First!  My apologize to the Bangles…it was just too easy!

Second!  It’s not Monday anymore but what the heck it’s still a good headline!

If you’ve been following the last saga of my trip to the Fancy Food Show you know that I’ve become the owner of a fair amount of Buffalo Style Hot Sauce from Tabasco.  So, it seemed only appropriate that I cook something with the hot sauce.  There will be more, at a later date, about the hot sauce itself, but in the mean time I adapted a recipe from one of my favorite new cookbooks The Meatball Shop Cookbook by Daniel Holzman and Michael Chernow.  I’ve adapted their Mini Buffalo Chicken Balls for the grill and turned this into a salad instead of an appetizer.

Grilled Buffalo Chicken Meatball Salad

Ingredients:

• 1/3 cup vegetable oil
• 1/4  cup Tabasco Buffalo Style Hot Sauce
• 2 pound ground chicken, preferably thigh meat
• 2 large egg
• 1 celery stalk, minced
• 1 1/2 cups bread crumbs
• 2 teaspoons salt

Directions:

The recipe calls for ground chicken and more specifically thigh meat.  Because chicken white meat is so lean and you’re going to be cooking this twice I recommend you try to find ground thigh meat.  If you can’t get your butcher or meat cutter to grind up a package of thighs for you then just do it yourself.  You can use a meat grinder or if it’s all you got try your food processor.

Preheat your grill to 350 degrees using indirect heat.  Using the oil coat a large baking dish about 9 X 13 in size.

Combine all the remain ingredients in a large bowl.  Roll the mixture into large meatballs, make sure you pack the meatballs firmly.  Place the meatballs in the oil baking dish.  Line the meatballs up into neat rows and pack them tightly into the baking dish.

“Bake” on your grill for about 15 minutes or until they start to get firm and hold their shape.

Quickly get your grill set up for direct high heat.  Remove the meatballs  with a spatula and grill them until they start to get grill marks and reach an internal temperature of 165 degrees.  Don’t over cook!

Let the meatballs rest for five minutes and combine with whatever salad ingredients you like.  Since it’s a “Buffalo” salad it has to be served with bleu cheese dressing.

You can easily cook this on your smoker or oven.  The grilling at the end is to give it a little of that “grilled” flavor I like. It’s not a necessary step but a good one.  Also, by making the meatballs much smaller you can toss them in additional hot sauce and serve them with bleu cheese dipping sauce for a great Big Game appetizer.

The “baking” of the meatballs on the grill, using indirect heat, is because the meatballs are not firm enough to set on grill grates without falling apart.  By cooking them a little first you can then grill them without any problem.

Enjoy!

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Larry Gaian

Over the holidays my friends at Mr. Bar-B-Q offered to send me out one of their grill accessories to use.  They also offered to give another set of whatever they sent as a giveaway on the blog.  I couldn’t pass up a chance to get my readers something nice so I accepted.  (Note:  This is my way of saying, so I’m in compliance with all stupid laws and rules, that the pizza grilling kit I’m going to talk about here was free to me.)

This isn’t so much a review of the Mr. Bar-B-Q Grill Stone Pizza Set they sent me, but a review of my pizza making skills, which are somewhat lacking.  The pizza stone and giant pizza spatula, I  hesitate to call it a pizza peel, worked great.  Mrs. Grail bakes an awesome pizza in the oven so I attempted to duplicate her efforts on my 26 inch Weber Kettle.  Take a look at how I did it and offer up some suggestions at the end in the comment section for your chance to win your own Mr. Bar-B-Q Grill Stone Pizza Set.

Keep in mind this is a Weber 26 inch Kettle which is considerably larger than the 22 inch most people have in their backyard.  The first thing I did was fire up a whole chimney of charcoal and once it was ready form it into a ring around the bowl.  Because of the size of the kettle I needed to add some extra charcoal.  Once all the charcoal was hot I placed the pizza stone on the grill.

For some reason, I’m not quite sure why, I thought it would be a good idea to have the pizza stone a little higher up into the dome lid so I placed the pizza stone on top of my GrillGrates.  I’m not sure if this was a good idea or not.  I’ll need to try this again without them to see how the process goes.

The pizzas I cooked seemed to take longer than I would have anticipated, about 15 minutes.  I don’t know maybe that’s the right time frame, but it just seemed like a long time.

