Recipe: Summer Grilled Beef Salad

In honor of the last week of summer, I thought I'd post a favorite dish of mine. I love fresh summer salads, slightly wilted by delicious grilled meats. I made this Marinated Grilled Beef Salad in under 10 minutes, start to finish. Not only is this a fast meal to make when you are out playing late, like you should be, it's light for hot nights and healthy.

I don't usually buy packaged products or already marinated meats, but these boneless Hawaiian style beef short ribs from Trader Joes caught my eye. My first thought was "boneless short ribs, why?", but when I picked up the package I noticed something: the ingredient list was short and all normal food items. No five syllable additives, no high fructose corn syrup. In fact, the marinade sounded like something I'd make.

Sure, it's almost just as easy to marinate the meat yourself with the same 5-6 ingredients on the package, but like I said, we were out late playing in the sunshine. This seemed like a perfect comprimise.

My hunch is that this meat wasn't really from the short ribs, much like "Boneless Country Ribs" aren't really ribs. But the texture, marbling and grain seemed similar at least. I'll have to talk to a butcher and get back to you on that.

I made my charcoal fire good and hot, a two-layer fire with the grill grate close to flames. You can of course grill these with a fully preheated gas grill.

Grill the ribs on high heat, 2 minutes per side approximately, then let the meat rest while you make the salad. The beef came out tender, with a light sweetness from the marinade and, most importantly, not overly salty. So often commercial rubs and marinates are loaded with salt, but these came out nicely balanced.

The salad is simple: Arugula greens with broccoli slaw mix in a light sesame-soy dressing. Again, I make this classic dressing at home, but today for speed and ease, Mr. Paul Newman made it for me. What a guy.

Cut the beef against the grain, diagonally and toss. Mmmm, and not a speck of guilt.