Hi. I’m Chef Phil Anderson, Harris Teeter’s chef. Today is such a beautiful day out here in the patio. We’re going to grill some vegetables. I’ve got some evenly cut zucchini, yellow squash, red, yellow and green bell peppers, red onions, shitake mushrooms and some green onions. Let’s see what else I’ve got. I think that’s it. Oh! Eggplant.

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 what I did was that I salted it first, and then I used freshly ground pepper, that’s very important. And then, I put the olive oil over the top of it because putting it into balsamic before the olive oil, the vegetables would soak up the balsamic and that it wouldn’t spread evenly across the vegetables.

So, we mix them up in a bowl and we’re ready to grow them right now. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to grill these really nicely over direct heat. There are two ways of cooking with a grill, it’s direct heat and indirect heat. We’re going to use both methods today. We’re going to begin with the direct. I’m 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. It doesn’t really matter the order because I’ve cut them in such a way that they’ll cook evenly. I’m 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’ll get the smokiness from the charred grill. And then, what I’m going to do is I’m going to move them towards the indirect heat and cover it. That way, the vegetables will really get a deep flavor of their own juices. They’ll be really good tasting. This is a very healthy way of cooking. Your grill temperature needs to be about 150 to 500 degrees. You don’t want to get too much hotter than that. It’s like driving a car, you don’t have time to react if you’re driving too fast 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. We’ve got some nice burnt marks. Now, what I’m going to do is close this lid for about five, six, seven minutes. When we come back, we’ll have perfectly grilled vegetables.

Okay. We’ve waited for about five or six minutes and that’s enough time to have these vegetables to do their indirect cooking. We’re going to put those back into the bowl, nice texture, they’re not mushy. They’ve all cooked to about the same degree. They still have some texture to them, the color is still nice. It’s got that smoky flavor from the grill. Cut the heat. We’re going to add a little bit of pepper, just a pinch. Toss it. Add some salt. Let’s add around a little bit more. A little splash of vinegar and with just a little bit more of olive oil.

And there you have it. Some really nice saucy great tasting grilled vegetables. Now, if you didn’t have a grill, you could put them on a roasting panel like this, put them in the oven and go on and have them for about fifteen minutes. You’ll have a really nice roasted vegetables. Same cut, same selection of vegetables. We’ve paired the grilled vegetables with a California Chardonnay Wente Morning Fog. It’s an awesome Chardonnay. It cuts through the smokiness of the vegetables. I hope you enjoy this recipe.