They rub chunks of bluefish with cumin and coriander and then, when serving the dish, offer a thick avocado and corn vinaigrette to cool the pungency. They instruct you to prepare chicken breasts with basil and garlic, which wouldn't amount to much of a dish if the breasts were served alone. But they come with startling grilled peach halves, glazed with balsamic vinegar and molasses. Mr. McLaughlin displays a sure hand in his several variations of the backyard standby, barbecued ribs. Many rib grillers employ one or another moist method of precooking to insure that the ribs cook through before they go to the grill for finishing.
Fish are so beautiful in their own right that they often require the least effort of all.
He tells you how to broil a whole gulf flounder, to take one example, scoring the side that's up, brushing it with a butter-lemon mixture and garnishing it with parsley when it's done. Yet if you eat fish often, variations do become necessary, and there are hundreds of possibilities here. Saucing is the key. The dish I enjoyed most was based on Mr. Guste's recipe for wahoo, a member of the mackerel family. The fish is served with creole sauce piquante, a flour-thickened sauce made of tomatoes, onions, cayenne and thyme, among other ingredients.