1. Coconut & Lime: Smoked Pepper-Cocoa Spare Ribs
2. Quick and Dirty In The Kitchen: Spicy Ranch Baked Chicken and Cornbread
3. Cookerati: Garlic Shrimp Fettuccine with Asparagus
4. Las Vegas Food Adventures: Korean Spicy Crab
5. 101 Cooking For Two: Simple Everyday Roast Chicken with Gravy
6. Whisk: Cilantro Salad
7. A Simple Home Cook: Pork Tenderloin with Broccoli and Noodles
8. Living The Gourmet: Fresh Salmon Steaks with Warm Mango Salsa
9. What’s Cookin, Chicago?: Smoked Salmon Fritatta
10. Family, Friends and Food: Roasted Pancetta & Herb Butter Crostini

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• 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

• Foy Update: Crisp Garlic Dill Pickles
• Forever Now and Then: Breakfast Potstickers
• Mind Over Batter: Roasted Garlic
• Leftovers 4 Lunch: Pomegranate Sauce and Sweet Braised Greens
• Taste With The Eyes: Grilled Baja Fish Torta
• Where And What In The World: Colman’s Mustard Barbeque Sauce Works
• Tastes Like Home: Pasta with Short Ribs
• Hungry Harps: Nor-Cali Egg Rolls & Kara-Age Soy Ginger Chicken
• Our Life In The Kitchen: Brined and Roasted Chicken with Tarragon Vinegar Cream Sauce
• Simply Good Eats: Thai Spicy Beef with Cold Sesame Noodle

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• Ezra Pound Cake:  Squash Puppies with Roasted Jalapeno Mayonnaise
• Bo’s Bowl: Monte Cubano
• Cooking By Seat Of My Pants:  Roasted Brussels Sprouts with Bacon
• Ang Sarap:  Grilled Pork ala Pobre
• Culinary Cory:  Grilled Steak House Pizza with Chunky Blue Cheese Dressing
• Pork, Knife & Spoon:  Italian Sausage with Pepper Sandwiches
• Sunshine & Smile: Zucchini: Zucchini & Avocado Cold Soup with Crispy Sticks
• Burnin’ Love BBQ:  National Chicken Wing Day
• AlbuKirky BBQ: Pizza on the Big Green Egg
• I Hope You Are Hungry:  Carolina Style Pulled Pork n’ Slaw

*If you visit in any of these great blogs would you leave a comment you read about them on The BBQ Grail?

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

Barbeque Insurance.  Now that’s just downright cleaver.  There’s no guarantees in BBQ life but it’s always good to have a little insurance.  And the two products from Easy Peasy Foods can give you a bit of insurance.  It’s not going to keep you from burning your food but it should give you a little peace of mind on the flavor side of things.

I’m going to admit right from the start that I’m not one of those haters of corn syrup.  In my book corn syrup is an important ingredient in a good commercial BBQ sauce.  Don’t know what it is, but I like it.  I try to limit the amount of corn syrup in other things I eat, but when it comes to BBQ sauce I just don’t mind it at all.  So when I received my free sample of BBQ sauce from Easy Peasy and noticed that it contains no corn syrup my expectations dropped.

Barbeque Insurance BBQ Sauce is a good sauce.  I liked it.  The flavor is a little different than normal.  Not to sweet and the flavors are somewhat neutral and complimented a couple different rubs I tried.  And it definitely matched up perfectly with their BBQ Insurance Chicken Marinade.

In addition to it’s slightly sweet taste it has just the right amount of finishing heat that I like.  My preference is a sauce that’s a little sweet on the front of the tongue with just a hint of heat on the back of the throat on the way down.  It’s almost perfect in that aspect.  And the fact they accomplished it with no corn syrup is pretty remarkable in my book.

You can see from the picture on the right that the sauce has a rich, thick consistency.  It adhered to the smoked chicken and gave it not only a good flavor but a very nice color.

Barbeque Insurance BBQ Sauce is a nice sauce.  It’s not perfect, but then again not very many sauces are.  It’s not available in stores outside of a few locations in Michigan so if you’re up to mail order you can order it here.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

This post kicks off a week of blog posts dedicated to plank grilling.  I’ve been interested in plank grilling for some time and thought it would be a good idea to practice a little as we begin the Spring/Summer grilling season.  There are so many techniques that make cooking interesting and varied foods easy and tasty.  There are two books I depended on a great deal for this series.  And I’d like to thank Ted Reader for his great book Napoleon’s Everyday Gourmet Plank Grilling and The Plank Grilling Cookbook: Infuse Food with More Flavor Using Wood Planks by Dina Gullen, Michelle Lowrey, Maria Everly and Gretchen Bernadorff.  As far as I’m concerned these are the best two plank grilling cookbooks on the market today.  If you’re at all interested in plank grilling you should pick these two books up.

