Choosing Grilling Vegetables

This list of vegetable grilling choices will remind you of favorite options and inspire you to try new ones. Learn more at TwiceasTasty.com.
At the peak of harvest, the biggest challenge when firing up the grill is choosing what to put on it. Do I want to roast that basket of peppers or let them sit longer to develop more color? Should I work through those giant bowls of tomatoes and tomatillos? Did I harvest eggplant, or broccoli, or corn? Is there extra room for vegetables that will keep longer, like onions, beets, and garlic, but would be tasty tonight?

When the pace of harvest slows, the question often becomes, What can’t I put on the grill? The answer is surprisingly little. From fruit to breadsticks and pizza to fish, it all tastes delicious when cooked over coals. Vegetables by far make up my largest grilling category. Hopefully this list will remind you of favorite options and inspire you to try new ones.
Read more about choosing grilling veg

One Prep, Two Meals: Grilled Peppers

Grilled peppers upgrade many quick, easy meals. Get one prep, two meal recipes at TwiceasTasty.com.
If you search through the blog’s recipe index, it quickly becomes obvious that grilling and smoking are my favorite ways to prepare peppers. Sure, raw peppers add a crisp, sweet flavor to everything from salads to summer rolls. But quickly cut free their cores and place them on a hot grill, and you have an immediate upgrade to salsas, sauces, kebabs, black bean burgers, and even canning projects. Set them on a grill over low heat and smoking woodchips, and you can smoke chilies until they are dry enough to store for winter use or just enough to puree them into my favorite chili paste.

For many of these uses, I’m grilling bumper crops of peppers until I run out of coals. But you can enjoy the same intense flavor with just a pepper or two for a weeknight meal. Better yet, make room for just a little extra veg and you can prep two meals at once. I lean toward pasta on the grilling night: I multitask by cooking the pasta while I’m prepping or monitoring the grill, and then I make a creamy sauce base while I’m waiting for the peppers to cool enough to peel. The next night, all I need to do is chop up the grilled veg before stirring it into batter for savory pancakes.
Learn to make Creamy Grilled Bell Pepper Pasta and Grilled Pepper Pancakes with Goat Cheese

Fired Up

Cooking over fire is simple and adaptable for not just meats but also vegetables and fruit. Learn more at TwiceasTasty.com.
This time of year, I’m always fired up about preparing food on the grill. Just this last week, I was grilling sourdough pizza aboard the Blue Mule and smoking cherries to infuse in bourbon and to pickle. Although I throw plenty of more traditional foods on the grill, like shrimp and fish, I increasingly fill my beat-up Weber kettle grill with vegetables and fruit.

The Twice as Tasty collection of grilling and smoking recipes has grown large enough that I recently broke it into its own category on the Recipes page. But many preparations are so simple and adaptable that once you get the hang of how your grill or smoker handles produce, you’ll realize you don’t need a recipe and can use the tool to prepare multiple meals and even frozen or canned treats.
Read more about grilling and smoking your harvest

Multibatch Canning

Call it impressive or call it procrastination: We sealed up 85 jars of goodness on Sunday. Learn more at TwiceasTasty.com.
Winter came early to Montana this year. The first flakes started coming down at home September 28, while we were sailing in Canada’s Gulf Islands. By the time I got home a month later, more snow and single-digit mornings were just days away.

It made for some interesting fall garden cleanup and canning. We managed to dig the last of this year’s carrots and beets and stuff next year’s garlic before the pre-Halloween storm, but we had to wait until last weekend to do the final round of canning with apples, tomatoes, and tomatillos. Call it impressive or call it procrastination: We sealed up 85 jars of goodness on Sunday. Read on for more about multibatch canning and boxing vegetables on the cusp of winter.
Read more for canning tricks and storage tips

Tomatoes

Grilling and preserving pair perfectly, and their advantages stretch far beyond flavor. Get grilled tomato recipes at TwiceasTasty.com.
You’ve probably noticed that I love grilled vegetables. I also love home-canned goods, and the techniques of grilling and preserving pair together perfectly. The advantages of grilling for canning stretch far beyond flavor, particularly for tomatoes.

Grilling combined with freezing makes it easy to start processing vegetables as they ripen throughout the growing season, making preserving seem more like a habit than a chore. During tomato season, we pull the ripest fruit from the vine every few days. That evening, we fire up the grill and cook off a rack or two of tomatoes; the hot halves go straight into a colander set over a large bowl to drain off the juice—usually while we’re enjoying a grilled dinner. Once they’re cool, I pour the separated solids and juice into separate containers, weighing and labeling each before adding them to the freezer.

When the freezer’s full, I have two products ready for processing: solids and juice. Because the juice was drained off, any sauce or salsa doesn’t have to cook for hours to thicken. Because the solids have already been pulled out of the juice, I can quickly apply it to any recipe, from beverage to soup. In just a couple of hours, I can have several canner batches processed for long-term storage. The freezer is ready for the next round of preserving, and the canning shelves are full of delicious fire-roasted flavors.
Learn to make Grilled Tomato Pasta Sauce and Tomato Juice Soup

Grilled Peppers

You could spend a small fortune buying jars of oily, roasted red peppers. Or you could grill your own. Get roasted red pepper recipes at TwiceasTasty.com.
Every year, we stuff at least 40 pepper plants into a hoop house, including bell peppers, Gypsy peppers, Poblanos, and several types of chilies. We go big because peppers can go in and on almost anything: salsas, salads, dips, sauces, breakfast eggs, lunch sandwiches, dinner pastas—the list is endless.

The challenge is in waiting for the peppers to ripen to bright yellows, oranges, reds, and purples and then capturing their peak flavor. My favorite variations use the grill to add a little char for fresh eating, such as for Corn, Bean, and Pepper Salsa and Shish Kebabs with Garlic–Soy Marinade, or a lot of smokiness before long-term storage, such as for Smoked Chilies and Home-Smoked Chili Paste. My latest trick falls somewhere in the middle: roasting peppers on the grill and then freezing them in a dice to throw in winter dishes or as a puree to use as a spread or sauce.
Learn to grill peppers and make Red Bell Pepper Puree