Carnage du Jour - 13 August 2010

Well, there are storms coming, so we'd better do our grilling today, right?  Right.

I've got some chicken breasts and some bone-in ribeyes - guess I'll just cook them both and we'll eat whatever.
The chicken is a couple boneless, skinless breasts, so I dropped in some Italian dressing and mixed in some smoky horseradish sauce as a marinade before cooking.
As to the steaks, I'm usually a "salt and pepper is more than enough flavouring for a good piece of beef" kind of guy, but with the horseradish working in my head already, I made a quick glaze / sauce / whatever of some prepared horseradish, a bit of (real!) vanilla extract, and some (also real!) maple syrup.  It still tasted mostly like horseradish, but with a little of the edge gone and its flavours mellowed and pointing slightly back from where it normally would be.

Once the fire was ready, on went the steaks, having been salted on both sides.  A turn halfway through the first side to give those nice cross-hatch grill marks was executed to perfection, they were flipped, and given their turn on that side when the mixture was applied.
Oh my.
The smoke and heat really did a number on that stuff - it was still a tad hot, but mostly it just melded with the beef flavour and did a virtual dance on our tongues.

As to the chicken, they went on once the steaks came off to rest.  With them went a nice little head of radicchio that had been halved and slathered with a bit of Italian dressing and a few leftover ears of red corn to reheat on the grill.
Wow.
The chicken was so tender, juicy, and flavourful that there were no complaints around the table.

Even better (although the radicchio and corn were fine), Heidi made her new variation on a Caprese salad, adding in some fresh chopped green chiles form the garden.  That extra heat is a beautiful addition to the flavour profile of that classic salad, and once again it was difficult to decide what to leave - so I didn't leave anything.  Fortunately, I didn't serve everything up, so there was only a little too much on the plate to start to go with the nothing left at the end.

Try that mixture on your next steak - it was spectacular!