• 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

One of the recipes they learned to cook was Slow Braised Honey and Cider Caramelized Pork Belly. I was inspired by this recipe and just had to try to come up with a version of this recipe for my smoker.  There were a couple of immediate challenges for me.  One of which was that Chef Novelli’s recipe calls for “dry cider.”  Since I have an alcohol free home I had to come up with a substitute.

“Dry cider” is an apple based alcoholic drink that is low in sugar content.  So a suitable substitute is basically non-existent.  What I came up with was to use “Simply Apple” juice.  This juice product is just apple juice.  No additional sugars or other fillers added.  It’s still pretty sweet, a great deal sweeter than what a “dry cider” would be so I cut down on the honey in Chef Novelli’s original recipe.

Here is my version of Chef Novelli’s recipe…

Shown here are the two pieces of pork belly I purchased. The bottom piece still has the rind on.

After the rinds had been removed from each piece I seared them on both sides in a cast iron skillet on the stove.

Now with a light sear the pork belly is ready for some smoke.

I put the pork belly on the MAK Grill I'm testing and smoked it at 225 degrees for just under two hours. Not a lot of smoke but just enough to give a little smoke flavor.

In the last couple of minutes of smoke I fried some fennel in the drippings left over from searing the pork belly.

The fried fennel then went into the cast iron skillet underneath the pork belly. I added 16 ounces of apple juice, 3 ounces of honey, 1 teaspoon of crushed anise seed and 1 tablespoon of Johnny's French Dip Concentrated Au Jus and four sprigs of fresh thyme. The whole thing went back on the smoker.

The pork belly was on the smoker for an additional three hours. During those three hours the pork belly was basted in the liquid every 20 minutes. This gave the meat a nice caramelized color.

A couple of large slices plated with a little parmesan couscous.

Not sure what Chef Novelli would think of what I did with his recipe, but it sure tasted good.  I’ve become a huge fan of pork belly and I have Chef Novelli to thank for that.

Aaron Ralston published an “ezine article” with a good explanation for cold smoking:

Cold smoking is very similar to hot smoking, except the cooking temperature is much lower. The targeted cold smoking temperature range is between 80 degrees F  and 100 degrees F, and the smoking time can range anywhere from 4 hours to 4  days. This process relies on smoke to cure the meat or food being smoked instead of using heat. Some people believe that cold smoking occurs at temperatures between 160-190 degrees F, but smoking at this temperature is really a form of hot smoking.

Types of Smoked Foods

A few examples of foods that are usually cold-smoked include bacon, sausage, ham, cheese, and fish. When smoking fish, a preservation salt is needed to pickle the fish before it is smoked. This will help prevent bacteria from groing while the fish is curing in the smoke.

When to Use Cold Smoking

Cold smoking is very difficult, and even impossible in the summer months, because the outside air temperature is normally as hot as or hotter than the temperature needed for true cold smoking. The best time to use cold smoking is during the winter months when the days are typically cooler.

I’ve wanted to give cold smoking a try and when Ian Mckend the owner of Mac’s BBQ, Ltd in England offered to send me a new “cold smoke” generator to try I jumped at the chance.

I’ve had the product for several months but with the temperatures in the Sacramento area over 100 degrees during the summer it’s hard to cold smoke anything when you can’t get your bbq pit below 125 degrees and that’s without a fire in it.  Now that the temperatures have cooled off I decided to give it a try.

I decided to use one of my Weber Smokey Mountain smokers for the cold smoking experiment.  After giving the whole thing a good cleaning I set out to smoke some sausages I recently purchased from Lockeford Meat and Sausage Company in Lockeford, California

There are a variety of smoke generation products on the market today.  But I don’t think there is one that can beat the “ProQ Cold Smoke Generator.”  For pure simplicity and ease of use it would be almost impossible to beat Ian’s new product.   I’m going to have to order some more wood dust to try this out again.  When I smoked my recent bacon experiment it would have been so much easier to have used this to generate the smoke.   I’m no where near an expert in cold smoking but as far as I can tell Ian has come up with another winning product.

I had to make time today to cook the pork butts for pulled pork. It’s going to be a great time with good good.

I started by rubbing down the butts with John Henry’s Apple Chipotle Rub and injecting with apple juice.

Here’s a couple pictures of the WSM chugging away. What a great smoker this thing is.

After a couple of hours the two butts were at temperatures that were far apart. It’s weird how that happens.

I peeked after a few hours. They were looking good.

And here they are ready for the cooler.

And of course, as usual, a big piece fell off that had to be eaten.