The flavor was great and Mrs. Grail’s Pizza Dough Recipe was fantastic but for some reason I just wasn’t satisfied with the results.  I was hoping for more of that “wood fired pizza” flavor.  It just wasn’t there.

Here’s what I would do next time to try to improve.

I think I need a much hotter kettle than I had.  I didn’t the get the temperature in the dome over 400 degrees.  To do this I need to either use more charcoal or use my smaller 22 inch kettle.  Is the ring of charcoal a good idea?  Or should I have spread it out?

I’ll probably try using the pizza stone directly on the grate instead of trying to raise it higher.  Thoughts?

Want to win a Grill Stone Pizza Set from Mr. Bar-B-Q so you can make great pizza outdoors?  Here’s how to get an entry:

• Leave a comment here about cooking pizza outdoors.  It can be a comment about how you’d like to do it for the first time, it can be a comment about how I can improve my pizza making skills. Just leave a comment.  You can leave multiple comments for multiple entries, but not more than once a day.
• Next if you have a Facebook account you can get an additional entry by “Liking” this post on Mr. Bar-B-Q’s Facebook Page.  (You’ll need to “Like” their page first, please do so.)
• You will also get one more entry if you “Reshare” the link on Mr. Bar-B-Q’s Facebook page.

On the morning of January 28th all entries will be transcribed into an Excel spreadsheet.  A number will be selected using a random number generator at Random.Org.  And that will decide our winner.  Winner will be notified that morning via email and/or Facebook!  Easy?  I sure hope so…

Thanks to Contestgirl for the promotion!

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2012 Larry Gaian

It’s that time of the month again.  The time when some of my food blogger friends and I attempt to create dishes from a list of four ingredients that some mean spirited individual comes up with.  Sometime the ingredients make some sense, and other times they just make no sense.

This was one of those months where the ingredients posed a little more challenge.  The ingredients for the November “On Our Grills: 4 Ingredients Challenge” were Turkey, Flour Tortillas, Cranberries and Cauliflower.  Flour tortillas and turkey makes me think of a wrap of some kind, so I went with a modified wrap.  A quesadilla!  But how do you use cauliflower in a wrap?  One of the things I like do when coming up with ideas for the challenge is to look not only at the flavor of an ingredient, I try to consider the texture of it.  In this case I new the cauliflower would give me some crunch so I decided to make a cauliflower and cranberry salsa.  It actually worked pretty good.

I had a turkey roast in the freezer so I decided this was the best thing to use for this challenge.  I had never smoked a turkey roast before so I figured I’d give it a try.  I was amazed at how well the roast took to the smoke.  It tasted amazing.  So after having a nice smoked turkey with mashed tater dinner I used some leftovers for the Turkey Quesadillas with Cauliflower & Cranberry Salsa.

No real recipe this time around.  This was one of the cook by the seat of my pants meals.  The salsa was made by chopping up some raw cauliflower into small little chunks.  I added some chopped cranberries, finely chopped jalapenos, chopped green onions with some salt and a squeeze of lime juice.  After a couple of hours in the refrigerator the flavor blended very nicely.  The cranberry gave the salsa a bit of a tang, so I added a pinch of sugar to give it a little less of a bite.

The quesadillas were cooked using cheddar cheese, smoked turkey and Tortilla Land tortillas.  The salsa was a nice touch and added a very interesting flavor profile.  Raw cauliflower has a flavor that I can only describe as interesting.  I wanted to use roasted cauliflower because roasting it brings out a nice sweetness, but the consistency of roasted cauliflower would have made the salsa too mushy.

I’m not sure I would make it a habit of using cauliflower salsa, but I certainly was able to accomplish one of the main goals of the “challenge” and that’s to come up with flavor combinations that I would not normally have thought of.  The cauliflower with the cranberry was a great way to use the ingredients.

I can’t wait to see what December has in store for me!

Additional participants in this month’s Ingredient Challenge include:

Paul Haight of No Excuses BBQ – ENTRY HERE

The No Excuses BBQ website was started in January of 2009 as a way to record the author’s goal of cooking outdoors at least once a week throughout the year and showing the results to the world. Somewhere along the way things got out of control…

Marc Van Der Wouw of Grill Adventures - ENTRY HERE

Grilladventures by broadcastmarc is started on march of 2010.I started the BBQ thing when I was 30,before that we eat a lot outside.have fun,but when the kids came in our life We start serious cooking.Most of it is realy healthy I think;-)The grill has a special place in my heart,We love to do things outside..Everything I make is an adventure,and sometimes we use the books.We try to grill as much as we can year round.

