Skip to footer

Memorial Day: cookbooks for grilling outdoors

Nothing says summer like grilling, but achieving the perfectly seared creation isn’t as easy as throwing meat on charcoal. These seven, recently released cookbooks could give you the steps and recipes you need to have a grill-tastic summer, whatever your tastes or skill level may be. Get ready to fire it up!

'The Big-Flavor Grill: No Marinade No Hassle Recipes,' by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby (Ten Speed Press, 224 pp.)

1. The Big-Flavor Grill by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby

'The Big-Flavor Grill: No Marinade No Hassle Recipes,' by Chris Schlesinger and John Willoughby (Ten Speed Press, 224 pp.)

  • By Caroline Kelly Staff writer

In their ninth cookbook together, former East Coast Grill owner and chef, Chris Schlesinger, and former Gourmet executive editor, John Willoughby, team up once more with “The Big Flavor Grill: No Marinade, No Hassle Recipes,” a no-frills approach to grilling their way – bursting with flavor.

“We want to dial it back, to get out from under the yoke of complex formulations and intricate preparations,” they write in the book’s introduction. “We want to take you back out to the grill, where cooking can be spontaneous and the food is easy but full of bold, intense flavors. One of the best things about grilling is that it is a supremely simple process.”

Each recipe is broken down into three steps: prep, grill, and toss. Picture skirt steak with smoky red onion and grilled avocados; grilled pork skewers with grilled peaches and arugula; grilled baby back ribs with maple-bourbon barbecue sauce – whatever taste explosion you’re looking for, these two grilling mavericks will teach you how to serve it up.

1 of 7
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.