With the Fourth of July falling on a Tuesday this year, there are more opportunities than ever to celebrate. The lucky ones—and the smart ones—are the people who planned ahead and took a vacation day on Monday, giving them a four-day weekend.

The rest of us can still party on, but we’ll have to plan ahead a bit and look for ways to do it around our work schedule. So that started me on a quest for fun and easy recipes for a backyard barbecue. It’s a great way to entertain anytime during the summer, but it’s particularly perfect on this weekend, which is an ideal time for friends to get together with friends to celebrate our great good fortune at being Americans.

You can’t beat a grill full of hamburgers, hot dogs, and a good steak or two. When that’s on the menu, I’m likely also to offer a side of baked beans. After about a month of fooling around with a recipe, I’ve finally come up with one we all like, bacon bourbon baked beans with caramelized onions. It does require some advance prep, but then you can throw it in the fridge and warm it up last minute. It also travels pretty well, it tastes great, and boy does it make the kitchen smell awesome.

I generally skip chicken when it comes to the grill. I know it can be done, but I usually get better results with other cooking methods. I love fish and seafood, but I often lose half my meal when it slips between the grates. I know there’s specialized equipment to help prevent that, but I am having great luck with a very simple piece of specialized equipment, and that’s a piece of foil. Foil packets full of seafood, chopped veggies, and fresh herbs, along with a drizzle of olive oil and a splash of lemon or white wine, work perfectly when hosting friends who don’t care for meat. As with the baked beans, some advance prep is required, but then all you have to do when guests arrive is pop it on the grill.

If you want something out of the ordinary, consider lamb chops on the grill. Michelle Anjirbag, our reporter who covers Connecticut River valley towns, recently recommended a delicious recipe for lamb chops with Moroccan barbecue sauce, marinated with a mint chutney, and served with additional mint chutney on the side. That recipe can be found at www.myrecipes.com.

Even if you’re not into lamb chops, it’s worth checking the recipe out if only for the Moroccan barbecue sauce, which combines honey, cilantro, lemon juice, rice wine vinegar, ketchup, and soy sauce, along with a bevy of beautifully balanced herbs and spices including whole star anise, ground cardamom, whole cloves, and hot chili flakes. It’s not your mom’s barbeque sauce, to say the least, unless your mom is an amazing cook from Morocco, in which case, lucky you.

Michelle also has recommended a fun summer drink that would be perfect for the backyard barbecue bar, and that’s a Pink Grapefruit and Gin Slush. You’ll have to plan ahead for this one, as it needs to chill for about eight hours, but it will definitely cool you right off as you’re working the grill. You can find that at www.davidlebovitz.com.

Another summer cocktail idea was recently developed by Branford native Anthony DeSerio, who works the bar at GW Carson’s in Branford and also at Carson’s on Whitfield in Guilford. This one requires a few special ingredients, and some planning ahead as well, but once you’ve prepared the base ingredients, it’s a snap to mix up at a party and it’s sure to impress your guests. A frequent cocktail contributor on Faith Middleton’s NPR program The Food Schmooze, Anthony says he often thinks of Italy’s Aperol Spritz as the iconic summer cocktail.

“With the current popularity of sparkling rose, I thought, why not combine the two? Infusing Aperol with wild hibiscus tea adds another layer of delicate floral flavor and fragrance, making this the ultimate summer spritz,” Anthony says.

He’s dubbed his new cocktail the Floreale and provided us with the recipe.

And, whenever I’m looking for a new recipe, I’m sure to stop by Michele Vejar’s blog, the Traveling Epicurean. She has several recommendations for summer barbeques, including grilled marinated steak on skewers, yogurt chicken kabobs, and one for homemade barbeque sauce.

Foil Packets Full of Seafood

The basic concept here is pretty simple: You take some fish, or seafood, or even just veggies and you put it on a piece of foil. Add more veggies, some fresh herbs, or spices, and then add butter and lemon or white wine. Fold it up tightly, then cook it on the grill, right next to your burgers and dogs. Many recipes call for flipping the packet halfway through the cooking time, and if your grill doesn’t get that hot, that does make sense, but if you have a gas grill where you can crank the heat, that isn’t necessary.

