18 Quick Grilling Recipes to Try This Summer

The sauce for this shrimp is a simple version of Italy's salmoriglio, typically made with lemon and herbs in a mortar. The sauce is also delicious spooned over grilled swordfish or any other meaty fish.

A bold mixture of red-pepper flakes, garlic, thyme, lemon juice, and olive oil serves as a spicy marinade for bone-in chicken breasts. If you want your chicken spicier still, increase the red pepper or leave the breasts in the marinade for an hour or two.

The burger at Tyler Florence's Wayfare Tavern in San Francisco is called Le Grand with good reason: It's a custom blend of ground prime rib, brisket, skirt steak and tenderloin, topped with Nueske's bacon and Cowgirl Creamery's triple-cream Mt. Tam cheese. The recipe is also delicious with a mix of chuck and sirloin.

Prick fresh sausages all over before grilling to release the excess fat.

Roasting a whole chicken takes about an hour, but cut out the backbone and flatten the bird and it will grill perfectly in 30 minutes. Melissa Rubel Jacobson rubs the chicken all over with a very simple, Thai-inspired mix of red curry paste, coconut milk and brown sugar.

Depending on the season, Travis Lett also makes this salad with plums, peaches and pears.

An apricot-based sauce brushed on chicken wings before grilling gives them plenty of flavor; extra sauce is good for dipping.

The flatiron steak, a.k.a. the top blade steak, is a marbled cut of beef from the shoulder. Uniform in thickness and rectangular in shape (just like an old-fashioned iron), it's easy to butterfly for quick cooking on the grill. Here, Melissa Rubel flavors the meat with a bold Southwestern-style marinade made with smoky chipotle and fresh orange juice.

This grilled-vegetable version of eggplant Parmesan, like the one Grace Parisi's Calabrian grandmother used to make, is much lighter than the fried kind.

"Celery is a vegetable people either love or hate, and we try to get people to love all their vegetables," says chef Amanda Cohen. She sets off celery's bitterness and crunch with meaty oyster mushrooms and grapes that have been grilled until almost bursting.

Lee Anne Wong plays with an array of Asian ingredients to create a wonderful marinade for extra-firm tofu or high-fiber tempeh (cakes made from fermented whole soy beans). Tempeh's nutty flavor and grainy texture make it an acquired taste, but Wong loves it here.

To accompany fresh tuna tacos, make a quick, vinegary, supercrunchy red-onion pickle. It's lovely with the warm, soft tortillas. To bump up the flavors of the tacos even more, add a dash of hot sauce and a healthy squirt of fresh lime juice.

Floral and lightly acidic salsa brings out the buttery, rich flavors of grilled salmon. Salmon is meaty enough to stay intact on a grill and gets meltingly tender as it cooks, and you can save the leftover salsa to serve with grilled lamb, chicken, or pork.

A simple glaze, made of sticky-sweet honey, savory soy sauce, and fresh garlic, drenches each perfectly grilled pork chop in this recipe. For the most evenly cooked pork, with delicious char and grill marks, flip the pork frequently over high heat for the first several minutes of cooking, and then finish the meat on lower heat.

Dessert deserves a place on the grill, too. These brownies take on a deliciously smoky flavor on the grill from "baking" in a skillet set over hot coals. Just remember to butter the skillet generously.

Chef Sheldon Simeon's recipe for a Hawaiian twist on Mexican elote features grilled corn slathered in a creamy, cheesy calamansi mayonnaise, which gets its acidic twang from a sour citrus fruit native to the South Pacific (you can substitute Key Limes in a pinch). Japanese chile flakes (ichimi togarashi) add heat; aonori (dried seaweed) flakes add umami oomph and island style.

Of course classic hot dogs are never a bad idea on the grill, but if you're looking for an easy upgrade this is it. These "BLT" hot dogs are topped with crispy bacon, fresh tomatoes and crunchy lettuce dressed with a creamy caraway-pickle mayonnaise.

A salad that's anything but boring, this grilled shrimp gets an extra boost from the green goddess dressing. Charring the dressing ingredients before making it lends a smokey depth to the whole dish.