After a long day of gardening, we’ve found the best way to relax is to sit outside on the newly cleaned patio with a cold beer and a little red grill filled with ingredients for dinner. In this setup, you’ve got no option, really, other than letting the stress melt away as you leaf through a magazine, listening to the birds sing sweetly (or, in the case of our resident grackles, caw incessantly).
For tonight’s cookout, we settled on some family favorites – veggie dogs, asparagus from the farmers’ market, and sweet potato fries!
First, I prepared the asparagus by slicing off the woody ends. Usually, I like to skewer the stalks for grilling, but these springtime asparagus spears were much too tiny for skewering! This is, in fact, an excellent thing – it means they’ll be some of the tastiest, most tender asparagus spears of the year – so I went with it and instead placed them all in a foil packet, marinating them with some olive oil and our favorite, Tony Chachere Cajun seasoning.
Once the grill was hot enough, I laid the packet down atop the grate. I like to cook the asparagus a nice, long time to get it perfectly tender, so I planned on a 25-minute cook time, turning the packet over every 10 minutes or so.
In the meantime, I put the sweet potato fries in the oven to bake. I still can’t come up with a good way to keep the fries crispy on the grill! If you’ve got an idea, I’m all ears – let me know in the comments!
When I had about 10 minutes left in the cooking window, I threw the veggie dogs onto the grill, rotating them every couple of minutes. As they cooked, I chopped up an onion (my father-in-law used to say that a hot dog without onions was like a day without sunshine) and added the other condiments to the table. Once the dogs were ready, I took them up and placed two buns on the grates to toast for a minute (and only a minute – don’t turn your back on them, or they’ll burn up!). Then I removed the buns and the asparagus, and put the fries into a serving bowl, sprinkling them with some salt at the last.
The result? Well, what do you think? :) With such a friendly spread, we couldn’t go wrong! The food was gone in minutes, and the beer was quick to follow. Another successful cookout, indeed!
:)