Not only is this post the beginning of a series on plank grilling it’s also the May entry in the “On Our Grills: 4 Ingredient Challenge.”  This month the four ingredients we had to work with were chicken breast, wild rice, fava beans and any ingredient that start with the same letter as our first name.  For the mystery ingredient I chose Leeks.  I picked Leeks because I like leeks, but mostly because I couldn’t think of a way to incorporate licorice into this meal.

For many backyard grillers the thought of plank grilling conjures up salmon roasting away on a cedar plank.  But there are so many more options available.  One technique is to just use some dried sticks.

In this cook I used some dried grape vines to provide the smoke flavor.  Fruit tree trimmings or blackberry vines work great.  I recommend you know the source of your vines/twigs.  You want to make sure they have not received any chemical treatments.  You’ll be cooking directly on them so make sure they’re clean!

Start with vines and twigs about the same diameter of your little finger.  Make sure they are completely seasoned (dry) and soak them in water for at least an hour.  The soaking will keep them from immediately going up in flames and instead will slowly smolder and impart a little smoke flavor to your meat.  Place the twigs on your hot grill and heat them until they just start to smoke.  Reduce the heat.

Season  your meat and give it a light coat of olive oil.  Place the meat directly on top of the twigs.  Close the lid on your grill and wait.  If you’ve adjusted your heat correctly the wood will not burst into flames and the meat will cook without much work by you.

It takes some practice to get the technique down.  You’ve got to practice.  Practice and you’re ultimate success is much easier on a gas grill than it cooking direct over a charcoal fire.  If you put in the time and effort to practice and learn cooking with planks you’ll be able to come up with some great food that will surprise and amaze your family and friends.

The other part of the “On Our Grills: 4 Ingredient Challenge” was incorporating wild rice, fava beans and leeks.  The wild rice was easy.  Buy some wild rice and cook it per the instructions on the package.  Easy…

Fava Beans!

Did you know that Fava Beans are really beans?  They’re really a member of the pea family.  I’m not really sure why they’re called beans.  I mean when someone actually named them couldn’t they have just as simply been called Fava Peas.  Anyway, trying to figure this out could take forever.

To cook fava beans you need to first remove them from the pods, which is a bit of work.  Once you’ve got them out of the pods you have to blanch them.  Then you have to plunge them into cold water.  And finally you have to peel the thick skin that covers each “bean.”  It’s a long, time-consuming process.  But it was worth it.  These little green gems taste great.  I decided to cook the fava beans along with the leeks.  Unlike last month’s challenge where I failed to come up with an ingredient combination that worked, this time a succeeded.  The fava beans and leeks tasted great together.

Cut away the roots at the bottom of the leeks along with the long green leaves.  What you want to have left is the white and light green parts of the leeks.  Slice the leeks in half and brush them with olive oil.  Grill all sides of the leeks until you have nice grill marks and they start to curl a little.

Place the leeks on a sheet of foil and sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of balsamic vinegar all over them.  Add your fava beans and wrap it all up tight in the foil.  Place the foil packet back on your grill and cook them at medium/high heat for about 20 minutes.  This process will cook the fava beans and gently braise the leeks.

After 20 minutes open the packet, season with a little salt and pepper to taste and serve!  You’re going to love the flavor.

This months cook was one of my favorite Challenge cooks.  Everything came out just as I thought it should.  Give both the plank cooking technique and the grilled/braised leeks.  You’ll be glad you did!

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!

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.

Chris 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”.

Robyn Medlyn of Grillgrrrl – ENTRY HERE

Robyn Medlin is the “grill girl” behind grillgrrrl.com. Her focus is on healthy, simple and creative recipes on the grill. She encourages women to learn to grill as it a great way to create healthy, flavorful dishes without all the fuss and clean up in the kitchen. This “grill girl” holds quarterly “Women’s Grilling Clinics” as a way to encourage women to not be intimated by the grill.

