End of Summer Grilling

We have had a few BBQs with friends to round out the end of summertime, 

and I've been trying to make something new each time!  

I found all of these recipes on Pinterest, 

and the links to the original recipes are below the photo collage.     

A couple of weekends ago we did some more of the grilled artichokes I mentioned here.  I'm thinking of making them again this weekend actually.  I love artichokes and they always seem to be a hit with guests.

The same evening we had blue cheese stuffed burgers.  They were SO GOOD!  My boyfriend actually made them.  He basically made two thin patties and piled blue cheese between them before sealing the edges. Warning: hot, melty cheese awaits your mouth!  Take the first bite over a plate!  ;-)

Along with the artichokes and burgers I made a cucumber and tomato salad.
It was so easy and so refreshing! 

Refreshing Cucumber and Tomato Salad

You only need: 

2 medium cucumbers, peeled and sliced  

1 ripe tomato, cut into bite sized pieces (I used one small tomato, from our garden!!, and a handful of grape tomatoes)

½ medium onion, diced

½ cup mayonnaise

1 tablespoon sugar

1 tablespoon milk (I left this out, it was already quite watery, I think from the cucumber)

Salt and pepper to taste

Mix the sugar and may, pour over cucumber/tomatoes and stir until coated. Salt/pepper... That's it!  Easy, yummy, refreshing, perfect for a picnic or BBQ. 

The following weekend, we cooked again!  We had a few friends over and ate: hot wings, more (the rest of the) artichokes, grilled halloumi and watermelon salad, and grilled strawberries (again, soooo good!) to top it all off.   YUM!

 I saw the halloumi/watermelon recipe in my Blogger feed one day, via The Cozy Kitchen.  The picture (featured below) made my mouth water!  Oftentimes I don't click on food blog recipes, as they tend to be WAY above my skill level.  But...I had just recently gotten an amazing heirloom tomato and watermelon (with balsamic) salad from a food truck so this caught my eye.  I Pinned it and just a few days later we were at Sprouts for some groceries and I saw Yanni Grilling Cheese.  While it wasn't actually labeled "halloumi" it sure sounded like the same thing to me!  So I threw it in the cart, and then grabbed a watermelon. It's very simple...

Watermelon and Grilled Cheese Salad
You need...

(I carried ) A watermelon, cut up and rind removed (keep in fridge until ready to assemble)

Halloumi or other "grilling cheese" (mine was an 8oz package)

Balsamic (1/4 cup or more depending on how many people/how big your watermelon is...?)

Honey (1 Tablespoon or more... as above)

Fresh Mint leaves (a few)

Olives (I actually  did not do the olives but they look good in the pic!)

Heat the balsamic vinegar and honey, whisking it along the way, until it simmers for a few minutes, then let it cool so it will thicken up!  As it is cooling you want to grill the cheese.  The way I cut the cheese did not work perfectly with our grill (which has pretty large spaces between the rungs/bars/whatever they are called on the grill...) but it was still kind of fun grilling cheese.  I finished the last few pieces in an egg pan on the stovetop while I was putting the salads together.  The edges of the cheese get nice and brown, and it gets really soft but doesn't lose it's shape. Then you basically just stack pieces of cold watermelon and hot cheese, drizzle some of the balsamic reduction over the top, garnish with a torn up mint leaf and dig in!  Nobody at our place was sure what to think of this when I presented it...aaand EVERYONE loved it.  :-)  I really loved it.  The cold, sweet watermelon offsets the warm and salty cheese perfectly.  And the balsamic somehow brings it all together.  Ah-maze-ing!!

The artichoke and strawberry pics are mine.  
The salads are from Pinterest/original sources. 

Follow @cynthiamm

            1) Grilled artichokes (yep, again)
                                                       2) Cucumber and Tomato Salad                      
             3) Watermelon and Grilled Halloumi Cheese Salad (OMG)
         4) Grilled Strawberries (yep, again!)

What new dishes did you try making this summer?

I loved this watermelon salad so much I am going to share it all over the place.  :-)  Linking up with these ladies for this week! 