Wilfred Reinke of The Oshawa Ogre – ENTRY HERE

Wilfred is somewhat of a newcomer to the BBQ scene having only done standard grilling for most of his 50 years, He found and became passionate about Low & Slow about 2 years ago. and that passion also morphed into a second hobby which is writing. Oshawa Ogre’s Views News & BBQ’s has been a project that has taken on a life of it’s own and blessed him with many many new friends in the BBQ community on Twitter, facebook and through the blog.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

I was an early adopter of Bacon Salt and have sung it’s praises ever since the first time I sprinkled it on my eggs one morning.  A few years later along came Baconnaise, a tasty mixture of bacon and mayonnaise.  I’ve been a devoted user ever since.  So when Justin Esch emailed me recently to ask if I wanted to try Bacon Croutons I said yes.  Even before they arrived I started to think about how I was going to use them.  Croutons are normally found on salads.  But it wasn’t likely that I was going to waste the goodness of bacon on a salad.  I had to come up with something more exciting than lettuce.

Over on Pork, Knife and Spoon I have been working on a series of blog posts on pork ribs.  I had some rib trimmings left over and it occurred to me that a Pulled Pork Cake, much along the lines of a crab cake could be a beautiful and tasty creation.  Usually I start my recipe development with a bit of internet and cookbook research.  My search for “pork cakes” lead to very little information but it did lead me to an actual pork cake.   I figured the best way to do a pulled pork cake was to make them as similar to a crab cake as possible.

I made up the pulled pork cakes, following the recipe below, and as I was getting ready to pan fry them the bag of J&D Bacon Croutons were staring across the kitchen counter at me.  It’s almost as if they were speaking to me.  It was in that brief moment that inspiration struck.  I decided to crush the Bacon Croutons and use them to bread the pulled pork cakes.  It’s not the first time I’ve had inspiration in the kitchen, but rarely does that inspiration come out as good as this one did.  The combination of the pulled pork, seasoning and bacon created a fantastic flavor profile.  I’m going to be making these pulled pork cakes when I have left over pulled pork.

Pulled Pork Cakes

Ingredients:

• 3 cups pulled pork, course chopped
• 2 cups panko break crumbs
• 1 teaspoon jalapeno, finely chopped
• 1 teaspoon bell pepper, finely chopped
• 1 teaspoon shallot, finely chopped
• 1 egg, beaten well
• 1/4 cup mayonnaise
• Bacon drippings
• Salt, Pepper and BBQ Rub, to taste

Directions:

In a small skillet melt the bacon drippings.  When hot saute the jalapeno, bell pepper and shallots until tender.  Let them cool to room temperature.

In a medium mixing bowl combine all remaining ingredients and mix well.   I used about a tablespoon of BBQ rub, but you can use however much you want.  Form the mixture into three compacted patties.  I used a hamburger patty press to make sure they were consistent in size and firmly packed.  Lay the patties out on parchment paper and chill in the refrigerator until cold.

Dust the patties in a little flour and then put in an egg wash.  From the egg wash put the patties into the crushed Bacon Croutons.  Make sure you cover both the side and all the way around the edges.  (NOTE:  When you open the package of Bacon Croutons you need to resist tasting them.  You have been warned, if you eat one you could find yourself eating the whole package.  They are that good.

Fry the patties until golden brown in oil.  Place them on a paper towel or rack to drain and then put them in a 200 degree oven until warmed through.  Serve garnished with BBQ Mayo (Mayo mixed with a little BBQ sauce) or some other BBQ condiment.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

• Chicken
• Pumpkin
• Brown Rice
• Apples

All the ingredients are traditional Fall/Halloween ingredients so I didn’t really think it would be all that much of a challenge for the participants this month.  The challenge for me was coming up with something I didn’t think anyone else would come up with.   The rules for the challenge are few.  The protein has to be cooked outdoors and you have to use the other ingredients in some form or another.  I didn’t want to use the pumpkin and brown rice in a traditional way so I set out to walk through a couple of local grocery stores looking for pumpkin products.

Here is what I came up with:

Apple Cider Brined Smoke Roasted whole chicken with Pumpkin Muffin, Brown Rice and Apple stuffing!  Yep!  Pumpkin Muffin stuffing.  And you know what?  It was darn tasty.

