John Willoughby

Serve these skewers with grilled pita and yogurt mixed with a little Maras pepper, olive oil, and chopped mint.

No bottled tomato sauce can equal a simple homemade one—especially when the robust flavor of the grill is added to the mix.

Incredibly rich and flavorful, skirt steak is ideal for this particular salad, but you can also use any other type of steak you might happen to have left over from yesterday's dinner.

The slightly sweet, almost flowery flavor of marjoram adds a delicate note to this Middle Eastern—inspired salad, though oregano is also fine. To be sure the eggplant is tender, slice into it before taking it off the grill—when properly done, it will be moist all the way through.

Searing the tuna well on the outside but leaving it rare on the inside gives you a lovely contrast between the two textures. That said, if you like your tuna cooked through, the salad will still be delicious.

Mushrooms in general are great for grilling, and portabellas—which not only have a wonderful, earthy flavor but are also large enough to be easy to handle on the grill—are perhaps the best of all.

Clams are excellent on the grill. The tinge of smokiness perfectly complements their briny flavor, and, conveniently enough, they pop open when they are done cooking. Combined with crisp bacon, they’re the foundation of a very easy yet very flavorful pasta sauce.

Grilled avocado is one of those things that sound faintly ridiculous until you try it—then you wonder why you never had it before.

The mild heat and deep flavor of Maras and Urfa peppers are wonderful not just in kebabs but also in soups and stews.

These wings are great to gnaw on while you're diligently grilling the main course and sipping a cold one, as my Basque friend Juan Riesco often demonstrated to me. The level of heat is up to you—the Tabasco is your fuel. Serving Suggestions:
These are excellent "tapas"-style appetizers. Serve them at a large cocktail party along with some other Mediterranean-inspired appetizers.

The garlic-nut sauce known as tarator, which sometimes also includes tahini, is a classic Turkish accompaniment to mussels and fried fish as well as vegetables. Here, it's used with cauliflower that is sliced — rather than separated into florets — so that it can be more easily browned, which gives it a nutty flavor that complements the tarator perfectly.

Lamb and mint are a very traditional English combination. But the straight mint jelly that is often served with lamb is a little too sweet for our taste. Add some fresh lemon juice for tartness, a bit of cardamom for a touch of exotic aromaticity, and some butter to smooth the whole thing out, and you've got the makings of a great but very quick and simple pan sauce. This recipe is also great on the grill. But since a hot fire, which is what you should use, is a bit hotter than the broiler even set on high, cook the chops for about 1 minute less per side.