From the kitchen and the bar – grilling lots of meat, my adventures with kimchi and a few new beers

beef at the bottom, then pork and chicken at the top

My husband and I wanted to try to grill out something other than steak. So, rather than getting one more steak from work, I got a pork tenderloin, a small piece of beef sirloin and a couple of chicken breasts.

We marinated each of these in a different marinade. I did a bit of web surfing to get some ideas and then I worked with what I had in the house.

For the pork, my husband cut the tenderloin up into medallions, across the grain. This made them very tender and the marinade finished the job. This is a riff on a bunch of Korean style barbecue recipes I found.

1 pound pork tenderloin, sliced into ¼” medallions (tenderloins typically run about a pound apiece).
3cloves  garlic grated
1 tbsp fresh ginger, grated
2 green onions, chopped
4 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp sugar
1/8 tsp black pepper
1/2 tbsp sesame oil
2 tbsp sriracha

Mix together and marinade pork overnight. Lace onto skewers and grill over charcoal. It’ll only take a few minutes.

I also made some “Korean-Style Coleslaw” from here, making it more simple by using shredded cabbage coleslaw mix from the grocery store. Of course, I made some plain white rice as a side.

before I tried to roll it and ended up with a handful of stuff

Now, as you can see from the coleslaw link, it says to eat the pork with the slaw and some kimchi in a lettuce leaf. I got iceberg lettuce, which I found far too crisp. The leaves just shattered. So, listen to other people and use butter lettuce. I did get some kimchi and that is a bit of a tale to tell….

I got a jar of kimchi at the store, King’s spicy variety. I got it home and found that the metal lid was very domed up. Sure I got myself a bottle of botulism, I opened the jar. One big hiss, and the kimchi shot out about 3 inches, along with bubbling juices. I was sure the stuff was ruined, but decided to do a bit of research since kimchi is a fermented food. Well, thanks to King’s FAQ, I found out that this is normal. It did take me a little while to get used to effervescent food, but I do like it quite a bit.

The beef was done as a satay. Again, my cobbled together recipe from others I’ve seen on the ‘net.

1.5 pounds thinly sliced beef (we used sirloin sliced against the grain)
Two stalks lemongrass , well bruised
1 small onion, minced
4 cloves garlic grated
1/2 tsp. to 1 tsp. cayenne pepper, to taste
1” piece ginger, grated
1/2 tsp. turmeric
2 Tbsp. ground coriander
1 tsp. cumin
3 Tbsp. soy sauce
4 Tbsp. fish sauce
3 Tbsp. palm sugar
2 tbsp vegetable oil

Mix everything except beef. Stir fry spice mixture to blend and release the spices. Cool. Add beef and marinate overnight. Grill quickly over charcoal.

I did get some peanut sauce to go with it. I’ve discovered that mixing Wegman’s peanut sauce and House of Tsang’s peanut sauce makes a very good version, not quite so sweet as the first and not quite so spicy as the second.

Finally, we did chicken in a satay style.

1 pound chicken breast, sliced thinly

2 tablespoons fish sauce
1.5 tablespoons grated garlic
2.5 teaspoons soy sauce
2.5 teaspoons sugar
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
2 teaspoons red thai curry paste (what I had in the freezer)
1/3 cup coconut milk (I used my coconut milk powder I got from Import Foods, a place I do recommend).

Again, marinate meat for 24 hours. Lace onto skewers and grill quickly over charcoal.

We also spent our “cashback bonus” from one of our credit cards on getting some lobsters. Lobster Gram has a deal with them that if you use $80 of the bonus buying a gift certificate from them, they’ll boost it up to $100. We’ve done this once before and they do provide good frozen lobster tails (we got 8-10 oz ones), shipped with dry ice. They’ll also ship live lobsters but since most of the meat is in the tail, and I don’t want to deal with scrabbling lobsters, we just go with that. Nothing special about how we cook them, just steam them and add copious amounts of butter.

Here are a few new beers.

DuClaw Funk – a nice blueberry and citrus beer tagging along on the popularity of shandy variants. There’s no real sweetness. I don’t really taste the Meyer lemon, but lemon and blueberries do go well together.

Ayinger Urweisse– This is a dark wheat beer, with the familiar Hefeweizen notes of fruit and spice. The spice comes through a bit more strongly than the fruit with this one.

Ayinger Brauweisse – This is the standard Hefeweizen. There wasn’t much of the banana scent to this one, much to my disappointment. I think it’s the travel time that takes some of that away from the beer.

Eat well!