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

My dear wife, Mrs. Grail, is a great cook in her own right.  And her chicken and dumplings is one her greatest meals.  I love this recipe.  If she made it once a week I wouldn’t complain.  She’s made it with smoked chicken and without and, of course, I think the smoked chicken version is better, but if you’d rather just used a roasted chicken then go right ahead.

Mrs. Grail’s Chicken & Dirty Dumplings

Ingredients:

• 1 large roasting chicken, about five pounds
• 1 large sweet onion, rough chopped
• 8 cups water
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 1/2 tsp salt

Dumpling Ingredients:

• 2 cups flour
• 1/3 cup minced fresh herbs/green onion tops
• 4 teaspoons baking powder
• 1 teaspoons salt
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 cup + 3 tablespoons milk

Sauce Ingredients:

• 7 tablespoons butter
• 10 tablespoons flour
• 1/4 cup dry white wine
• 2 teaspoons Todd’s Bayou Dirt (or other cajun seasoning)
• 1 teaspoon fresh thyme leaves
• 3 ribs celery, cut into 1/2″ pieces
• 4 carrots, cut into 1/2″ pieces
• 1 large onion cut into 1″ pieces
• 1/4 cup heavy cream
• 1 cut frozen peas, thawed
• Salt & Pepper to taste

If you’re going to use smoked chicken you want to make sure you get a the smoked flavor and the seasonings through out the bird.  The best way, in my opinion, to do this is with a spatchcock chicken.

After cutting your chicken season well with your seasoning of choice.  Mrs. Grail’s recipe calls for Bayou Dirt, but if you can’t get your hands on this great seasoning, any cajun type seasoning will work.  Make sure you season both sides of the chicken.  And using your hands get some seasoning up under the skin too!

When the chicken has finished cooking let it cool.  Once cool pull all the meat off the bones.  Get as much as you can, because once you load up the sauce, having a little extra chicken for a sandwich is a good, good thing.

Place the chicken bones and water in a large stock pot and bring to a boil.  When water has boiled reduce heat, cover and simmer for 1 hour.  Strain out all the bones and other pieces of chicken carcass.  Return the liquid to the pot and add the onions, bay leaves and salt.  Bring back to a simmer and cook for an hour or so.

While the chicken stock is cooking you can prepare the dumplings.  In a medium bowl mix flour, herbs, baking powder and salt together.

Set flour mixture aside.  In a small saucepan bring butter and milk to a simmer, over low heat. Add liquid to flour mixture, stirring with a fork until mixture just starts to come together.

Drop by the spoonful onto a baking sheet covered with plastic wrap or parchment paper.  Refrigerate until read to use.

For the sauce, melt the butter in a dutch oven over medium heat.  Whisk in the flour and cook, stirring constantly until a golden-brown, about 4 minutes.  Whisk in the wine and chicken stock, Bayou Dirt and thyme.  Cook until thickened.  Add celery, onions and carrots and cook until tender-crisp, about 15 minutes.  Add chicken meat, heavy cream, peas.  Season to taste with salt & pepper.

Place dumplings on top of chicken sauce mixture, cover and simmer until dumplings are cooked through, about 15 minutes.

Serve!

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian

For some it may seem hard to spatchcock a chicken, but it’s really not all that hard.  There are lots of videos and other pictures out there on the internet that tell you how.  I figured I show how easy it is with a minimalistic view.

After you’ve removed all the offal (guts and stuff) trim all the excess fat and skin that is normally around the chicken cavity.  Nothing hard so far…right?

Don’t worry about making it perfect.  This is backyard grilling, we aren’t talking Four Star restaurant.  Just get it done and be happy with it.

Here comes the hardest part, and as you’ll see it’s not all that hard.  Take your kitchen shears and cut down one side of the breast bone.  Make sure you cut as close as you can to the center of the bird.  Cut all the way through to the neck.  When you’ve finished with one side, cut out the other side.

Once you’ve cut out both sides of the backbone the chicken will lay some what flat just like the picture on the right.

Turn the chicken over.  Push down with a little force on the leg/thigh joints so the chicken will lay even flatter.  There!  You’ve spatchcocked a chicken.  Piece of cake!

Now just season the chicken like you normally would, on both sides, and grill or smoke just like you normally do.  One of the advantages to this method is, in my opinion, the chicken will cook evenly and you have a better chance of getting a perfectly cook (done) chicken.

Give it a try!

Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Larry Gaian