It would be an affront to our journalistic integrity to treat this review any differently than our others. The price may have been right, but the service was spotty, the chef didn’t seem to know what he was doing and not everything we ordered even made it to the table.

We’re talking (quite snarkily) of the meal we prepared at the man of this endeavor’s apartment last Friday. The food ended up tasting pretty good, but the Michelin stars are probably not forthcoming. We claimed in our Introduction to “spend our way to the poorhouse one paycheck and one graduate school stipend at a time” and this plan has worked even better than we imagined. In the spirit of summer (and having to spend money on so many other fabulous things), we are cutting back by cooking more from home for awhile. (This is actually a pretty common occurrence, but now we’re just writing about it!)

This guy hasn’t grilled in a few summers, so our first hurdle was the long process of starting our little kettle. The charcoal took on the second try, but we never got our coals to heat the whole area, so the cooking was slow in our restricted space. Added to this, someone got QUITE ambitious with the menu (two meats, a bowl of veggies and dessert), so the prep time was long. (It’s a hassle to get the grill going, so if you’re going to do it, no reason to hold back, right?)

We started with chicken tenders that had soaked in a tasty (though maybe a bit too powerful) lime-chili marinade and cooked them directly over the flame. To this we added a halibut fillet (the last from a deep sea fishing trip in Alaska last summer) that we cooked in a super-simple and super-traditional way. Wrapped in foil with salt, pepper and butter, we grilled it slowly on the edge of the coals. The results were fantastic! The fish is so tasty that you don’t want to overpower its natural flavor.

For sides, we threw together some peppers, zucchini, corn and onion and grilled those up before topping with a very nice olive oil, balsalmic vinegar and herb drizzle (adapted from here). These were a mixed bag; the onion’s hard to cook (we lost half the slices through the cracks) but tasted the best, while the corn and zucchini didn’t pep up quite like we had hoped.

For dessert, we roasted up some bananas and made a great chocolate sauce, though the better half of this endeavor was already half asleep. Neither of us go out of our way for bananas, but cooking them this way made them really soft and tasty. The whole reason for this dish, though, is the Kahlua-spiked sauce which the fellow plans to put on all sorts of other things for dessert.

While it was a great night in, clearly we need to work on our grill skills!