Light Brioche Hamburger Buns

June 6, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 33 Comments

Light Brioche Hamburger Buns | Korena in the Kitchen Summer is almost here, I can feel it. The first half of May was a big tease, followed by nothing but cold and rainy disappointment, but I have high hopes for June. So far it’s been pretty nice and we’re been doing a lot of barbecuing to take advantage of the warm evenings. Which brings me to probably the most well-known item of the summer barbeque: the hamburger. Many people go to great lengths to doctor up the beef patty, but in this case, I decided to focus my energy on the bun instead. It was a good idea!

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Grilled Butterflied Chicken

May 16, 2013 By Korena in the Kitchen 14 Comments

Grilled Butterflied Chicken | Korena in the Kitchen Butterflied chicken, aka spatchcocked chicken (which is much more fun to say), is one of the items on my list that can now be checked off. Butterflying/spatchcocking (see? more fun 😉 ) a chicken simply means cutting out the backbone so that the chicken lies flat, and as such, it cooks faster and more evenly. Last week we had a run of gorgeous early summer weather (shorts, t-shirts, and SPF 30 kind of weather – it was glorious) so I fired up the barbeque to celebrate and cooked my spatchcocked chicken on the grill.

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Cedar Planked Teriyaki Chicken

November 22, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 6 Comments

Contrary to the image that might pop into your head when you think “Canadian winter“, on the West coast of Canada it doesn’t actually get super snowy and impossibly cold – it mostly just gets super rainy and only rather cold. This means that, among other things, it is still totally possible to grill or barbeque outside through the winter. Which explains how I found myself cooking cedar planked teriyaki chicken on the barbeque on a drizzly November day. Read the rest of this post at the SeaChange blog! 🙂

Happy Thanksgiving to those of you in celebrating today in the US (or elsewhere, for that matter!) 🙂

Szechuan Grilled Chicken

August 7, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 9 Comments

Last year sometime, I went to a homemade calamari feast at my friend Katheryn’s house. (I brought dessert, and also helped disembowel about 300 little squid. My kind of dinner party!) One of her other guests, who was from the Szechuan province of China, concocted a delicious Szechuan spice mix for dipping our calamari: a combination of sugar, salt, black pepper, Chinese 5 spice powder, and hot paprika.

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Cedar Planked Salmon with Rosemary Smoke

June 21, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

I have another guest post up at the SeaChange blog: Cedar Planked Salmon with Rosemary Smoke. This is a perfect summer grilling recipe and a very exciting cooking method!

Grilled Hot Wings with Blue Cheese Dip

February 9, 2012 By Korena in the Kitchen 2 Comments

When Nate said he was going to watch the Super Bowl on Sunday, I suddenly got the urge to make hot wings. I was hoping that I could tie this in with my cookbook resolution, but wouldn’t you know it, I couldn’t find a recipe for plain old hot wings in any of my cookbooks. So to the internet I went! This is a twist on the basic hot wing sauce – butter, vinegar, and hot sauce – spiced up with a little chipotle (because I can’t seem to make anything without adding chipotle, but you could use any kind of hot chili sauce) and poured over grilled chicken wings. The grilling part was Nate’s idea, and it was a good one; however the thing about barbequing in February is that it gets dark early, and then you find yourself wearing your camping headlamp and feeling like a dork while turning your chicken wings. And because it’s dark, it’s hard to tell when things are getting a bit charred. But charred or not, these were really tasty and I can’t wait to make them again – but maybe I’ll wait for better daylight ;).

Grilled Hot Wings

Hot wing sauce adapted from Allrecipes.com

Place 3 lbs of chicken wings (drumettes and wingettes separated) in a large bowl and season very generously with:

black pepper

salt

garlic powder

cayenne or other hot chili powder

Toss the wings around with your hands so they are all evenly seasoned.

Preheat the barbeque, then arrange the seasoned wings on a lightly greased grill over low heat. Put the lid down and let them cook 10-15 minutes, until lightly brown on one side. Turn them over and grill for another 10-15 minutes with the lid down, until they are evenly browned and cooked through, moving them around a bit to avoid hot spots and burning. The wings need a little more babysitting during the second half of cooking, as they can go from golden brown to charred pretty quickly.

