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:

Growing up I was never exposed to very many different fresh vegetables.  Vegetables were something you “had” to have on the plate and for the most part not a great deal of thought went into them.  Most of the time they were the frozen type that got nuked in the microwave just before we all sat down at the table.

Winter squash is a vegetable that has always sort of baffled me.  I’d pick them up at the store and wonder just how in the world you could eat something as hard as these appeared to be.  Last year I gave Acorn Squash a try for the first time and really enjoyed the flavors it gave me off the grill.  So when Mrs. Grail sent me to the store with the instruction of “just get a vegetable” I decided to give Butternut Squash a try.  The squash grilled up great and tasted fantastic.

BBQ Grail’s Grilled Butternut Squash

Ingredients:

• 1 butternut squash
• 1/2 cup olive oil
• 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
• 1/4 cup honey
• 1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, thyme or oregano
• 5 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
• Salt

Directions

Slice the butternut squash in half and remove the pulp and seeds from the bulb end.  Slice the squash into 1/2 slices.  Cut the bulb end slices in half.  Combine the oil, vinegar, honey and herb in a bowl and mix well.  Place the squash in a plastic zip bag and pour in the oil mixture.  Remove as much air from the bag as possible and seal it.  Place the bag in the refrigerator for at least two hours.

Heat your grill to medium hot.  Remove the squash slices from the bag, retaining as much oil mixture as possible.  Season the squash slices with a little bit of kosher salt.   Grill the slices about 5 minutes per side.  Remove squash from the grill and drizzle with oil mixture.  Cover with foil and let rest for 12 minutes.  Serve.

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I purchased a 6 pound piece of fresh skin on pork belly earlier in the week. The first step in the pancetta curing process is removing the skin. You need a very sharp boning knife to accomplish this. Start in one of the corners with a little slice under the skin.

By slowly pulling up and back on the skin and making small slices along the base of the skin you can slowly peel it back. It’s time consuming because you need to take care not to cut away to much mean and fat.

Once the skin has been removed you can start preparing the cure.

The cure calls for kosher salt, “pink salt,” Juniper Berries, peppercorns, Thyme, Rosemary, bay leaves and brown sugar. Use a skillet or sauce pan to break up the juniper berries and peppercorns before mixing them into all the other dry cures.

At the recent Winter Fancy Food Show I received some sample of different Billington’s sugars. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to try out the dark brown sugar. It has a flavor unlike any other brown sugar I’ve every used. Can’t wait to see what difference it makes.

Spread the cure on all sides of pork belly. It’s important to make sure you get the cure even all over.

The pork belly goes into a 2 gallon zip lock back and placed into a 9 X 13 dish.

A plastic cutting board and some weight keeps the pork belly flat. The weight also helps to force some of the moisture out of the meat during the curing process.

The pork belly will remain in the cure of 10 days. Every other day the pork belly will be turned over. I’ll take a picture or two during the process for updates.

The recipe I used can be found at Chow.

Ingredients:

• 2 Gallons of water
• 2 cups Kosher Salt
• 2 cups Brown Sugar (the darker the better as far as I’m concerned)
• 1/2 cup Tone’s Rosemary Garlic Seasoning

Instructions:

Heat the water in a non-reactive, stainless steel or anodized, pan on the stove.  When water is hot add salt and sugar to the water and stir until desolved.  Once the sugar and salt has disolved and the mixture has cooled to almost room temperature add the Rosemary Garlic Seasoning.  Stir and let the whole mixture cool to at least room temperature.

In another non-reactive container, a zip lock bag works well, cover your chicken, turkey or pork loin in the brine and refrigerate.  Use the guidelines below for how long to brine.

  When the brining is complete make sure you rinse the meat well otherwise the salt taste will be overpowering and your meat will possibly be inedible.

Give it a try.  Thanksgiving is coming up and if you’re cooking your turkey outdoors then brining it is a good idea.

 Brining Times:

• Whole Chicken (4 lbs):  4 to 8 hours
• Whole Turkey:  24 hours
• Whole Pork Loins:  6 to 8 hours