat does need a while to cook, but you can poach them up to a day in advance.

Salted watermelon, cornbread, and molasses. You don’t have to look far to see how much Southerners like to mix their sweet with their salty. This summery salad, featuring Balsamic-glazed grilled peaches and shaved country ham tossed with fresh herbs and creamy goat cheese, is an elegant tribute to this unendingly popular flavor combination. For real Southern flavor, use sticky-sweet Georgia peaches.

What better way to make use of the frenzy of vegetables that bursts on the scene in midsummer than these easy grilled skewers, all dressed up in pesto vinaigrette. Keep it fun and simple by loading the skewers with whatever mix of fresh, seasonal vegetables you find at the market.

In the cattle-ranching heartlands of Texas, barbecue usually means beef, not pig, and brisket—which comes from the animal’s lower chest—is hands down the most popular. A little patience and a few hours of smoking or braising transform this relatively tough cut into the most succulent, falling-apart-tender meat you’ll ever eat. Part of the trick is marinating the meat for several hours or even overnight prior to cooking, so be sure to factor in this additional “inactive” prep time. To avoid standing over the grill for six to eight hours, I start the meat on the grill for an infusion of smoky hickory flavor and then let the oven do the rest of the work.

Roasted fillet of beef was a standard at my mom’s house during the holidays, and I always crave it when the weather turns crisp. When I make it, I start the meat on the grill for extra flavor and finish it in the oven, where it cooks more evenly and comes out juicy and tender. It’s a no-fail method that ensures a perfectly cooked fillet every time.

My dad was the unusual male who didn’t like to grill—he was a cast-iron fryer—so I became the family griller as soon as I was old enough; except for the three or four times a year when Peter makes burgers, I still am. This buttery, tangy, grilled steak sandwich—a favorite of my mother’s—is supereasy, and it was one of my first specialties.

Here is a convenient way to duplicate succulent, hickory-smoked pork barbecue with only a fraction of the fuss. Just pop a pork butt in the oven, then finish it off quickly on the grill for smoky flavor, and voilà: a tender heap of slow-cooked, vinegar-spiked meat that you’d never know hadn’t spent the whole day over the coals.