Chicken Wings and Crostini w/Zucchini Pesto

That title is a mouthful (hah!) and a pain in the behind to type.

Anyway...

My love for chicken wings has really blossomed in the south, so I decided to try my hand at making them. I wasn't sure how to do them exactly, and I didn't really follow a specific recipe - just a bunch of different ones. Most of them give the following guidelines for making chicken wings:

1. Season with salt and pepper before putting them on the grill.
2. Heat grill to medium, high heat will cause flame-ups.
3. DO NOT marinate! Toss in sauce immediately after cooking.

Because I have some sort of sauce ADD (I HAVE to have multiple sauces, I can't focus on one) I used a homemade ketchup-based BBQ and a true mustard-based BBQ sauce and tossed about half in each one. They were delicious.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Lissa was busy making the crostini. I'll admit, I had my doubts at first, but it turned out to be super good. You can find the recipe here.

Suggested changes and additions:

* Go lighter on the garlic for the Crostini. (I never thought I'd say go light on garlic!)

* Flip often with the wings, and make sure your grill is oiled/sprayed so they don't stick

* Find a recipe for your OWN ketchup-based BBQ sauce, it's totally worth it.

Chili Stuffed Zucchini

I promise you, this tastes WAY better than it sounds.

We're on a Rachel Ray binge lately, scouring her website and old issues of her magazine for recipes that use produce that's in season. That's how we found this one. It gets a 3/5 peppers on my heat scale.

The best way I can describe this is that it's like a healthy chili-taco with a hollowed out zucchini as a shell. It's a very effective way at sneaking in another serving of veggies and it still tastes phenomenal.

Suggested changes and additions:

* Figure out what size zucchini you want before you buy them. Bigger ones allow more filling, smaller ones allow easier portions for fewer people.

* Substitute fresh jalapenos if you want more heat. Canned ones are good, but the fresher they are the hotter. Leaving seeds in will increase the heat as well, so judge accordingly.

* We love cheese, so we piled it on. It's the most unhealthy thing in this meal, so we figured that's OK.

* This is a good candidate for lean beef. I'll try to remember to blog about that sometime soon.

Grilled Crab Legs

This idea started where many good recipes start: the sales "rack" at the grocery store. After we bought the snow crab legs we heard about grilling them from a family member and decided to try it. The result? Deliciousness. Grilling foods adds a flavor you can't get anywhere else, and when you pair that with a food that's not traditionally grilled you either have a wonderful new taste or a complete failure. Luckily for us it was the former and not the latter :)

Recipe (if you can call it that):
* Keep the crab legs frozen until you put them on the grill.
* Heat grill to medium heat and add crab legs
* Flip every 5 minutes or so until the white parts of the crab have turned yellow/brown (about 10-15 minutes for snow crab, 15-20 for king crab)
* Melt butter, enjoy!

First Post

Lissa and I have talked a lot about creating this blog, and now that summer is here we're finally going to do it. Dinner tonight is on the right: chicken-fajita burgers with Black Bean Smash. It gets a 3.5/5 peppers on my very own heat-scale. Made my lips tingle but didn't burn my mouth. You can find the recipe here.

Suggested changes/additions:
* Pepperjack Cheese (for added heat)
* Use good buns and toast them a bit before adding the toppings

Black Bean Smash was good too. We didn't put it on our burgers, but it was a fantastic appetizer with chips!