It's a great time to eat your veggies

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My outdoor, charcoal grill has been gathering dust since I stopped eating meat more than 18 months ago, but I haven't missed a beat by grilling vegetables on an indoor, stove-top grill to go with pasta and seafood meals.


I'm also using a small food processor to puree vegetables, including cucumbers from my garden, into a cold soup.


This afternoon, I grilled a few onions and a nice bunch of Asian greens on the grill with extra-virgin olive oil, salt and some red-pepper flakes, and stored them in the refrigerator for dinner.


They joined grilled Japanese eggplant, small sweet-potato slices, squash, plumb tomato and thin-sliced organic carrot.


My All-Clad grill covers two burners on my stove and its ridges leave nice grill marks on the vegetables. It's also perfect for prawns or shrimp. I use cooking spray and turn both gas flames to "Medium" or "Medium Low."


In the past, I've used the grill to cook thin slices of marinated, free-range  beef from Australia; garlic cloves and onion for Korean barbecue meals at home. 


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The greens I grilled today have thick stalks and leafy, slightly bitter leaves -- similar to Chinese broccoli. They turned bright green, and I removed them after about 10 minutes.


Grilled eggplant and sliced potatoes turn creamy inside their skins, and the stalks of the greens keep their crunch.


For a cold soup today, I cut up skinned cucumber, two small tomatoes, watermelon and some onion, processed them and poured the liquid into a small bowl.


Recalling a TV cooking segment I had seen at the gym, I added a little extra-virgin olive oil, wine vinegar and salt, stirred it up, and garnished it with more chopped cucumber.


After I had the soup, I plated grilled squash and potato slices and heated them up in the microwave while I prepared a simple egg-white omelet, drinking iced tea flavored with lemon and garden mint.


Tonight, I'll plate more grilled vegetables to accompany leftover whole-wheat pasta in a red sauce filled with salted fish and cabbage. (See A robust pasta sauce without meat, Aug. 3, 2011.)

Storm-tossed tabbouleh salad

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Paterson has a few Lebanese restaurants that serve tabbouleh salad.

The other day, I saw a big shock of flat-leaf parsley growing out of one of the boxes on my deck, and immediately thought tabbouleh salad.


I'll always remember the small mountain of tabbouleh served at Vine Valley, the Lebanese restaurant in Paterson that closed several years ago. It was mostly parsley, with just a little bulgur wheat, chopped onion and tomato, and other ingredients. 

Today -- as wind and rain lashed my house and trees swayed like so many drunken sailors -- I raced outside with scissors and cut as much parsley as I could find.


I checked online for recipes, but didn't have all the ingredients on hand, so I winged it.


I washed and chopped the parsley and a few leaves of peppermint that was growing next to it. I'd say I had about two or three cups of loose parsley. I also chopped half of a small onion and a large beefsteak tomato, removing the seeds and putting everything in a bowl.


I boiled a cup of water with a dash of salt and added a half-cup of bulgur, simmering it until most of the liquid was absorbed. I put the small pot in the refrigerator until the bulgur cooled a little.


After I added the bulgur to the parsely, onion and tomato, I poured on Lebanese extra-virgin olive oil until everything was moist, then squeezed about two lemons over the salad. I was looking for a tart salad, and combined everything well.


I liked the way it came out. Of course, it wasn't Vine Valley's salad, but it was lemony and crunchy, and tasted good.