BBQ Grail’s Halloween Apple Cider Brined Chicken

Ingredients:

• 1 quart water
• 1 quart ice cold water
• 1 cup apple cider
• 1 cup kosher salt
• 1 teaspoon Pumpkin Pie Spice

Directions:

Bring the quart of room temperature water to a boil in a medium sauce pan.  Add the kosher salt and stir until dissolved.  Remove from heat and add the 1 quart of ice cold water, apple cider and pumpkin pie spice.  Stir to dissolve.  If it’s still warm let it cook completely.

Find a container that will allow you to completely submerge the whole chicken in the brine.  Add the chicken and the brine, cover and put it all in your refrigerator for 12 hours or so.

BBQ Grail’s Halloween Pumpkin Muffin Stuffing

Ingredients:

• 2 cups cubed Pumpkin (and walnut) muffins.
• 1/2 cup uncooked brown rice
• 1/4 cup cubed apple pieces
• Poultry Seasoning
• Salt & Pepper to taste
• Chicken Broth

Directions

Two days before you’re ready to eat, cut the muffins into 1 inch cubes and spread them out on a baking sheet.  Leave the sheet out on your counter and let them get good and stale.

When you’re ready to cook start out by cooking the 1/2 cup of uncooked brown rice.  This should yield about 2 cups of cooked rice.  When the brown rice is cooked and cooled.  Mix all the remaining ingredients together with the rice.  Use enough seasoning, salt, pepper and chicken broth to give you the seasoning level and consistency you want.  Leave the stuffing a littler firmer than you will want because the muffins and rice will absorb a lot of juice from the chicken while it’s cooking.

Stuff your chicken and cook it on your grill or smoker has you normally do until it’s done.

Serve and enjoy!

I served mine with some carrots, mashed taters and gravy!

Additional participants in this month’s Ingredient Challenge include:

Paul Haight of No Excuses BBQ – ENTRY HERE

The No Excuses BBQ website was started in January of 2009 as a way to record the author’s goal of cooking outdoors at least once a week throughout the year and showing the results to the world. Somewhere along the way things got out of control…

Hanneke Eerden of The Dutchess Cooks – ENTRY HERE

After years of cooking, grilling, baking and reading other people’s blogs, I thought “why not start my own blog??” And I did, in 2010, but already after a short period of time, a blog wasn’t enough, and I started my own website. It’s not my goal to publish or come up with fancy and difficult recipes: just good and delicious food with an international twist! Straight from my plate to yours!

Kristina Vanni of “The Daily Dish” – ENTRY HERE

Kristina has been writing “The Daily Dish” for www.BetterRecipes.com for the past two years. The blog covers a wide variety of recipes, but firing up the grill truly lights up her passion for food! She was named “America’s Next Pork Personality” by Guy Fieri for one of her grilled pork dishes, won the outdoor grilling division of the National Beef Cook-Off, and her winning grilled lamb-burger took her all the way to the land Down Under with Meat and Livestock Australia. The “4-Ingredient Challenge” is a fun and exciting way to get creative on the grill!

Curt McAdams of Livefire: – ENTRY HERE

Marc Van Der Wouw of Grill Adventures - ENTRY HERE

Grilladventures by broadcastmarc is started on march of 2010.I started the BBQ thing when I was 30,before that we eat a lot outside.have fun,but when the kids came in our life We start serious cooking.Most of it is realy healthy I think;-)The grill has a special place in my heart,We love to do things outside..Everything I make is an adventure,and sometimes we use the books.We try to grill as much as we can year round.

Freek Haan of Freek’s Food Blog - ENTRY HERE

Maybe some of you know me from my Dutch blogsite www.freeksbbq.nl. I have a great passion for grilling, since it is always challenging. For me grilling is a time to relax and to have a great time with friends and family. I wanted to reach more people with my blog since there are so many food lovers and freaks out there! So that’s why I decided to blog in English instead of Dutch.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

Running out of food is not something I want to happen, especially when I’m cooking for quests.  I and since I’m not very good at figuring out the right amount of food to have on hand I often end up with leftovers.  Anyone that loves to BBQ and Grill knows that leftovers are okay to have.  But sometimes, especially, with hamburgers coming up with something different to use the burgers with is often a challenge.  Leftover burgers lends itself to some nice chili, maybe a burrito but other than that I’m often at a loss.  This time around we made some pretty amazing Sloppy Joes.  (This recipe was adapted from a Paula Deen version)

