Vegetarian

We’re sweet onion junkies and whenever beef is on the grill, so are a pile of onion slices. At first, we just served them with Mexican fajita feasts, but then quickly found that their sweet, salty, smoky, soft, and crisp qualities turned plain old burgers into chopped steak and added richness and depth to all kinds of meats. Now that we’ve become cheaters, so have the onions. Charred in the oven, these smoky sweet onions are just what cheater brisket needs on the side. Days later diced leftover onions end up in all kinds of meals like a weekend fridge scramble, hash browns, baked beans, and green beans. Georgia’s Vidalia onions are a big thing in Tennessee, and we’re seeing more and more varieties of sweet onions from Texas and Washington. Take your pick, but any yellow or white onion will do the job.

Lots of barbecue joints in Tennessee do country-style vegetables other than coleslaw, barbecued beans, and potato salad. One of our favorites is a big pile of turnip greens doused with hot pepper vinegar to go with a side of pork ribs. We think vegetables are a critical counterbalance to rich smoky barbecued meats. Same goes with Asian barbecue. Swap the collards and turnip greens for bok choy or Napa cabbage flavored with garlic, ginger, and soy sauce. Serve this with Filipino Adobo-Q Chicken (page 94) and a big pile of fluffy jasmine rice.

R. B.’s childhood campout hobo packet memories have inspired many of our favorite side dishes. He’s put just about every vegetable combo imaginable in a foil packet on the grill. Without added water, vegetables steam in their own juices and roast beautifully over the direct high heat of the grill. Even better and easier than the grill is the even heat of a hot oven. If there were a hobo packet merit badge, R. B. would have definitely earned it.

The key to enjoying dense winter squash more often is a time-saving ten or so minutes in the microwave. By cooking them first, you avoid the anxiety and danger of hacking a sturdy squash or your finger in half. Or, look for packages of ready-to-cook precut and peeled squash in the supermarket. After cooking, the other trick is to scoop the flesh into a casserole where it’s easy to char evenly under the broiler in a couple minutes. This way no one has to negotiate an unwieldy squash boat, and everyone gets as much or as little as they want. Make the casserole ahead and you’ll be glad come dinnertime. The trio of squash sauces shows how well squash gets along with a full range of sweet to savory flavors. One sauce is traditional—buttery and sweet with pecans. The second is a sweet-savory exotic beauty blending spicy chutney, dried cranberries, and almonds. The third, a savory tomato, mysteriously brings out the sweetness of the squash without overpowering it. Serve all three sauces with any squash combo and watch everyone duke it out for a favorite.

For too long cauliflower has been confined to salad bars, vegetable medleys, and Velveeta sauces. Everything changed for us when R. B. roasted two cut-up heads in a foil packet on the grill. The transformation was amazing—instead of bland, white, and wet the florets were brown, nutty, and rich. Yes, cheese was involved. And some bacon. A nicely browned cheater oven version is just as big a hit and has become a dinner regular. R. B. prefers the cauliflower cooked really soft, not crisp-tender, but fix it the way you like. It’s good to go as is, or dressed up to suit the menu. Give our variations a try. Some are everyday good, others are fancy dinner-party style.

This salad uses Oven Potatoes rather than fluffy, starchy boiled potatoes. The difference is that the potatoes, browned with the help of a little oil and cooked without water, are crusty, giving the salad a new texture. Dress the salad with either mayonnaise or vinaigrette. A little dry rub on the potatoes will add robust flavor and rusty color to the dressing, a perfect side for lightly seasoned meats and fish. If you’re serving potato salad with peppery rubbed cheater BBQ, season the potatoes only with salt and skip the dry rub. One dry-rubbed menu item per meal is usually plenty.

A spirited family debate one holiday season over the merits of sweet versus white potatoes prompted this compromise—colorful root vegetables all coexisting nicely in one big happy roasting pan. Frozen pearl onions are easy to use right out of the bag and make the dish look extra fancy. You can cook the vegetables early in the day and stick them back in the oven to warm before dinner with whatever’s cooking. These are delicious sprinkled with smoked paprika.

Charring a pineapple slice steps it up from fruit salad and baked ham ornament to a more sophisticated salad sphere. Our sweet and savory charred pineapple salads are all great matches for any style of barbecued pork and run the gamut of pineapple possibilities. Pineapple is easy to char because you’re just adding some smoke and a chic look to the fruit, not cooking it. If you prefer groovy grill marks, use a ridged grill pan to sear in some lines. It takes about 3 minutes a side. For the classic charred diamond grill pattern, rotate the pineapple slices about 45 degrees on one side during the charring process. Skin and core a fresh one yourself, or find one all trimmed in the cut produce section.