One of my favorite recipes is this one from the blog Creme de la Crumb. I used both shrimp and scallops, and it was delicious. My friend Kelly didn’t bother pre-cooking the corn or potatoes, and the pieces were small enough that they cooked up just fine, she says. If you have bigger chunks, however, it does make sense to pre-cook both the corn and potatoes. Here’s the recipe:

Shrimp and Scallop Boil Foil Packet

Adapted from a recipe from Creme de la Crumb (www.lecremedelacrumb.com)

Ingredients:

1 pound shrimp, peeled and de-veined

1 pound sea scallops

2 to 4 ears of corn on the cob, husked

½ pound chicken Andouille sausage

1 pound baby red potatoes or baby yellow potatoes

3 to 4 tbs. Old Bay seasoning

salt and pepper, to taste

3 to 6 tsp. minced garlic

juice of 1 lemon, plus lemon wedges for serving

6 tbs. butter, melted, plus ½ cup, divided

chopped fresh parsley, for topping

Directions

• Chop corn into thirds. Chop potatoes into 2-inch pieces. Boil corn and potatoes for 10 minutes. Drain and set aside.

• In a large bowl, combine shrimp, scallops, sausage, corn, and potatoes. Stir together melted butter, Old Bay seasoning, garlic, juice from the lemon, and salt and pepper to taste and pour over shrimp, sausage, and veggies. Stir to coat. Make sure everything is well coated. If not, add more butter and lemon juice as needed

• Divide between four 12 x 12-inch sheets of aluminum foil. Fold edges of foil up around the food to create a tightly closed packet.

• Cook on preheated grill over medium-high heat for 8 to 10 minutes on one side, then flip and cook another 8 to 10 minutes on the second side, or a total of about 15 to 20 minutes on one side if you have a gas grill where the temperature can get up to about 400 degrees. Alternately, you can bake the packets at 400 degrees in the oven for 15 to 20 minutes until corn is tender and shrimp are pink and the scallops are fully cooked as well.

• Melt remaining butter in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat.

• Serve seafood packs with chopped parsley, lemon wedges, and extra melted butter.

Check out the original recipe from Creme de la Crumb and find a recipe for homemade Old Bay-like seasoning at www.lecremedelacrumb.com.

Bacon Bourbon Baked Beans with Caramelized Onions

Don’t get me wrong. I like baked beans straight out of a can just fine, and if that’s all I have time for, no problem. Still, when planning ahead for a party recently, I wanted to do something to make them a little more special, so I asked some friends for recommendations.

Just about everyone I asked had an opinion. A little maple syrup and a dash of mustard. Onions and cut-up hot dogs. Brown sugar, mustard, and bacon. Add a dash of Worcestershire sauce. Bourbon—add bourbon. Or beer. Several called for prepping the beans from scratch, which I found admirable, but that felt like too much work. Still, in the past, when I’ve added ingredients to canned beans, it can get really soupy, so when my friend Eileen McNamara of East Hampton recommended this canned beans trick, I was intrigued: “I drain ‘em, throw a bunch of onions and some molasses in, and let them cook an hour or so in the crockpot.”

Sounded good to me. So did onions, and if onions are good, caramelized onions are even better, if you have the time. Bourbon for sure, and I happened to have some on hand. And who can say no to bacon? So that was the plan, and here’s the recipe. If you have vegetarian friends, go with the vegetarian beans, and serve the bacon and Worcestershire sauce (it includes fish sauce) on the side for your omnivore friends.

Bacon Bourbon Baked Beans

by Pem McNerney

Ingredients:

5 medium onions, caramelized

3 28-ounce cans Bush’s Baked Beans

(or your favorite brand)

½ cup Grandma’s Molasses, Original Flavor

1 tbs. Worcestershire sauce

10 slices good quality cooked bacon

(optional or can serve on the side)

¼ cup bourbon (I used Blanton’s)

Directions:

• Thinly slice onions in a big Dutch oven, and caramelize them, low and slow, with a bit of butter and olive oil, for more than an hour until they are good and brown. If you don’t have time, cut up an onion or two, and cook them for about four to five minutes. The low and slow caramelized onions will give the beans a sweeter, more complex flavor, but browned onions will do in a pinch.

• Drain the cans of beans, retaining the sauce in case you want to add some in later.

• Add the beans to the onions in the Dutch oven, and add a half cup of molasses. Add the Worcestershire sauce, if using (omit for vegetarian version). Taste. Adjust the taste, adding in retained bean sauce, molasses, and Worcestershire sauce until you have a balance you like.

• Add bacon if you are using it. Make sure it is cooked to a crisp.

• Add bourbon. Again, you can add more or less to your liking. Cook at a simmer for about an hour, until the sharp taste of the alcohol is cooked off.

• At this point, it can be refrigerated and rewarmed in a slow oven (about 300- to 325°F) about 15 to 20 minutes, right before serving. It’s best served justly lightly warmed, or even at room temperature. And if there are leftovers (unlikely!), it’s also good straight out of the fridge.

