It’s just starting to get cold. The trees are changing. The thermometer is finally rising. True to “Better Beer” you took JF’s advice to heart and have just returned from Super Liquor IV with your own custom-mixed six pack of spring ales: maybe some Hoegaarden, Sam Adams Nobile Pils, Great Lakes Grassroots Ale… You fire up the grill and your friends proceed to throw half of the butcher’s block on it. There’s enough chicken and steak and pork loin and turkey sausages and burgers and dogs and brats for a small army. But Spring is about a celebration of what is green. It is about balance, a return of growth. So stake your claim to one corner of the grill and take a stand for vegetables.
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Ingredients:
Sweet Red (or Green or Yellow) Pepper(s)
Crumbled Bleu Cheese (or Goat cheese depending on taste)
Olive Oil
2 Lemons
1 Jar Capers
Cracked Peppercorns
Good hearty, grainy, crusty bread

Instructions:
  1. Turn on the grill and let it warm up. Move the meat over.
  2. Cut pepper in half, removing stem and hollowing seeds and other otherwise undesirable material out from pepper’s flesh.
  3. Place hemispheres on the grill hollow down and allow them to warm up and soften.
  4. While the peppers are heating, pour about ¼ of a cup of olive oil into a bowl. Roll lemons on cutting board (this softens them up and allows for maximum juicing efficiency). Cut lemons into quarters and squeeze them out into olive oil. Empty a good amount of capers into the oil/lemon juice sauce. Note: All measurements are estimates- keep the exact science for your chem lab, and enjoy some freedom and season to taste here.
  5. Turn on some good springy music (this can actually be moved into step one). One sweet world.
  6. Remove peppers from grill. There should be some char marks (depending on how much of a charcoaly flavor you want your peppers to have).
  7. Place the peppers on cutting board/cooking surface hollow-side up and fill with cheese. The bleu cheese is in my opinion the best, but it has a slightly stronger flavor. For those with a milder palate, goat cheese may be a better option. But try the bleu too. Trust me.
  8. Put cheese-filled peppers back on the grill with the cheese-filled hollow-side up. Give the peppers a couple minutes on the grill, allowing the bottoms to warm and cheese to begin to melt.  Again, I like a charcoaly flavor, so I usually put the peppers over a hotter flame.
  9. While you’re waiting, slice some good, hearty, grainy, crusty bread (I recommend Zingerman’s Roadhouse Bread). Put the slices on that sometimes annoying/cumbersome and terribly inefficient (yet here immensely useful) second tier in the grill and allow them to toast.
  10. Spoon some of the olive oil/lemon juice onto the cheese, making sure that you get some of the capers from the bottom of the bowl. Don’t drown the cheese, but flavor it well.
  11. Give the peppers another minute or so on the grill so that you don’t get warm cheese with cold sauce.
  12. Take the peppers off, grind some fresh peppercorns over the cheese. Slice, dice. Remove the masterfully browned bread. Use the bread to mop up the spilled olive oil (it’s a spring meal outside, no one said it had to be neat and clean).
  13. If necessary, barter some smaller slices of your perfect pepper for your friends’ carnivorous massacre. Crack another finely spiced wit bier, sit back, forget about finals and drink in the sun.


Enjoy! And have a great summer!
-J.F. Quinn-

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**Note from the editor- Due to the number of wonderful Thanksgiving articles we received, this one's a day late but gives us an excellent idea for what to do with all those leftovers!

Ingredients:
  • 2 Slices White Bread
  • 2 Dollops Mayonnaise
  • Several Pieces Cold Turkey
  • 2 Dollops Cranberry Sauce 
  • 2 Large Dollops Cold Stuffing
  • 1 Ginger Ale
Directions:
  1. At roughly 9:30 PM Thanksgiving night, right when you are considering the possibility that you might one day be able to eat again, decide that it is in fact time to leave the family viewing of _________ (insert your choice family movie for traditional post-Thanksgiving feast- for me, “Meet Me In St. Louis”). 
  2. Fight the “itis” (dangerous disease brought on by overeating and characterized by symptoms of laziness and sleep) to regain a slightly more vertical posture and make your way to the kitchen. 
  3. Toast two slices white bread (they taste the best when your grandmother or some other older matronly figure can cut it into triangles for you after toasting them- don’t ask, I’m just giving you the recipe for success- some things just work). 
  4. Once bread is nicely crisped and golden brown, add a layer of the thinner turkey left-overs (which hopefully have had a chance to chill nicely in the refrigerator while the first part of the movie was being watched). I prefer white turkey meat, but that is just a personal preference. 
  5. Add a light layer of stuffing on top of the turkey. 
  6. Add cranberry sauce to the turkey and stuffing piles. Apply mayonnaise to the top pieces of bread. Note that there must be a sufficient amount of both mayonnaise and cranberry sauce, as these act to combat the dryness of the turkey and stuffing. 
  7. Note that the sizes for ingredients are relatively arbitrary- this is both because in a food-drunk state it is impractical to take the time to measure, and because in a food drunk state I have never taken the time to measure my own portions. 
  8. That being said, this is a complex dish characterized by two key contrasts: temperature contrast between the cold left-overs and the warm, freshly toasted bread and texture contrast between the dry turkey meat and the moist cranberry sauce and mayonnaise. That being said, perfect balance in these contrasts can only be achieved through experimentation.  In the spirit of American gluttony on Thanksgiving, it may be necessary to test the combinations on a sandwich or two before even bringing the final masterpiece back to the movie room. 
  9. Finish sandwich assembly (there will most likely be overflow).
  10. I always find that a Ginger Ale is the perfect accompanying drink for this late-night snack, as it quiets my stomach down. 
  11. Be prepared to receive jealous looks when you re-enter the movie room. I try to by-pass these and do my duty as a good American and Thanksgiving celebrant by making several sandwiches (or perhaps delivering those slightly imperfectly balanced attempts mentioned earlier) for other family members. 
  12. They can get their own Ginger Ale. 
  13. Settle back down in a more horizontal position, let the “itis” resume its work, and enjoy Thanksgiving: Round 2.
Note: This recipe can be used for times other than 9:30 PM Thanksgiving night. However, I make no guarantees about its success.  In my experience, it never tastes as good. 
 
Hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving, and Enjoy!
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Quinoa (pronounced Keen-Wah) an ancient Mayan grain which, in addition to being very healthy, holds the largest amount of protein of all grains, making it an immensely valuable addition to a vegetarian’s diet


See J.F.'s Recipe
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