Grilled Vegetable Medley

Phil Anderson: Hi! I am Chef Phil Anderson, Harris Teeter's Chef. Today, it's such a beautiful out here in the patio, we're going to grill some vegetables. I have got some evenly cut zucchini, yellow squash, red, yellow and green bell peppers, red onions, shiitake mushrooms and some green onions and let's see what else I've got. I think that's it. Oh! egg plant. And what I did in the kitchen was of course cut these, so that they would evenly cook together. You see this is thin and this is thicker, but they'll cook about the same time. And I what I did was I salted it first, then I used freshly ground pepper, that's very important. And then I put the olive oil over the top of it, because putting the balsamic before the olive oil, the vegetables would soak up the balsamic and that wouldn't spread evenly across the vegetables. So we mixed them up in a bowl and we're ready to grill them right now. So what we're going to do is we're going to grill these really nicely over direct heat. There's two ways of cooking with the grills, direct heat and indirect heat, we're going to use both methods today. We are going to begin with the direct. I am going to put these vegetables over direct heat about 500 degrees or so. So we're going to start that right now, nice hot grill. Doesn't really matter the order because I have cut them in such a way that they will cook evenly. I am going to put the tomatoes on last though. I want you to put the cut side of your peppers down first. What we want is a really nice flavor coming out of the vegetables. You get the smokiness from the char grill. And then what I'm going to do is I am going to move them towards the indirect heat and cover. That way the vegetables will really get a deep flavor of their own juices, it'll be really good, tasty. This is a very healthy way of cooking. Your grill temperature needs to be about 450-500 degrees. You don't want to get too much hotter than that. It's like driving cars, you don't have time to react if you are driving too fast. So you don't want to be cooking too fast. You want to be able to make the adjustments when it's necessary. We're moving some of our vegetables over to the indirect area, that's nice for remarks. And what I'm going to do is close this lid for about 5,6,7 minutes, we'll see when we come back, we will have perfectly grilled vegetables. Okay, we have waited for about 5 or 6 minutes and that's enough time to have these vegetables do their indirect cooking. We're going to put those back in a bowl. Nice texture, they are not mushy, they have all cooked to about the same degree, they still have some texture to them. Color is still nice, they have that smoky flavor from the grill. Slide over here, cut the heat, we are going to add a little bit of pepper, just a pinch, toss it and some salt, mix them around a little bit more. Then I splash vinegar, just a little bit more olive oil.

And there you have it some really nice, healthy, great tastings, grilled vegetables. Now if you didn't have a grill, you could put them on a roasting pan like this, put them in the oven and go in the oven for about 15 minutes, you would have a really nice roasted vegetables. Same cut, same selection of vegetables. We've paired the grilled vegetables with California Chardonnay Wente Morning Fog, it's an awesome Chardonnay. It cuts through the smokiness of the vegetables. Hope you've enjoyed this recipe.