Sunday Summer Supper

Grilled Eye Round Roast with Warm Potato Salad and Grilled Baby Eggplant

Tonight I’m making what I had planned to make last night, but Derek ended up working really late, so we had a pizza.  I love pizza - and I love the fact that on pizza nights there's no heating up the kitchen and no cleaning.  Anyway, this meal is better suited to a nice Sunday dinner and we can have leftovers tomorrow.  I’m doing a grill-roasted eye round roast that has been wrapped in Saran Wrap with salt and pepper and garlic and rosemary for two days.  I start it out on the hot side of the grill to get it nice and brown, then put it in a disposable aluminum roasting pan with holes punched in the bottom.  That goes on the cool side of the grill for about 45 minutes to an hour.  If you're using charcoal and/or wood chips, make sure that you position the vent opening so that the smoke moves over the meat.  It turns out tender and juicy and outrageously flavorful.  The leftovers are delicious just plain, but they also make great sandwiches and salads.  I’m contemplating making Romesco sauce because Derek loves it, but I’m not sure I have all the ingredients and I’m certainly not going to the store at this point.   A good fresh horseradish sauce would be good, too. 



Green salad with artichoke, pine nuts and Parmesan

 Our accompaniments tonight include a French-style warm potato salad with olives and tomatoes dressed with its own very special dressing of Olive Oil, Champagne vinegar, lemon juice, garlic mashed with salt, Dijon mustard, freshly ground black pepper and the secret ingredient: freshly ground fennel seeds.  I use a Krups coffee grinder to grind spices, and the flavor is significantly better than spices that are already ground.  I would have preferred to put some grilled fresh fennel bulb in the salad, but alas, we didn’t harvest our fennel in time and it’s gone to seed.  It sounds like an odd combination of ingredients, but it's really tasty and a perfect hearty side dish for grilled beef.  I also had a leftover fresh artichoke that I had cooked earlier in the week, so I sliced up the heart in thin slivers and I’m going to have it in a green salad with a fresh lemon vinaigrette, toasted pine nuts and curls of Parmigiano Reggiano - tomatoes, too, since we have so many right now.  I have some fresh cauliflower that I’d love to serve roasted, but it’s just too damned hot to turn the oven on.  Ha!  Serendipity.  I just found a handful of tiny baby eggplants that our neighbor gave us, so I’m going to brush them with olive oil and salt and pepper and grill them while the meat’s resting.  Now what kind of wine should we have?