Michele’s Steak on a Stick

“These grilled marinated steak strips on skewers are bursting with flavor. You can marinate them for 15 minutes and still get an amazing taste or all day for a deeper, richer taste. These little ‘steaks on a stick’…what my kids call them, get caramelized on the edges from the brown sugar addition in the marinade. They happen to be one of my kids favorite things to have for dinner!

“I first saw this recipe on a grilling special with Paula Deen and Bobby Flay. I did add scallions and a bit more brown sugar and garlic to the recipe as always I need to tweak it to my own perfection. This recipe is unbelievably easy and so delicious once you try it you will have it as a go to marinade especially now that summer BBQ’s are here! You won’t even want to dip with these grilled-marinated steak on skewers into a sauce of sorts because you’ll love them just as they are.”—Michele Vejar

Grilled Marinated Steaks on Skewers

By Michele Vejar

Ingredients:

1 ½ pounds of sirloin tips or ribeye

¼ cup tamari sauce (it’s a darker, slightly more

concentrated and thicker then soy) or ½ cup

of Kikkoman reduced sodium soy sauce

½ cup water

¼ cup brown sugar

2 crushed garlic cloves

2 green onion scallions in ¼-inch slices

pkg of wooden skewers

½ tsp. salt

1 tbs. olive oil

Directions

• Put wooden skewers in a dish of water to soak (so they are less likely to burn on the grill).

• Slice sirloin tips or ribeye into strips length wise so they are about 1 ½” wide, ¼-½ thick and 3” long pieces.

• Cut a 15” x 16” piece of parchment or you can use a large Ziploc baggie.

• Place four steak strips in between the layers at a time.

• Pound out steak strips to 1/8” thickness…they will almost double in size.

• In a medium/large bowl add tamari sauce, brown sugar, water, garlic, and scallions and steak strips.

• Cover and marinate from 15 minutes to all day.

• Take the marinated steak pieces out and dry them off on heavy duty paper towels. (You don’t want the paper towels to fall apart and stick to the steak strips, so Vejar uses Bounty.)

• Take the skewers and pat those dry. Begin to thread each piece of meat with the skewer right down the middle. You will get about 20 skewered steak strips. Sprinkle ¼ tsp. salt on each side. Add 1 tbs. olive oil to lightly coat.

• Add the skewered steak to a hot grill lining up the skewers so that the wooden ends overlap over another piece of meat.

• Sear for 3 minutes on each side until caramelized on the edges

• Mangia!

For more of Vejar’s recipes, including yogurt chicken kabobs and her homemade barbeque sauce, visit http://thetravelingepicurean.com.

Floreale

Anthony DeSerio is not only a bartender at GW Carson’s in Branford and Carson’s on Whitfield in Guilford, he’s also a frequent contributor to Faith Middleton’s NPR program, Food Schmooze. He’s past president of the United States Bartender’s Guild representing Connecticut, and he’s at his happiest when he’s crafting cocktails. Here’s his latest creation.

Floreale

By Anthony DeSerio

Makes 1 cocktail

Ingredients:

1 ounce hibiscus-infused Aperol *

1 ounce Carpano Antica Sweet Vermouth

1 ounce sparkling rosé

1 wild hibiscus flower in syrup

Grapefruit zest

Directions:

Build the cocktail in a champagne flute, in this order:

• Place hibiscus flower in base of a chilled champagne flute

• Pour in 1 ounce hibiscus-infused Aperol*

• Next, 1 ounce Carpano Sweet vermouth

• Place the end of your bar spoon down the center—careful not to crush the flower—and pour your sparkling rosé down the twisted spoon so as not to overflow the glass with fizz. Give a light stir as you remove your spoon, or gently pour in your rosé down the side if you don’t have a spoon. Express oils of grapefruit zest over the top. You can also serve on the rocks: Combine all ingredients into your ice filled glass and give a light stir. Garnish with a wild hibiscus flower after expressing the oils of a grapefruit zest over the top.

* To make hibiscus-infused Aperol: Pour contents of a 750ml bottle of your favorite Aperol (DeSerio uses Cassoni 1814) into a glass container or large mason jar. Add three wild hibiscus heart-tee tea bags. Seal the jar and give it a swirl for 30 seconds to a minute; let sit at least an hour and a half (giving another stir now and then). Once done to your taste, remove the tea bags and transfer back into your bottle or another container you can cap. This should last about 3 weeks if you don’t use it all right away! Note: If you don’t want to infuse a whole bottle, use 1/3 of a bottle of Aperol to 1 wild hibiscus heart-tee tea bag. Wild hibiscus flowers in syrup and hibiscus heart-tee can be purchased at www.wildhibiscus.com or at some area liquor stores.