Onion Bombs (Camping Food)

I found this one on Pinterest, and it was a camping food I have never heard of.  
I did a decent amount of camping (particularly with Girl Scouts) in my younger days so it was fun to browse Pinterest for camping food and stumble upon some old favorites, and some new ones!  We made these back in June on a beach camping trip to Pismo Beach. 

These are called meatloaf in onion balls on Pinterest.   I called them Onion Bombs the whole time. Honestly, I am not sure where I came up with that. (I THOUGHT I saw it on Pinterest, but now that I go back to link to the pins and post, I don't see onion "bombs" anywhere.  Weird.)   Close enough...

It's basically just meatballs wrapped in onion halves to cook.  

And it's basically delicious.  :-)

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I suggest a couple of meatballs per person on average.  They vary pretty drastically in size, depending on the size of your onion pieces.  One onion gave me 2 decent sized "wrappers", 2-3 medium sized, and a few tiny ones.

As prep, you just take off the outer onion paper stuff, and chop it in half, as evenly as you can!  Then you separate the pieces into matching pairs from the outside to the inside.  They LOOK big enough, but when you put them together there isn't as much room inside as you might think. 

(**Note:  This step could be done at the campsite if you wanted to keep the onions fresher or whatever.  I prepared them entirely at home.) 

Next (or before or at the same time if you are working with your boyfriend) you want to prepare the meatballs.  I followed the recipe I found via Pinterest as far as additions to the meat.  But I started it with some Italian sausages from our friends' butcher shop. (About 2 lbs meat?)  I also chopped up a few cloves of garlic, added ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, bread crumbs, and salt/pepper.  Hand mix it all together!

 (Don't start making the meatballs until you are ready to wrap them!) 

Once you have the meat mixed up, and the onions cut and matched up (at campsite, or at home), you are ready to wrap!   The size of each meatball is going to depend on the onions.  So just use your judgement and roll up some meatballs.  Squish them between two pieces of onion and voila! Some meat might push out the ends but it's fine because you will be wrapping them in foil.  I tried to keep them as compact as possible, though.  I had a few of every size when I was done.  Big tomato size to small lime sized.  :-)

Then I wrapped them each in foil with a twist at the top.  I used one layer of regular foil and one of heavy duty since I knew they would be thrown in the fire.  Be careful not to rip or poke holes in the foil, especially the outer layer. Ash is not a good condiment. 

This is my boyfriend putting the balls into the fire.  There are probably numerous tools for doing this but we didn't have any or (if we did, like a shovel, duh!) we didn't think to use them.  I just let the (getting drunk) boys be boys.  You can see a couple of them in the bottom of the pic, at the front of the fire.  He tried to get them in where there were coals. 

Here is a close up of one of those in the front.

We let them cook for about 10 minutes, flipped them around, and another 10 minutes (or so).  I don't think leaving them a little longer would have done any harm, as the onion keeps the meat nice and juicy. 

I didn't get any pics before the men started digging in and saucing them up. (Ketchup, Sriracha, etc)

But, they were delicious!  Fresh out of the foil the onion wrappers were nice and charred and sweet smelling.  The meatballs were super moist and had yummy grilled onion flavors soaking into them. 

Everyone in camp loved them.  We (6 people) ate every last one and wished we had more. 

This was a big success and I KNOW I will be making them again as soon as dirtbike season is in full swing.  They are just so easy and convenient.  Minimal prep time, ready to throw on the fire when you get to camp,  sand resistant, they are a good "first night camping" meal.  I'm so happy I found these on Pinterest! 

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Thanks for visiting!  Feel free to browse through my food blog,
 for more recipes and some restaurant reviews around So Cal. 

You can also find me on Pinterest here....

                                or on Instagram here...

You are also cordially invited to stop by my non-food blog (kinda lifestyle, kinda random, whatever...)
at Living In Neverland.

Also... (also also!?) I'd like to mention that I am a contributor (in a very inconsistent, probably annoying to the other ladies way) to a fun book review site.  So if you like to read and/or read about books (particularly YA fiction and romance, but really, almost anything is fair game for us them) please stop by and check them us out at The Readers Cafe.  

Recent Life and Eats (Grilling all the things!)

