Summer time is grill time – especially to bring out the delicious flavors of veggies! This week we have used beautiful seasonal veggies like squash and zucchini along with radishes, garlic and red onions to create the most beautiful platter.
You can use any seasonal veggie in this dish. Simply drizzle with olive oil and season with salt and pepper before placing it on a medium hot grill. Make sure to monitor the progress – soft veggies like squash won’t take long to cook, perhaps 5 minutes one each side.. The harder the veg the longer you will want to leave it on the grill. Arrange all on a platter – we like to include some crunchy fresh veggies in a slaw as well. Serve it up with a pitcher of the herbed mustard dressing!
You can use a variety of herbs for this dressing – or just one! We’ve chosen Dill to feature this week, because its abundant in southern gardens right now. Dill has two types of healing components: monoterpenes and flavonoids. The monoterpene components qualify as a “chemoprotective” food (much like parsley) that can help neutralize particular types of carcinogens such as cigarette smoke, charcoal grill smoke, and the smoke produced by trash incinerators. Dill also has a lot of calcium so it is a great bone healthy herb. It is very important to have a marinade on any meat you put on the grill to reduce carcinogens so this dressing can be used for that as well. It completes a meal well because the healthy dressing can be used for the veggies as well as the protein. Enjoy!
Herbed Mustard Dressing
- ½ Cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil
- ¼ Cup Red Wine Vinegar
- 3 TB Dijon Mustard
- 1 Tsp Orange Juice
- 1 Tsp Orange Zest
- 1 Garlic Clove, grated
- 2 TB Fresh Chopped Herbs, like Parsley, Thyme, Basil, Dill, Tarragon, Oregano or others
- Sea Salt and Freshly Ground Black Pepper to taste.
Shake all the ingredients together in a small jar.