Sloppy Joe’s

• 2 lbs leftover grilled hamburger patties, chopped
• 1/4 cup flour
• 1 tablespoon BBQ rub (I used Plowboy’s Bovine Bold)
• 1 can condensed French Onion soup
• Hamburger Buns
• Mustard (Optional)
• Sliced Onions (Optional)
• Cowboy Candy (Optional)

In a skillet combine the chopped grilled hamburger patties, BBQ rub and flour.  Stir to incorporate everything.  Make sure the flour is cooked through.  Add french onion soup and stir.  When the mixture starts to thicken add enough water to make a “sloppy” consistency.  You can add some hot sauce at this point if you want.

Serve on toasted hamburger buns with onion, mustard and Cowboy Candy.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

Brain Fart!  That can be the only explanation for listing tofu.  And after this time around I am confident I can actually live up to my promise to never, ever use tofu again.  I know lots and lots of people use tofu with great success.  I don’t even mind it in my miso soup.  But for grilling it’s just not something I can manage.  So here it is again…no tofu…ever again.

This month’s ingredients were, tofu, melon, peas and potatoes.  I really did a number on the challengers with this.  I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.  Anyway, one of the reasons I came up with “On Our Grills 4 Ingredient Challenge” was to force us to come up with ingredient combos that didn’t make sense, but still create good food.  Using out heads on creative ways to use the ingredients is one of the benefits.  This time around I think I came up with some great ingredient choices.

Earlier in the week I stopped in at the local Asian market to pick up some tofu and decided to wonder the aisles to see what I could come up with.  Sure enough I came up with a noodle made with sweet potatoes and a soft drink made from melon.  How lucky can a guy get?  Having a noodle made from potatoes took the guess-work out of the how I was going to use potatoes and pretty much dictated I’d be going with an Asian flavor profile.  I’ve had great success using various sodas for sauces and other things in cooking so how difficult could coming up with an Asian broth that uses an Asian melon soda?  It wasn’t all that easy but I think, in the end, it tasted okay.

I also had a can of Spam in the pantry and figured I couldn’t possibly go wrong adding Spam to tofu.  I mean how bad could combining two of the most maligned proteins be?  No real recipe to follow this month, I mean no one else would ever want to try to recreate this dish.  But here’s how I did, what I did.

I seasoned the slices of extra firm tofu with Chinese Five Spice and grilled them alongside my slices of tofu.  As expected the tofu stuck to my grill grates and looked unappetizing.  I was able to save a few small pieces to plate along side the Spam.  (I love grilled Spam, by the way)

I combined some of the Melon soda, miso, garlic chili paste and water to create a somewhat flavorful broth.  It wasn’t something I would ever want to make again, but it didn’t allow me to come up with some different flavors to play with.  After cooking the noodles I slice the snow peas into little slivers and fried them so they were nice and crispy.  The noodles went into the bowl with the broth and the slices of tofu and Spam were added.  The crispy snow peas made a nice garnish on top of everything.

Everyone always wants to know if something tasted good.  This concoction tasted okay.  The melon-miso broth just didn’t have the Asian flavor profile I think this dish needed.  And as usual the consistency of the tofu just wasn’t something I could eat.  Oh, how I hate tofu!

I looked a lot better than it tasted.

Shall we see what everyone else came up with?

Additional participants in this month’s Ingredient Challenge include:

Paul Haight of No Excuses BBQ – ENTRY HERE

The No Excuses BBQ website was started in January of 2009 as a way to record the author’s goal of cooking outdoors at least once a week throughout the year and showing the results to the world. Somewhere along the way things got out of control…

Chris North of Nibble Me This –ENTRY HERE

The Nibble Me This website was created to share Chris’ misadventures in live fire cooking. ”I have no culinary training….I’m just entertaining myself with fire and food”.

Kristina Vanni of “The Daily Dish” – ENTRY HERE

Kristina has been writing “The Daily Dish” for www.BetterRecipes.com for the past two years. The blog covers a wide variety of recipes, but firing up the grill truly lights up her passion for food! She was named ”America’s Next Pork Personality” by Guy Fieri for one of her grilled pork dishes, won the outdoor grilling division of the National Beef Cook-Off, and her winning grilled lamb-burger took her all the way to the land Down Under with Meat and Livestock Australia. The “4-Ingredient Challenge” is a fun and exciting way to get creative on the grill!

