Bobby Flay, Deborah Madison

These two accomplished cookbook authors are helping us with our diet. Bobby Flay's Boy Gets Grill guided us through two great meals this weekend, while Deborah Madison's Local Flavors delivered a tasty side dish.

What appealed to me about the Tandoori Cornish hens recipe was the idea of these two little hens together on the rotisserie spit. The Tandoori marinade consisted of yogurt, ginger, and the usual curry spices, and the hens sat in that overnight. They were roasted to an internal temperature of 175 degrees and served on white onion slices chilled in ice water and cilantro sprigs. We had a tomato-avocado salad with them (summer is great!). Either you take the temperature differently for these little birds than you do for a chicken, or having them breast to breast on the spit kept the breast meat from getting done, so I had to put them back in the grill for a while -- but no harm done.

The other Flay recipe was for grilled chicken breasts with a delightful toasted chile sauce. I toasted the New Mexico chiles in a cast iron frying pan, removed the stem and seeds and chopped coarsely. The chile gets cooked in a concoction of canola oil, chopped red onion and garlic cloves, coconut milk and coconut cream, then mixed in a blender till smooth, with some honey and lime juice blended in at the end. The sauce, which has a lovely red color, gets strained and served over the grilled breasts topped with chopped cilantro. Neither too hot from the chiles nor too sweet from the coconut, the dish has a nice balanced flavor.

We paired it with waxed beans cooked in salt water and then mixed in with a peeled, seeded and chopped yellow tomato and shallots sauteed in butter and oil with chopped lemon thyme (so few recipes for this herb we grow in the garden). You are supposed to drizzle a little champagne vinegar over the vegetables, which I'm sure is nice, but which I forgot to do.