A Perfect Fruit Recipe for the Grill
by Richard Calvin Myers

Description: For something different this summer, try cooking up some fruit on the grill.

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Fruit and vegetables on the grill are becoming more and more popular. I have a perfect fruit recipe for the vegetarian, or anyone who loves fruit. This is the perfect little dessert to polish off a nice meal. You can cook it while you're cooking your dinner and leave them until afterwards. The idea here is to just warm the fruit through and give it a nice grilled flavor on the outside. We don't want to cook the fruit entirely or it will turn to mush and fall off the skewer. This is a great recipe to do on a gas grill. There's no preparation and maintenance to stress over. Just turn your burners on to medium heat and place the skewers on and rotate a few times while brushing a glaze on. These skewers would also make a fantastic lunch all by itself.

Fruit skewers:

We'll need to make a trip to the grocery store and grab a few items, very few. We want a bag of wooden skewers, a small bag of brown sugar if you don't have any already, a small bottle of real apple juice, one really ripe and fresh cantaloupe, one pineapple, also super fresh and ripe, a few green baking apples, a few bananas (or bushel, whatever you call them) and 2 lemons. Make sure all your fruit is as fresh as possible. One possibility would be to pick up your skewers and sugar from the store, and then pick up your fruit from a roadside farmers stand.

The rest of this recipe is a breeze. Before we start on the fruit, we want to make a really simple glaze. Pour 2 cups of the apple juice into a medium sized pot and place on the stove. Add ½ cup of brown sugar and a nice pinch of salt. Turn the heat to medium-high and let it come to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium and let it bubble down and reduce until there's roughly ½ to ¾ of a cup left. You will see it thickening up and looking more like a gravy or sauce than apple juice. After this has reduced, remove it from the heat and allow it to cool. You can leave it in the pan. No reason to dirty another dish.

Place as many skewers as you'll be using into some water to soak. Generally, we're going to use around 8 pieces of fruit per skewer. Pour 1 cup of cold water into a bowl. Mix in ½ cup of sugar, stir until almost dissolved. Next, squeeze the juice of both lemons into the bowl, throwing the lemon pieces in the bowl also. Now, we're going to cut up that fruit.

Start with the apples, peel and dice the apples into 1 inch cubes, immediately putting them in the sugar/lemon solution. Repeat these steps with all the fruits, all being cut into roughly 1 inch squares. We want to start arranging the fruit on the skewers. You can go in any order you wish, just make sure to alternate fruits. After each skewer is complete, you can place it back into the lemon mixture bowl. This will stop your apples from browning excessively.

Make sure your grill is set to medium heat and allowed to heat up for at least 10 minutes. Oil the racks well with a neutral flavored oil such as vegetable oil before placing the skewers down. When placing the skewers down, make sure to go against the grain of the grids. Immediately after placing the fruit down, begin basting with the apple juice reduction. You should turn these skewers every minute or so, do not leave them unattended. Once they have a good color on them and are heated through, they're done.

Be careful turning the skewers. Use tongs or some oven mitts. You don't want to burn yourself. You will find these pieces of fruit nicely contrast each other in flavor. The fruit picks up a smoky flavor with a hint of lemon in each bite. These are great to eat by itself, or pull the pieces off and serve over some vanilla ice cream. It's amazingly simple and delicious.

Richard Myers will provide articles, tips, recipes, and videos to help you learn to use your grill and to become a better griller, and show you that "Grilling Is Easy" at: http://www.TheGrillingCoach.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Richard_Calvin_Myers

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