The dusky flavor of smoked paprika makes quite an impact on the usual creamy ranch. We either make this from scratch or just sprinkle the paprika into bottled ranch. A little smoked paprika is also a nice addition to any basic vinaigrette.

Min’s Cranberry Fruit Salad is the result of her crusade to bring vibrant colors and crisp textures to those brown winter meals—including plenty of the cheater pulled and chopped meats. Bright cranberries and fall fruits make a drop-dead gorgeous salad with body, color, and crunch. Smoked turkey, chicken, pork loin, and brisket are always better with a bright accessory. Freeze extra cranberries in the fall to whip this up throughout the winter.

Min’s dad Max, an accomplished engineer who claims two slide rules and the ability to use them, shares R. B.’s bite-size approach to salad making. His dressing of choice is creamy picante for geometrically correct iceberg lettuce and supporting vegetable elements. Garnish the salad with fresh cilantro.

Min was first encouraged to make this dish when her fridge was jammed with leftover grilled corn on the cob. We liked this salad so much that now she doesn’t wait for a summer corn surplus—she cheats with a bag of niblets from the freezer. Frozen white shoepeg corn and frozen baby peas are two of Min’s constant freezer staples for ultraquick sides.

Since R. B. has expanded his blade assortment beyond an ax, a maul, and a cleaver to include a few kitchen knives, he’s more than happy to wield the Santoku for diced salad vegetables. This kitchen task is best suited for the detail oriented. Around here, that would be R. B., whose T-shirt collection is always impeccably folded, stacked, and arranged by hobby. Instead of limp baby weeds, we vote for a crisp head of chilled iceberg lettuce that cuts beautifully into bite-size pieces for serving with barbecue.

Min found her inspiration for this dressing at the end of the Indian restaurant buffet. That delicious yogurt-dressed lettuce salad is crisper around here, but it’s just as cooling with spicy meats. Garnish the salad with fresh cilantro and mint leaves.

Adding a little sugar to frozen vegetables is an old country kitchen trick for turning the clock back to summer. It occurred to us that revitalizing frozen corn in some sugar water is essentially a sweet brine. The other trick is plenty of butter, just like corn on the cob. The first time we tried this was for a winter cheater barbecue party with piles of cheater brisket, pulled pork, and hot drums. Everybody loved the cute little cups of peppery sweet corn. It tasted remarkably fresh and was loads cheaper than out-of-season fresh corn or frozen ears. Corn absolutely goes with every kind of American barbecue.

Our good friend and food pal, Anne Byrn, author of the wildly popular Cake Mix Doctor cookbook series and the Dinner Doctor, is a cheater from way back. Long before she earned advanced degrees in cake-mix doctoring, Anne was doctoring pickles by transforming store-bought dills and sours into home-canned-style bread-and-butter pickles. Anne says cheater pickles were especially popular with her mother’s generation as a “homemade” Christmas gift, and a must for serving with the Christmas country ham. Our own sweet-hot version of cheater pickles enjoys a little heat from pickled jalapeños and tastes great with cheater meats. Pickled red jalapeños, if you can find them, are especially colorful for the holiday season. Sour pickles work best because their pungent flavor really hangs in there with all that sugar, but you can resort to regular dills in a pinch. We’ve had the best luck finding sours in big jars at Wal-Mart. The mustard seeds make the cheater pickles look even more homemade.

This completely fat-free side is the perfect counterpoint to rich meat. No matter the barbecue, Q-Cumbers will expand your side dish repertoire beyond the more conventional slaws, potato salads, beans, and corn. Q-Cumbers are best icy cold. Regular cucumbers may need their seeds removed, but the long, plastic-wrapped English/Japanese/seedless kind grown in hothouses are ready-made for thin slicing. Maybe it’s psychological, but the palate-cleansing effect of fresh vinegary sweet cucumbers is extra good in hot weather. Plus, you don’t have to worry about the mayonnaise issue in the heat. The jalapeños, while optional, are encouraged.

The traditional yogurt-cucumber mix that cools Middle Eastern and Indian barbecue dishes operates the same way with cheater BBQ. This slaw is a natural side to Tandoori BBQ Chicken Thighs (page 96) and Cheater Q’Balls (page 129). When we have any leftover brisket, burgers, or turkey, it gets loaded into pita pockets with as much slaw as will fit topped with whatever hot Indian chutney happens to be in Min’s fridge door condiment collection at the time.