Can you tell I am on a grilling kick here? It’s been beautiful out this week and I have barely come in contact with my stove. It’s so nice to be able to roast my entire meal on one cooking surface. It really cuts down on dishes, clean up and time.

Now if I could just have a night where dinner doesn’t entail me leisurely cooking the meal, and then rushing to scarf it down so that I can run out to work, it would be perfect. Actually, tonight just might be that night.

With any luck.

Grilled Potato Wedges
serves 2-3

2 large Idaho potatoes
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tbsp chopped fresh rosemary (or 1/2 tbsp dried rosemary)
1 clove garlic, finely minced
1/2 to 1 tsp salt, depending on taste
1/2 tsp pepper

Slice the potatoes into eight wedges each, lengthwise.

Combine all ingredients in a large sealable bag and shake vigorously until well coated.

On a preheated grill, roast the potatoes turning frequently until all sides are browned and crisp.

Let cool 5 minutes before serving, so as not to burn your tongue.

Last week I had the pleasure of talking to author Chris Fisk, whose new book Sneaky Vegetables is due out in last June. She sounded so fun and enthusiastic, something I love to hear. After years of talking to victim’s parents, criminals and their lawyers, it’s great to talk to someone about something so life affirming.

Read all about it at Food Bound here. (EDITED TO ADD: The Food Bound site no longer exists. 6/2/2011)

I’ve been admiring the baby vegetables in the produce section of my local supermarket recently and finally gave into the temptation this past week, picking up a pack of fresh baby corn. I am all for eating locally, but for now I must resign myself to the grocery store for vegetables. Here in New England, farm markets are still a month away from opening (and it’s still pretty chilly here, so who knows if they will open on time).

In any case, I had no idea what to do with the miniature ears of corn. But I’ve been reading a lot about grilling veggies lately and decided to try that with these. This one is pretty simple. So simple in fact I will just tell you what I did, sans recipe.

First I rinsed the ears and cut off a bit at the end where it had been taken off the stalk. I laid them in a single layer in heavy duty aluminum foil and topped them with 1 tablespoon of roughly chopped butter. Finally, I sprinkled sea salt over them and sealed the foil around the corn.

I put the little package on my preheated grill (medium heat) and let it cook for about 15 minutes.

It tasted pretty good with a nice lightly smokey flavor offset with a slight buttery taste. Even my husband, who usually dislikes baby corn, enjoyed it.

I make no secret of it. I love asparagus. When I was younger, I would eagerly eat the tender tips and skip the thready bottom, but with age I have come to even appreciate that aspect. And now I know that I could always peel that off with a vegetable peeler.

For the past month or so, Kevin from Seriously Good has been hosting Asparagus Aspirations, a mouth watering event where food bloggers from all over the world have been submitting interesting and tantalizing recipes involving asparagus. Back in April I submitted a recipe for a savory Napoleon, using white asparagus. That prompted Kevin to create asparagus en croute (and of course, blame me for the idea of Phyllo dough and asparagus. But that is something I am more than willing to accept blame for. Actually, I think blame is a high form of flattery…well at least in this case. Thanks Kevin!

Now Kalyn, over at Kalyn’s Kitchen, had a great recipe for grilled asparagus with parmesan and that inspired me to use my latest bunch of asparagus for my own version of this.

For mine, I wanted to herb it up a bit (and hey, that makes it a great submission for Kalyn’s Weekend Herb Blogging event, which is being hosted this weekend by Lucullian Delights – check there on Sunday or Monday for a roundup of great herb/plant/garden inspired posts).

Anyway, the parmesan and the asparagus really complement each other. And the herbs add just a touch of flavor, without overpowering the asparagus. This is definitely something I will be repeating again and again.

Now, onto the recipe.

1 bunch asparagus
1 1/2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp sea salt and lavender mix (I use a French grey sea salt and lavender from Williams-Sonoma, but here is another from Local Harvest or alternatively, you could use 1/4 tsp fresh lavender and 1/8 tsp sea salt)
1/2 tsp fresh chopped thyme (or 1/4 tsp dried)
1/2 tsp fresh savory (or 1/4 tsp dried savory)
3 tbsp grated parmesan

Combine asparagus, olive oil, pepper, salt and lavender, thyme and savory in a sealable bag. Shake until well-coated. Let the asparagus sit in the spice bag for 10-15 minutes, while heating up the grill.