Bob Fukushima of Bob’s Brew & Que – ENTRY HERE

Bob started Bob’s Brew and ‘Que in August of 2009 with the intent of sharing his views on food and drink. Originally focused on BBQ and Homebrew, it was inevitable that the influences of his upbringing in the San Francisco Bay Area and it’s wealth of ingredients as well as his heritage as an American of Japanese ancestry would help focus his blog, as it has his approach to food and drink.

Curt McAdams of Livefire:  – ENTRY HERE

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

I have shelves and shelves of rubs, spices, seasonings and sauces.  There is even a spare refrigerator in the garage where the overflow of previously enjoyed jars/bottles of sauces are kept.  I love all the unique flavors you can come up with, but when it comes to expensive cuts of meat and seafood I prefer to go with a much more simple approach.  And that’s the case with these wonderful halibut filets my sister-in-law dropped off from a recent trip to Alaska.  The last time I checked halibut this good was over $19.00 a pound.  At prices like that I want to taste the fish, not seasoning.

Halibut is a very firm white fish and holds up well to grilling directly on the grates.  It you’ve had trouble with fish sticking to your grates try oiling the fish and NOT the grates.  This is the technique I use with great success.  Also, trying to turn the fish to early will also give you sticking problems.  If your grates are clean and you oil the fish when its time to turn over the flesh of the fish will “release” from the grates.  Making sure you’re not using too hot of a grill also will make sure your life is much easier.

I served the halibut with a some roasted potatoes and a zucchini fritter.  Just a touch of tartare sauce for some added zing and we had a fantastic meal.  The zucchini fritter was super simple.  Shred three or four zucchini and place them in a mesh strainer.  Mix in 1 tablespoon of kosher salt and let it sit for 30 minutes.  After 30 minutes cut the crust off two pieces of white bread.  In a food processor grind the bread into a fine powder.  Squeeze as much liquid as possible out of the zucchini and add the bread crumbs, pepper and a little sliced green onion.  Form into patties and pan fry until crisp and cooked through.

I wanted a little dab of tartare sauce to compliment the fish so I mixed some mayo with a touch of Dijon mustard, pickle relish and grated onion together.  It was a little boring so I chopped up a few candied jalapeno and added them to the sauce and bingo, we had ourselves a winner.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

I had a couple of leftover MOINK Balls in the refrigerator and while thinking about eating them it struck me that stuffing them inside a polenta ball and frying them would not be a bad thing.  And I was correct…

I cooked the polenta per the package instructions and let it cool in the refrigerator completely.  Then with oiled hands I formed the polenta around the MOINK Balls.  It worked with no problems at all.  I put the Polenta Balls in the fridge so they stayed cold and kept their shape while I cooked the pasta and made the tomato sauce.

The sauce was simple.  Peeled three Roma tomatoes and chopped them.  In a skillet I sautéed a little onion, a little finely chopped carrot and celery and some garlic in olive oil until tender.  I added some Italian Seasoning, Oregano and dried parsley.  With just a little water I cooked everything for about 15 minutes.

When the pasta was done I fried the Polenta Balls in oil until golden brown.  With some penne pasta I had myself a nice and simple dinner.  Experimentation in the kitchen can be a good thing…at least this time it was.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

When it comes to barbecue and grilling two cuts of beef seem to standout far more than any other.  With BBQ it’s brisket and for grilling it’s tri-tip that gets the most press.  But, in my book the chuck roast is under appreciated when it comes to outdoor cooking.  The juicy meatiness of a well smoked chuck roast is something I look forward to.  Normally I just rub the chucky and toss it on the smoker.  A few hours later it’s moist and tender and waiting for any number of treatments.

This time around I decided to do something a little different.  I broke out my favorite cast iron skillet and tossed the seasoned chuck roast in it.  The whole thing went into the smoker for about four hours at 235 degrees.  I used the cast iron skillet so I could keep the drippings for some gravy.  It seemed to work to perfection.

After the four hours of smoke past I put the potatoes and carrots into the skillet and covered the whole thing with foil.  I didn’t want smoked potatoes or carrots, so this method allowed to me keep using the smoker outdoors and not get smoky potatoes.

Everything was cooked until the potatoes were done.  While the meat rested I made up a nice, simple gravy and we were able to chow down on a great dinner.