TheState.com: Food and Drink

Grilling 2.0: Recipes

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:24 EDT

James Beard’s Roast Leg of Lamb

Serves 6

1 6-lb leg of lamb

6-8 cloves garlic, cut into slivers

Salt and pepper

Cooks Calendar

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:08 EDT

NEW HOURS:

Harvest Week at Motor Supply

Celebrate the produce from local sustainable farms with menu specials by Executive Chef Tim Peters featuring dueling ingredients from the featured farms. Summer Harvest Week runs through Sunday (Father’s Day), so make dinner and brunch reservations now. 920 Gevais Street, (803) 256-6687, motorsupplycobistro.com

Want to find restaurants serving locally grown food? There’s an app for that

The South Carolina Department of Agriculture unveils a free Fresh on the Menu app that will allow users to find restaurants serving at least 25 percent Certified South Carolina Grown produce and products on their menus when in season. The app is compatible with iPad, iPhone and Android devices 4.0 and higher and you can search categories of Restaurants, Chefs, Recipes and Roots (showing farms, produce companies and breweries supplying the restaurants). Download the app at www.certifiedscgrown.com/freshonthemenu

Grilling 2.0: Beyond burgers and hot dogs

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:44 EDT

So you have a new grill and/or have mastered the basics of grilling and want to take your skills to the next level. What’s the next step beyond the basic burger and hot dog routine?

Why not try smoking ... or grilling larger pieces of meat?

I’ve talked to two gentlemen whom I consider to be experts on the grill: barbecue pit master Mark Busbee, of Smokin’ Coles sauce and Buzz’s Butt Dust rub; and Jeff Bannister, founding member of Bovinova, a whole-animal barbecue event in Simpsonville. Here are some of their tips and suggestions, mixed in with some research that I’ve done...

“Peace, love and BBQ,” Mark Busbee

The art of grilling takes time to master, but it can be done with some basic tools.

Recipe Finder: Back-of-the-box lasagna

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 10:27 EDT

Liz Williams from Newton, N.C., wanted help finding a recipe for making baked lasagna that she had lost. She said the recipe came from a box of pasta she was using probably around 20 years ago, and it was the best lasagna ever.

Back-of-the-box recipes are always popular and reliably good. I received quite a few of them from readers for baked lasagna from several different pasta brands. I decided to test the one Kay Sauvageot from Joppa, Md., shared that she said she came from a box of Mueller's lasagna noodles, circa 1980. She said she still uses the recipe often, "just as I cut it from the box and copied it word for word, and it is delicious."

Homemade lasagna can be a little time-consuming but is an excellent party dish and can easily be made. It also freezes beautifully. These days, I find that there are many very good-tasting, high-quality tomato sauces on the market that can be used to speed things up a little. Once everything bakes together with all the cheese, I doubt anyone will notice if you used sauce from a jar. For the purist, however, this recipe is a classic.

ï¿½ï¿½ CLASSIC LASAGNA

Makes 8 servings

Greek culture: Creamy and tangy, yogurt's thicker sibling enhances your cooking

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 03:07 EDT

We spoon up so much yogurt at breakfast, lunch and dinner that we spent $7.3 billion on the tart stuff last year.

Its creamy texture and good-for-your-gut benefits are draws. So are the varieties: full fat, nonfat and low fat; organic and conventional; honey sweetened or plain, fruit on the bottom or swirled throughout.

Among these cultured denizens of the dairy case, it's Greek yogurt that's getting lots of attention.

Retail sales in the U.S. of this thicker-than-regular yogurt increased more than 50 percent in 2012 to reach $1.6 billion, according to Packaged Facts, a Rockville, Md., market researcher. Such numbers, they say, have pretzel, salad dressing and cereal-makers jumping on the Greek yogurt bandwagon.

Greek yogurt's appeal is easy to understand. It's deliciously thick and creamy, it plays well in recipes, its ingredient list is simple (milk plus live cultures) and its tartness dovetails with our fondness for fermented foods (pickles, beer, etc.).