I was planning on making grilled pork chops and vegetables for dinner tonight. However, when I got home from the gym thunder was starting to rumbling which didn’t bode well for outdoor cooking. When it rains here it POURS and it looked like we were going to have a monsoon style downpour.
Luckily I have a trusty grill pan that is great for grilling meat. So I dug this out, heated it up super high and “grilled” the meat on it. The vegetables presented more of a problem though because the grill pan really doesn’t work well for them. They stick and don’t cook completely. Which is a terrible combination. So I decide to slice them thinly, season and roast in the oven at high heat.
This technique of roasting veggies in the oven has worked super well for broccoli, cauliflower and Brussels sprouts. I surmised it shouldn’t be too bad for the zucchini, peppers and eggplant I wanted to cook. To make sure everything cooked evenly. I spread things out across the pans before I put them in the oven for 30 minutes.
Of all the vegetables the eggplant came out the best. The zucchini were a little juicy because they shed the water off into the pan instead of it dripping down into the grill. Additionally, none of it had that nice char-grilled taste one gets with the grill. However, just after I finished putting things in the oven the heavens completely opened up. So I think I made the right choice regarding modifying my meal plans. Soggy meal and wet cook would not have been better.
That being said if I were to have to make this type of last minute change again, I’d probably opt to re-purpose my vegetables into something more like Julia Child-style ratatouille or a vegetable casserole. I almost always have canned tomato sauce, Parmesan cheese and bread crumbs on hand. So I could have gone this route just as easily. You never learn what works and what doesn’t though if you don’t try.
Lessons learned:
- Yay grill pan
- Roasted eggplant yummy
- Roasted zucchini not so much.