Hello, friends!  I hope everyone has had a great summer.  I've been slacking on blogging but I have quite a few ideas brewing and plenty of drafts to work on.  

In early August, I spent a long weekend in Yellowstone (and The Grand Tetons) with my mom, and some extended family. It was some good family time, and lots of natural beauty.  At every turn in the road, the views were AMAZING...

Me in front of the Tetons (hazy day)

We saw soooooo many buffalo, and I'll tell ya...it never got old.

On the home front...

It finally got HOT enough for our tomato plant to flourish!!  We had a big, beautiful green tomato sitting on this plant for about a month.  We had a nice hot spell a couple weeks ago and it FINALLY started changing to yellow and then red, within about 2 days!  (We had been wondering for a while what was going on, but didn't realize they loved the heat so much.)  Since then it's been pretty warm and we have 5 new tomatoes growing, the second one was just picked today! 

Tomato #1 from our front yard tomato plant (that we did not, consciously, plant).  

My boyfriend, ceremoniously picking it.  I had to take a picture of the momentous occasion.  :-)

We had some chocolate (and assorted topping) covered strawberries.  

Just cuz he loves me.  :-)  (I forgot to use my real camera so just have a crappy Instagram pic.)

And now for the Grilling All The Things portion of this post!

As I mentioned, it's been warm and the grill has been calling our names.  A few weekends ago our friend invited us over to help him eat a bunch of abalone he had gone diving for.  He did a few preparations of it, and it was delicious!  I was kind of expecting it to be somewhat rubbery, but it really wasn't.  We had small pieces wrapped in bacon, larger "fillets" straight on the grill, and ceviche.  To contribute to the feast, we brought artichokes and strawberries.  

The grilled artichokes were inspired by a booth at the Ocean Beach Farmer's Market, where we had purchased a grilled artichoke a month or so ago, and fell in love.  I looked online for a recipe, and it was as simple as I thought it would be.  You boil them first, for about 20min or so.  (I did that before we went to the BBQ.)  Then cut them in half (from top to bottom) and spoon out the fuzzy stuff.  Then drizzle olive oil, a little salt and pepper, and I also sprinkled some shredded roman cheese on top and (mostly, so it wouldn't all fall off in the grill) between the leaves.  Throw them on the grill and do each side for maybe 5-10mins?  Depends on the grill's heat.  You just want it to get a little char and melt the cheese.  They were a big hit!!  We just ate them plain, no dipping sauces required. 

Not a great phone pic but these grilled strawberries.  O.M.G.  Seriously amazeballs.  (And amazeballs is not a term I use lightly!) Grilled strawberries are my new favorite thing.   Balsamic and brown sugar grilled strawberries, to be precise.   Rinse and cut the tops off (or leave them on, doesn't matter) of the strawberries.  I had 2 baskets because there were 7 or 8 people coming to the BBQ.  Then put them in a bowl and pour on some balsamic, just enough to coat them all but not so much that they are swimming in it. Give it 5-10 mins to soak in.  Then pour some brown sugar out on a plate and roll the strawberries in it. Let them sit another 5-10 mins to soak in the sugar, otherwise it will all fall/cook off on the grill.  Pile them up on your skewers (soaked for 20+mins in water so they don't burn!) and grill them for 10 mins, rotating often to avoid burning!  The flavor is ridiculously good, and they are all hot and juicy.  We ate them with vanilla ice cream.  We will be doing this again, soon, and often. 

Today we harvested our second tomato!  Talking about how to eat it, we decided on kabobs.  So I grabbed some stew meat (beef), bell peppers, mushrooms, onions, and more tomatoes (cherry).  We marinated the meat in a teriyaki sauce from our fridge, and then skewered everything together.  Open a bottle of wine, and ta-da!!  Easy and delicious Sunday night dinner. 

So, that's what has been going on with me lately.  I just (this weekend) got caught up on blog reading after being out in the beautiful wilds of Yellowstone for 5 days (like 2 weeks ago).  I've been reading lots of food and, especially, travel blogs lately.  Another vacation already seems in order.   Hope everyone has been having a great summer! 

Most of this stuff (and many more delicious recipes) can be found on my Pinterest Food Board.