Losing the light (the camping headlamp didn’t quite cut it for photos!)

Meanwhile, make the sauce. In a saucepan over medium heat, melt 6 tbsp butter, then stir in:

1/3 cup + 2 tbsp hot sauce (I used 1/3 cup Cholula hot sauce and 2 tbsp chipotle purée – use whatever kind of hot sauce(s) you prefer)

1 1/2 tbsp white vinegar

salt and pepper to taste

When the wings are cooked, place them in a bowl, pour the sauce over them, and toss to coat. Serve with Blue Cheese Dip (below), cut-up veggies such as celery and carrots (optional), and lots of napkins (definitely not optional!).

Blue Cheese Dip

In a small bowl, combine:

1/3 cup plain yogurt or sour cream

1/3 cup mayonnaise

1/4 cup crumbled blue cheese

1/4 tsp garlic powder

dash of paprika

salt and pepper to taste

Mix it all together and refrigerate for about 30 minutes, to let the flavours meld a bit. Serve with the hot wings.

Chinese BBQ Pork Spareribs

May 21, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 3 Comments

Downtown in Victoria’s Chinatown (the oldest Chinatown in Canada, yo!) (also probably the smallest, as it’s literally only one block long) there are several Chinese BBQ shops with barbequed ducks, chickens, and meat hanging in the window. If you go in and order some barbequed pork, the guy behind the counter will grab a hunk of pork from the window, throw it down onto a worn wooden chopping block, grasp a formidable-looking cleaver, and hack the pork into little bits, which he will then wrap in purple butchers’ paper and hand to you with a little smile, like he knows how much you are going to enjoy those juicy, salty-sweet, porky morsels. Mmm-mmm indeed. Just thinking about it makes my mouth water a little bit.

I stumbled across a recipe for homemade Chinese BBQ pork on someone’s blog, and of course it made me want to try it for myself. I had also recently seen a recipe for Chinese pork spareribs, and I happened to have some ribs in the freezer, so I decided to combine the two to make Chinese BBQ pork spareribs. SO GOOD. I cooked them most of the way in the slow cooker and then finished them on the barbeque, because the Chinese name for barbequed pork means something along the lines of “fork toasted” – as in, the meat is toasted over flames on a fork to finish cooking it. I figured on a grill over flames was close enough!

The only thing I had to purchase for this recipe was the Chinese 5 Spice Powder, the ingredients of which vary but apparently the most common is a combination of cinnamon, star anise, cloves, fennel, and Szechuan pepper. In fact, my Chinese 5 Spice Powder is simply labeled “Chinese Spice Powder” and only has four ingredients! But it still tasted great, so I’m quite sure that whatever five or so spices sold together as Chinese 5 Spice Powder will be just fine in this recipe! Some more authentic recipes call for using maltose as a sweetener, but I couldn’t find any so I just used honey and a touch of brown sugar.

I chose to use this sauce on ribs, but you could also use it on other cuts of pork. Most recipes recommend marinating either pork tenderloin (for leaner BBQ pork) or pork butt (for fattier, juicier BBQ pork) in the sauce before roasting and then grilling it and brushing it with more sauce. I want to try making this with pork butt and rotisserie-ing it on the barbeque!…

Grilled Pizza: a story in pictures

April 7, 2011 By Korena in the Kitchen 16 Comments

We just got a really nice, new-to-us barbeque from Nate’s parents, and today I christened it with grilled pizzas. I’ve done this before with moderate success (minus the charred bits 😉 ). My technique needs refining, but this is the basic idea!

For some reason I made four pizzas for only two of us. I get over-zealous with cooking sometimes. (OK, often.)

First, grill the veg for toppings (everything has been doused in olive oil, salt and pepper). This nifty veggie grilling rack is awesome. Look at those grill marks! I’m so proud.

Grill the tomatoes until they’re nice and soft and bursty – you then sort of smear them on the pizza base to make the “sauce”, but we’ll get to that later.