Chomp!

By Ron Aiken

 

Steak! Grilling! Eggplant! Steak!

Sometimes, Chomp! loses the dinner war and the family eats things (frozen pizza, spaghetti, frozen pizza) he doesn’t care much for. Which is fine – go family! What Chomp! can and does often do in such situations, however, is do a little something for himself (and the family, if they choose to partake, which they sometimes do, sometimes don’t).

Making that endeavor even more fun is the new gas grill Chomp! got the family back on Mother’s Day. It’s been a terrific addition to the home, and as well it gets us outside, where we now (thanks to new chairs also bought for Mother’s Day and a newly painted deck thanks to Chomp!’s fiancee Leesa Benggio, who spotted a great deal on some returned paint at Home Depot) enjoy a fair number of meals outside, with the permission of area mosquitoes.

Outvoted last week on frozen pizza, a quick run up to the Elgin Food Lion – Chomp!’s new local – produced a nice chuck roast, which Chomp! likes both for their price and size. With the grill, it’s just STUPID not to use it as often as possible, and if Chomp! is being honest, he kind of tries to find a use for it every day. He’d probably even try making coffee on it if given half a chance.

There’s just nothing like steak on a grill, and with my honey preparation (it holds the seasonings on so well and caramelizes wonderfully) I can scarcely prevent myself from eating one every night. Here’s the one from last week, and just you tell me you don’t want this RIGHT NOW.

 

A win, right?

 

For spaghetti night (which, Chomp! is sad to report, he’s just never developed a taste for), Chomp! turned to the grill again, this time with some delicious eggplant he bought for the very purpose of grilling it.

Eggplant is SO GOOD on the grill that there’s really no way to mess it up. You can do it whole and let the skin burst and blacken a bit and the inside get all creamy and wonderful (in which case you can scoop it out and/or put toppings on it or whatever you feel like) or slice it. I decided to do one in super-thick, steak-style slices, making about four pieces (cutting vertically) out of one eggplant.

The other eggplant I cut horizontally to make nice round slices. I fancied stacking them with some cheese and drizzling the spaghetti sauce on it, but in the end I just ate them as they were cooked. On the grill, the eggplant skin becomes crispy and fantastic, so you definitely want to keep it on. All I did by means of preparation was to drizzle olive oil on both sides and add sea salt and coarse black pepper. That was it! I wish I could show you more photos of the preparation steps, but Chomp! enjoyed them so much he forgot to take a picture until just these two survivors were left, fortunately one from each preparation.

 

SOOOOO good!

 

Chomp! Also threw two ears of corn on the grill that were leftover from a previous dinner, which is a TERRIFIC way to re-heat previously cooked corn and make it marvelous, which it was!

Have any great go-to grilling ideas you’d like to see me try? Send them my way at [email protected]! Until then, cheers!

 

 

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