Grilled Vegetable Salad

We've been grilling out a lot lately.  It's one of my favorite things about summer.  Ever since reading the book How To Grill, we've been expanding our repertoire of grilled foods.  We're really into grilling veggies and other side items now.  The book has instructions for grilling all different kinds of veggies, and I want to try them all.  The idea came to me to grill a bunch of different veggies and put them together in one dish, a grilled veggie salad, if you will.  So that's what we did this Fourth of July weekend (I say "we" because I do all the prep work and my husband does the actual grilling).  This is how it turned out.


Grilled Vegetable Salad


Ingredients:
3 medium zucchini
Garlic powder
Salt
Olive oil
½ large onion
2 ears fresh corn
2 tbsp fresh cilantro, finely chopped
Red wine vinegar


Directions:
Slice zucchini lengthwise into ¼” slices.  Season with garlic powder and salt and brush with olive oil.  Slice onion into ¼” slices and brush with oil.  Place two skewers through onion, if desired.  Brush corn with olive oil and sprinkle with salt.


Grill zucchini, onion, and corn until grill marks form and veggies are tender.  Remove from grill.  Dice zucchini and onion, and cut corn off the cob.  Toss veggies in a medium bowl.  Add cilantro and a few dashes of red wine vinegar.  Taste, adding salt, oil, or vinegar as needed.  Serve warm.


Makes 6 servings.

Mmm, it's really good!  The grill imparts a smokey, roasted flavor to the veggies that just can't be beat.  And I think these three veggies go really well together.  But you can add any kind of veggie you like.  I think roasted bell peppers would be good in this too if you like them.

Here are some pics of the individual veggies before they got cut up.

 You would not believe how sweet the onion gets after being grilled.  I could have totally eaten it all by itself!  I was worried that the onion slices would fall apart on the grill, so I put skewers in them.  Jim told me that he didn't think they were really necessary, and that they took up too much room on the grill.

 Grilled zucchini.  I would have done the grill marks on the diagonal, but it doesn't really matter.  In the book, he suggests doing them on the diagonal, and then turning them 90 degrees to get a crosshatch pattern.

Grilled corn on the cob.  Yummy!  The roasted corn flavor is so good.

This dish was part of a grill feast we had on Sunday evening.  We did steaks, pork chops, all the veggies for the salad, extra corn just to eat off the cob, and even sweet potatoes on the grill.  We threw in some fresh sliced tomatoes with cottage cheese and some coleslaw and it was the quintessential summertime feast!  Thankfully my mom was visiting for the weekend and helped us eat all that food!