Applewood Smoked Beef Rib Roast with Creole Sauce

What could be better than sitting outside on a cool autumn day reading and smelling a nice rib roast smoke away? Smoking is a long process but the end result is so worth it. That smoky flavour is like cranking your bbq's flavour up 5000 times. Plus with the sweet, mustardy creole sauce caramelized all over the roast, this beef was truly delicious.

I don't have special equipment for smoking. Just my beef on the top rack on the opposite side of the heat and smoke-box where the wet applewood chips slowly charred. I had a meat thermometre stuck into the beef and pulled it out when it was about medium.

Along with some bbq sweet potato wedges, my first serious foray into smoking went alot better than I could have expected. Long live the versatility of the grill!

Grilled Sweet Potatoes with Harissa and Ham-Burgers

I'm having real fun with the versitility of the grill lately. Grilled pizzas, fries, veggies, you name it. My aunt in Ottawa does nearly all of her cooking on the bbq nowadays. She even bakes her cakes using the bbq as an oven. Now all I wish I could have access to is a charcoal or brick bbq. No more propane for me.

To make grilled sweet potatoes or regular potatoes, simply toss relatively thick slices of them in oil with salt, pepper and whatever flavouring you want (I added some harissa) and grill till charred on the outside and soft on the inside. It takes a good half hour on medium-high heat but the result is better than trans-fat laden deep-fried fries any day. "Fries" this way are actually healthy.

With the grilled sweet potato I grilled some ham-burgers (ground pork with 25% ham) from the market and a nice simple tossed salad with orange segments, asian greens and bean sprouts. I put spicy jerk bbq sauce on the burgers and sandwiched them in some English muffins which are way better than the crappy air filled burger buns you buy from those cheap bread industrial bakeries.

With a generous dolop of harissa, this meal was nice slow food...meaning that I took the time to select and gather ingredients and then took time cooking and eating it while enjoying my time with my girlfriend. Life is good on the slow side.

Marinated Pork Tenderloin with Sweet Potato Purée and Warm Chipotle Salsa

If this recipe sounds fancy that's because it's from the 5th edition of Le Cordon Bleu's Professional Cooking which is basically a textbook for culinary schools. You've got everything in here from the use and care of a chinacap to the basics of broiling and the chemistry of gelatine. It's awesome because you could basically work through this whole book and you'd be a "professionally" trained chef. Now the only problem is is that doing so would cost a fortune because lots of this food doesn't come cheap and all the recipes are written for restaurant portions. Best to pay your tuition and go to a culinary school if that's your bag. But if you're like me, you just want to learn how to cook better so buying a book like this does the trick.

What I was originally looking for was a recipe for Eastern European pork roast with sauerkraut. I don't even know if that's the dish but I'll post it as soon as I've found out. For now we have this South American inspired dish that has the delicious flavour of marinated pork loin, coupled with the sweetness of the sweet potatoes, and all offset with a nice smoky and spicy chipotle salsa. It's obvious that a recipe from Le Cordon Bleu will match flavours properly. Salty. Sweet. Spicy. There's no tart or bitter here but you catch my drift.

The marinade consists of chopped onion, mashed garlic, salt, oregano, cumin, cinnamon, lime juice, olive oil and powdered red New Mexico chiles (I used dried chiles from Mexico but that's what I had on hand...the recipe says that you can also substitute for good old chili powder). As you can see there's nothing magic about this marinade. Just let sit over night, barbecue or roast, and enjoy.

As for the salsa, it's also pretty basic. Roast one garlic clove and 1 lb of plum tomatoes for about 10 minutes, peel, throw into a blender with 2 whole chipotle chiles in adobo (seeded or unseeded depending on how much heat you want), a bit of salt, a bit of adobo sauce, purée and voilà. You could probably add cilantro, onions or other such traditional salsa ingredient but I found this sauce was basic and tasted really nice.

All you have to do once everything is cooked is to cut the tenderloin into medallions, place on top of the roasted and puréeed sweet potatoes, drizzle with salsa and that's it. Delicious. Lean. And lets not forget spicy.

But if you're not a health nut, you can use the leftover tenderloin and salsa with some smoky cheddar all baked on top of some nachos and you've got another delicious meal that's great with a nice cerveza, a hockey game and some wings.