Heat grill to medium heat. Lay the asparagus in a single layer across the grates. Cook, turning often, until desired tenderness (10-15 minutes on direct heat).

Remove from grill and immediately top with Parmesan. Let cool 5-10 minutes before eating because it will be awfully hot.

New recipes are coming. There will be at least one up by tonight.

In the meantime, I just wanted to post a few links to recent articles on Food Bound (EDITED TO ADD: The Food Bound site no longer exists. 6/2/2011) by yours truly.

Click here to read my review of Blender Baby Food by Nicole Young.

Click here for a quick blurb regarding the James Beard Foundation’s Trends and Transitions Conference.

. . . but it will definitely be a cooking week. So check in this week for some new recipes with some interesting ingredients like fresh baby corn.

And I did end up sharing the broccoli slaw, because I had to take something to my parents for dinner. It drew a few compliments, which is always good to draw a smile.

I happened to learn about Horseman of the Esophogus when checking in at the Hartford Courant yesterday and wrote up a brief entry about it for Paper Palate (EDITED TO ADD: The Paper Palate site no longer exists. 6/2/2011).

The whole idea of competitive eating eludes me. Why would you want to stuff your face like that? And furthermore, why would you want to do it in a timed competition in public? I just don’t get it.

To me, food is something to be savored. It’s something that is best served in beautiful formations (though I am indeed guilty of sometimes slopping it on a plate without concern for aesthetics). It’s a flavorful sensory experience that can take you back to your childhood or to that little Parisian cafe in one bite.

So to take the sweet and savory flavors, the sour and the sultry, the bland and the exquisite and twist the purpose into some shameless speed eating exercise is just a pitiful waste of good food.

With all due respect to Tim “Eater X” Janus and his fellow competitive eaters like Ed “Cookie” Jarvis and Sonya “The Black Widow” Thomas, I think competitive eating is a disgusting event that goes against all the good principals of cooking and eating. It is shameful that people actually do this. On purpose. And garner some fame for it.

Certainly, I know that not everyone can be a competitive eater. But then not everyone would want to.

Last Friday, my friend Kim challenged me to create a broccoli salad recipe for her that met certain specifications. I set out to create something like a salad she’d had at a party some time ago. While I don’t know if this recipe is anything like that (and if it isn’t I certainly will try again, just for Kim), I do know that the resulting salad is amazing.

It’s a little sweet, a little tangy and it has this awesome kick to it. At first I was concerned about the large amount of it I made, fearing that I might not be able to eat it all myself. Well, fear not. I certainly will eat it all. And I am not sharing.

Now, on a slight side note, it really takes a special person to get me to use mayonnaise for anything. As a rule, I hate the stuff. But I made an exception this time and even tried it. Did I mention how worth it this was?

Apparently blogger thought this post was getting too long though, so I had to move the recipe to my recipes site. So the recipe for my broccoli slaw, pictured above, is here.

For a long time I have anxiously waited for my little blog to appear on Kiplog. I sent in my link and description eons ago and thought it would happen sooner or later. It hasn’t. So I guess I will stop checking there, and release my bated breath. And who knows, some day maybe I will be checking out my referral links and find that I’ve finally made the cut.

Speaking of referral links, or rather, traffic tracking, I’ve found it a tad disturbing that hot bunnies is a frequent search term that brings people here. Kind of makes you wonder what they are REALLY looking for. Considering the other sites that appear with that search . . . well, look for yourself and you decide.

In other news, I have a new piece up on Absolute Write about Dan Kline and Jason Tomaszewski, authors of 50 Things Every Guy Should Know How to Do.

A few weeks back, Virtual Frolic treated me to the James Beard Foundation’s First Annual Trends and Transitions Conference at the Kimmel Center at NYU.

It was a really interesting conference that included a discussion with editor Judith Jones (read about that here), a discussion of taking blogging to the next level, and one about packaging yourself for television. There were a few others, too, but those are the ones I attended.

They’ve put up podcasts of the events. To download and listen to them, click here.