This month’s “On Our Grills, 4 Ingredient Challenge” posed some real challenges.  Some people have gotten the impression these monthly culinary exercises is a contest amongst our little group of BBQ Bloggers.  But the challenge is more about challenging ourselves and not each other.  And this month was an amazing challenge.  The four ingredients we had to work with were: freshwater fish fillet, broccoli, apple and sourdough bread.

As usual I had to try something out of the box.  Way, way out of the box.  The normal process for the challenge, each month, is to search my library of cookbooks and the internet looking for ideas.  From that point I start to develop some ideas.  I didn’t want to just grill some fish fillets so it was essential to find something else to include the fish in.  First I found recipes for broccoli and apple quiche.  Then I found some recipes for a fish and broccoli “pie.”  The second recipe was basically a quiche and the basic quiche recipes were similar.  So why not combine the two.

No recipe this time.  Just a few photos and descriptions for the Fish & Broccoli/Apple Quiche.

(L) The freshest freshwater fresh fillet I could find was farm raised catfish.  One of the things I learned through this process was if you soaked the fish in milk for a few hours it would make the fish “less fishy.”  It seemed to work.

(R) After the milk soak I grilled the fish with a little seasoning until it was done.  I then let the fish cool and flaked it.  I used 2/3 cup of flaked fish.

The broccoli was steamed and rough chopped.  The apples sliced.  I used a couple eggs, milk and some goat cheese to make up the quiche in a beautiful homemade pastry crust.  (Thanks to the family baker…Mrs. Grail for helping me out on this part.)

Now how to bake the quiche outdoors.  I was, at first, a little baffled as to how to get this done, but after some thought I came up with what turned out to be a pretty darn good.  I used my Char-Broil Big Easy and my trusty dutch oven.  After pre-heating the dutch oven I placed the pie inside the dutch oven, raised off the bottom with another pie pan.  After closing the lid the pie baked to a golden brown.

They quiche cooked in about 25 minutes.  Normally I would have expected it to cook in about 15 minutes.  Because it’s difficult to tell what the temperature of this “oven” is I don’t know how close to 350 degrees it was.  I’m not sure viable this technique is for baking other items, but I’m going to give it a try on a fruit pie just so I can say I did it.

I figured the best way to use the sourdough bread was just as bread and butter.  Some sliced apples on the plate for a little color.

No recipe this time.  If you really want the measurements drop me an email and I’ll send them to you.

Additional participants in this month’s Ingredient Challenge include:

Paul Haight of No Excuses BBQ – ENTRY HERE

The No Excuses BBQ website was started in January of 2009 as a way to record the author’s goal of cooking outdoors at least once a week throughout the year and showing the results to the world. Somewhere along the way things got out of control…

Marc Van Der Wouw of Grill Adventures-ENTRY HERE

Grilladventures by broadcastmarc is started on march of 2010.I started the BBQ thing when I was 30,before that we eat a lot outside.have fun,but when the kids came in our life We start serious cooking.Most of it is realy healthy I think;-)The grill has a special place in my heart,We love to do things outside..Everything I make is an adventure,and sometimes we use the books.We try to grill as much as we can year round.

Bob Fukushima of Bob’s Brew & Que – ENTRY HERE

Bob started Bob’s Brew and ‘Que in August of 2009 with the intent of sharing his views on food and drink. Originally focused on BBQ and Homebrew, it was inevitable that the influences of his upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area and it’s wealth of ingredients as well as his heritage as an American of Japanese ancestry would help focus his blog, as it has his approach to food and drink.

Hanneke Eerden of The Dutchess Cooks – ENTRY HERE

After years of cooking, grilling, baking and reading other people’s blogs, I thought “why not start my own blog??” And I did, in 2010, but already after a short period of time, a blog wasn’t enough, and I started my own website. It’s not my goal to publish or come up with fancy and difficult recipes:  just good and delicious food with an international twist! Straight from my plate to yours!

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

When I send out the email each month asking random participants for random ingredients I never know what’s going to come back.  For the first two months the ingredients matched much more readily.  This month though it got a lot more difficult coming up with flavor profiles that would match.

The broccoli and pomegranate  were the two ingredients that gave me the biggest pause.  I’ve eaten a lot of broccoli over the years, most of the time it’s as a more traditional veggie side dish so coming up with something  different that would go with shrimp was hard.  I mean, really, broccoli and shrimp.  Tough, tough ingredient.

My only experience with pomegranate was picking them off a neighbor’s tree and throwing them at each other.  All I knew about pomegranates was that they were full of juicy seed casings (known as arils) and the juice stained liked crazy.  Without any idea of what the juice taste like I was a little concerned about how it would match.

I decided to go with pomegranate juice from POM instead of purchasing a bunch of individual pomegranates.  After getting the bottle of juice home and tasting it I was able to start thinking about how to put all these ingredients into a meal that made sense.

A light and fresh meal was what I was hoping to come up with.  I knew I wanted to grill the shrimp seasoned with Todd’s Crabby Dirt so the broccoli and pomegranate problem still was the stumbling block.

Light and fresh, to me, means salad.  But it had to be a salad that would go with shrimp.  Since I had to use broccoli it had to be a broccoli salad.  I purchased a bag of shredded broccoli and came up with a pomegranate vinaigrette to make a nice vinegar based slaw that ended up matching well with the shrimp.

Broccoli Slaw with Cilantro Pomegranate Vinaigrette

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup POM Pomegranate Juice
• 1/4 cup Sugar
• 1/4 cup Apple Cider Vinegar
• 1/2 cup Olive Oil
• 1 tablespoons Cilantro, finely chopped
• Zest of 1 Lemon
• 2 packages Broccoli Slaw
• Salt & Pepper to taste

Directions:

In a small sauce pan warm pomegranate juice.  Add sugar and remove from heat.  Stir until sugar is fully dissolved.   Let cool to room temperature.

Combine all ingredients in a blender or food processor.  Mix until completely combined.  Refrigerate until cold.

Place Broccoli Slaw in a bowl, pour vinaigrette over slaw and mix.  Chill for at least two hours.  Add salt and pepper to taste and serve.

One of the ingredients was fococcia and whenever I need something baked for a blog post I turn to my favorite baker, Mrs. Grail (Celeste).  She came up with some fantastic  onion and rosemary fococcia that matched the flavors in the shrimp seasoning perfectly.  The olive oil bread dough was moist and so flavorful.  I couldn’t help but start to think of some other foods that we could grill up in the future to eat with this bread.

The shrimp was done very simply.  I skewered the shrimp, drizzled it with olive oil and seasoned with Todd’s Crabby Dirt.  The flavors in the seasoning matched the rosemary and onion in the fococcia very nicely.

Shrimp cook very quickly on a hot grill, so a great deal of care needs to be paid to them.  This is one protein you can’t put over the fire and walk away from.  A couple of minutes on each side is all you need.  By using skewers you’re able to turn them over quickly and have much less of a chance of turning them to overcooked rubber.

Another important factor in getting properly cooked shrimp is making sure your grill is not too hot.  You want a medium/hot grill with well oiled grates.  One thing you might want to consider is oiling or spraying with non-stick spray right on the shrimp.  This should help eliminate the hated shrimp stuck the grill grate problem.

We plated everything very simply.  Nothing fancy with the bread, just a nice plate of broccoli slaw with some beautifully grilled shrimp.

Additional participants in this month’s Ingredient Challenge include: