I stop into my local supermarket this morning to pick up some salmon for dinner and left with steelhead instead.  I guess, based on the paragraph above I did actually get salmon but since I’ve never grilled steelhead I figured I’d try something a little different. It really wasn’t all that different, the taste was slightly different but most people at the table didn’t really know the different.

Mrs. Grail was cleaning out a cupboard the other day and came across a bottle of Salmonberry Syrup we picked up on a cruise to Alaska several years ago.  I thought it would be nice to come up with a glaze using the syrup for the steelhead.  I served the steelhead on a bed of Israeli Couscous mixed with grilled summer squash. (The recipe for the Grilled Squash Couscous will post tomorrow)

One of the reasons I like to grill this type of fish is because it’s just so easy to do.  Brush the fish with a little olive oil, season and toss it on the grill.  This time around I seasoned the steelhead with Todd’s Crabby Dirt.  Dirt adds a nice flavorful kick to the fish that lets you know it’s there without a huge kick.

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(Originally published in Wenatchee World)

WENATCHEE — A 39-year-old Cashmere man suffered multiple broken bones when he and a barbecue that he was holding on to fell out of the back of a pickup about 12:25 p.m. Thursday.

The accident happened on Highway 2/97 about two miles west of Wenatchee, according to a State Patrol report.

Kyle J. Stewart was transported to Central Washington Hospital, then was transferred to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle where he was in serious condition.

The accident happened when the barbecue and Stewart, who had been standing in the back of the pickup, fell out of the pickup and landed on the highway, according to the report. Sgt. Mike Harris with the Chelan County Sheriff’s Office said Stewart suffered multiple fractures.

The pickup was driven by Wayne P. Warren, 74, of Cashmere. Another passenger in the vehicle, Dale J. Stewart, 70, of Cashmere, was not injured. He was riding in the cab.

Sgt. Leon Leyde with the State Patrol said the barbecue, which one of the men had just purchased, was not tied down.

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!

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To air your grievance, leave a comment below. Please remember this is all in good fun and all grievances should be ”Family Friendly.” Grievances will be moderated and any inappropriate comments will be deleted. Mean-spirited grievances will also be deleted.

Check out the Grievances so far and be sure to add your own.

Have fun with this…

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If you’ve read this blog for very long you know that good reviews of BBQ restaurants are few and far between.  As an official “BBQ Snob” I just don’t come across restaurants that warrant praise very often.  This weekend I’m in Des Moines, Iowa for the 14th Annual Niman Ranch Hog Farmer Appreciation Dinner and tonight I had the good fortune to eat at a wonderful BBQ restaurant.  Smokey D’s…

Smokey D’s has everything a good BBQ restaurant should have.  You can smell the wonderful sweet aroma of good BBQ from a block away and you can smell the wood smoke in the parking lot AND the restaurant smells like BBQ.  Everyone that knows good BBQ knows you can tell you’re going to have at least a decent dining experience before you’ve left the parking lot.

Smokey D’s has everything a good BBQ establishment should have.  Great food, a good vibe and fantastic  customer service.  It’s Thursday night and the restaurant was very, very busy.  Darren Warth, one of the owners, said it was a little slow.  This is a good sign…a packed restaurant and it’s a slow night.

I ordered the two meat dinner combo with brisket, chopped pork, mac & cheese and beans.  By the time I filled my drink cup and sat down our food was making its way to the table.  Super fast service is not always a plus in my book.  This often times means the food is sitting under heat lamps or drowning in sauce in warming pans.  It was obvious when the food arrived this was not the case.  Sauce on the side and everything freshly cut and plated.  BBQ perfection so far…

 The Food…

First and most importantly the meat was served with sauce on the side.  This is always a good sign.  When a restaurant serves it’s meats without sauce I’m always happier.  In my mind this means they aren’t trying to hide something.

The chopped pork was flavorful with little pieces of bark mixed in.  It wasn’t soggy or over cooked.  It was very good.  The brisket was good.  Nice beautiful smoke ring with just a hint of smoke (more on that later).  I prefer my brisket a little “juicier” than it’s served at Smokey D’s.  I don’t mean the brisket was dry, it wasn’t, I just like to get some of the fat cap on my brisket.  Smokey D’s serves it with almost all the fat trimmed off.  It’s not bad this way, in fact, most people probably prefer it without the fat, I just like the fat.

You can tell a lot about a BBQ restaurant by the sides they serve.  I ordered the beans and mac & cheese.  Both were excellent.  The beans weren’t cooked to mush and had great flavor.  The mac & cheese was awesome.  I loved it.  There was a little spice to it.  Not really a “heat” spice, but it did tickle the tongue on the way down.  Darren shared with me the pepper that’s in it and I can’t wait to give it a try at home.  (Since I didn’t ask if it was a “secret” I won’t share it just in case it is)

Now for some BBQ Restaurant Review hyperbole!

The cornbread is like crack.  I could sit down at Smokey D’s and eat just this stuff.  It is without a doubt the best cornbread I have ever eaten.  It’s just cornbread.  No peppers, no pieces of corn…just cornbread.   The cornbread does have a little sweet crunch on the top, but that’s just sugar sprinkled on the batter before baking.  Darren said they have their own pastry chef in-house.  Whoever this person is  should win the Nobel Cornbread Award!

And I ate a whole peach pie!  Well not really.  They don’t have peach pie at Smokey D’s, but they do have these amazing Peach Sliders.  And they tasted great too.

The restaurant is full of BBQ Championship trophys.  The gang at Smokey D’s don’t just run a first class BBQ restaurant they are amazing competition BBQ cooks.  And winning the Grand Prize on the 2nd Season of BBQ Pitmasters is proof enough these folks know their BBQ.

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This one simple Tweet got me to thinking.  What are the 25 Undeniable BBQ Truths?  Certainly “No microwaves in BBQ restaurants” must be considered one of them.  Right?  So, the BBQ Grail is out to find out what are the 25 Undeniable BBQ Truths?

Leave a comment below for you nomination.  One Truth per comment, please.  This is serious stuff, so give it some thought.  You’re truth can be about restaurants, backyard grilling/BBQ or even competition cooking.  What’s YOUR undeniable BBQ truth?

On July 17th  I’ll set up a poll with all the nominations.  If you’ve submitted the #1 Truth you’ll win a prize.  I don’t know what the prize will be yet, but you’ll get something.

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I watch a lot of cooking shows on television.  Whenever you watch a cooking show the on air personality will always taste their creations and exclaim to the tv audience how wonderful it is.  Do you ever wonder if they cook anything that just doesn’t taste good?  I’m not talking about something that isn’t perfect.  I’m talking about spit it out, unable to swallow bad.  It’s hard to imagine Giada, Rachel, Paula or Bobby Flay taking a bite, looking into the camera and saying.  “Dang, this really stinks.”  Just doesn’t happen.

One of my favorite shows is “The Best Thing I Ever Ate.”  I’ve gotten a lot of great cooking inspirations from this show.  Today I write about the opposite of “The Best Thing I Ever Ate.”  Tonight I write about “The Worst Thing I Ever Cooked.”  Scan the internet, not to many “foodies” will admit that they screwed up when cooking.  I know my buddies at “No Excuses BBQ” and “Brew and Que” have written about cooking disasters.  And my hat is off to them.  But for the most part only successes make into print.  This is not one of those cases.  This is a blog post about some pretty bad food.

This weeks throwdown on the BBQ Brethren is about Scovilles, that crazy heat measurement for telling how hot a pepper is.  I like heat, but I’m not a chili head.  I don’t like heat for heat sake.  I want flavor first and foremost.  I got the brilliant idea to to combine habaneros and a smoked pork mousse with sharp Irish cheddar cheese. 

On the surface it’s not all that crazy of an idea.  There are lots and lots of Pork Mousse recipes on the internet.  It’s actually something that appears to be popular in some circles of cooking.   Most often when I think of mousse I think of chocolate and it’s a desert.  But it can be an entree if done correctly.  So I set out to come up with what I figured would be a nice tasty pork mouse.

I bought a couple of thin pork loin chops and seasoned them with a little bit of “Simply Marvelous” Cherry rub.  I figured this would give me a little sweet with a nice mild cherry flavor.  I used maybe a tablespoon between all four chops.

The chops then went on the smoker at 225 degrees with cherry wood.  The goal here was to have a common flavor from start to finish.  I’ve been thinking about how I was going to do this for several days.  So I was fairly confident I was going to have some good flavor combinations here.   I learned a long time ago that just pulling stuff out of the pantry and tossing them together was a recipe for disaster.  So I did some thinking…

After smoking the chops I cooled them and put them in the refrigerator overnight.  The next day I chopped up the chops and put them into the food processor with a teaspoon of rub and some heavy cream.  Because the pork loins were so thin they were done before they had a chance to absorb much smoke flavor so I used a tablespoon of “Show Me” BBQ sauce.  This sauce has a good dose of liquid smoke in it and I knew it would give me the smoke flavor I was looking for.

Once I had the consistency I needed I put the mousse into a zip lock bag, cut the corner off.  This allowed me to pipe the mousse into the habanero halves that I had removed the seeds and veins from.  The color of the mousse wasn’t exactly what I had in mind, but it wasn’t too bad.  I wasn’t all that thrilled with the flavor of the mousse.  Normally thought I have found that some rubs and sauces don’t taste all that great when you just taste them without cooking so I figured I’d just wait and see.

I’ve fallen in love with Irish Cheddar cheese.  It’s got a great sharp, nutty flavor that I just knew would go with the cherry in the rub and the wood smoke.   It also looks nice when it’s melted.

After topping the mousse with the cheese I popped them into the oven and baked them at 325 degrees for about 15 minutes.  This cooked the mousse and melted the cheese to give me a nice looking appetizer. 

After allowing them to cool a couple of minutes I grabbed one and tossed it into my mouth.  I got about three chews before I realized that this was just horrible.  It may have actually been The Worst Thing I Ever cooked.    The flavor was just so bad.  Individually the flavors seemed to be a good match, but when you put them together with the habanero it just made for a concoction that was just so bad I had to spit it out.

This made the whole Shankopotomus fiasco seem like a walk in the park.  So Giada, Rachel, Alton and Bobby, what’s The Worst Thing You Ever Cooked?”

For some strange reason I had the urge to create a meal in “honor” of Black Friday.  I have no reason other than sometimes cooking has to be fun and I just needed to do something different.  The only way to represent Black Friday properly would have to create an all black meal.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to find foods that are black?  It’s not all that easy.  So I decided that black beans would do the trick.  And when I was able to locate some black sweet rice at the asian market I knew I had the right formula.

First a little about Black Sweet Rice.  I bought the rice because it was black.  I had no idea what it tasted like or how it would work.  Once I got home I did a little research and learned that Black Sweet Rice is mostly used in Indonesia and Thailand to make sweet deserts like puddings and cakes.  It’s rarely used as the primary rice in a meal.  Black Sweet Rice has a nice nutty flavor and I thought it might still work as a compliment in the black bean recipe I was going to make.

Black Sweet Rice is hard as a rock.  You’ve got to soak this stuff for up to 10 hours before actually cooking it.  It take a long time to make it soft enough to actually eat in a meal like I was preparing.  So if you find yourself wanting to use it leave yourself plenty of cooking time.

This is my standard Red Beans & Rice recipe, except this time I used black beans.  I also normally use a smoked ham hock but I found some smoked pork necks at the store and used them instead.  They worked out great.  I put the whole mixture in the Traeger on the smoke setting for a couple of hours to see if I could get more smoke flavor.  Not really sure how much that worked.

All and all it tasted amazing.  I really liked the sweet rice with the beans.  It actually was a good combination.

BBQ Grail’s Red/Black Beans and Rice

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 cups green onions, chopped
• 2 cups onions, chopped
• 1 cup celery, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup bacon drippings
• 1 pound dried beans, traditionally red (but black works)
• 1 ham bone, ham hock or other smoked pork product
• 1 pound smoked sausage, sliced in 1/2 inch slices
• 3 bay leaves
• 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1 teaspoon pepper
• 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
• Hot Sauce to taste
• 1/3 cup cilantro, chopped (or parsley if you prefer)

Directions:

The night before put the beans in a large bowl and cover them with water.  Soak overnight. 

The next morning rinse beans throughly.  In a large dutch oven saute onions, celery and garlic in the bacon drippings until softened.  Add all other ingredients, except cilantro, to the dutch oven.  Add enough water to cover everything.

Bring to a boil.  Reduce heat to low and simmer, partially covered until the beans are tender.  Plan on 2 or 3 hours.  Remove bay leaves and add the cilantro just before serving.  Serve with hot rice.

Rick is in the hospital in Utah facing surgery.  If you wouldn’t mind would you leave a comment with your well wishes for Rick.  I’d appreciate it and I know he will too!