BBQ Chicken... Time is growing short.

Few things mean summer to me like Barbecuing chicken over a real charcoal fire... in many ways!  I spent the summers of my youthful prime working for a small amusement/picnic park in the Philadelphia Suburbs.  My main job was running the Chicken and corn pavilion, where we would turn out up to 5,000 pieces of chicken and corn on any given Saturday or Sunday.  My partner Steve and I have estimated that we probably cooked around 3 tons of chicken in the years we worked at "The Park"

The park was West Point Park, in West Point, PA, a small village about 20 miles west of Philadelphia.  The park is no longer in existence, and the site is now primarily the back lots of Merck & Co. (the pharmaceutical giant), and a few overpriced cookie cutter "fine" homes.
West Point Park was originally built in 1868 as a "Trolley Park" designed to give people a place to ride the trolleys on a weekend.  My friend Steve (pictured) and I worked there in the last years of the park, in the mid to late 1980s.

The largest part of the park's business was hosting company and family picnics.  The highlight of those picnics was the BBQ chicken.  The key to the chicken was the baste, which we sprayed on the chicken with brass sliding pump sprayers, like the one at left.

One person would carry the stainless steel bucket of sauce, stirring constantly with the end of the hose, while the other would pump the spray on the chicken.  With two full pits of chicken at full cook this was a very intense operation.  At left is the first spray, on only 3/4 of the pits, before the fire got really hot.  At peak heat, about ten minutes from when this picture was taken, you couldn't see the far end of the pits through the smoke.  you would take a deep breath and dive in, with fire masks on, frequently spewing fire from the end of the spray nozzle.  OSHA would have had a field day, to say the least! The baste itself was a simple concoction of one gallon of white vinegar to one pound of butter, with salt and pepper.  It had to be stirred constantly while spraying, or the sauce would separate.   We would lay out the racks of chicken bone side down as soon as the flames subsided and the coals were white.  We would then spray and flip the racks, browning the skins with the early peak heat of the coals.  This was followed in about 5 minutes with another spray/flip to put the bone side down again.  After this initial process, we would leave them on their backs for about 10-15 minutes, and then spray/flip at 10 minute intervals, until the chicken was golden brown, at about 45 minutes total.
The chicken was delicious and juicy, with the vinegar sealing in the juices, and the butter creating the crispy golden brown skin.  Over the years I have created many variations of this baste using different herbs and spices, and last year I picked up a tip from upstate New York, where they have a variation of the classic baste called State Fair Chicken which adds an egg to the mix and uses oil instead of butter.  Of course the simplest way to achieve similar results is to use Italian salad dressing, straight from the bottle, but that's too simple for me, and I have been using the following mixture, more or less, to great success.

Ingredients:
3 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted.
2 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1 large egg
1/2 cup Vinegar (White, or Cider, or Red Wine, or White Wine... your choice)
2 cloves garlic (1 Tbsp), smashed and minced
Kosher Salt to taste
Fresh ground  black pepper to taste
Any or all of the following, to taste
Rosemary, Thyme, Parsley, Marjoram, Minced Dried Onion

You can really use your imagination, if you start with the butter or oil and vinegar mix, you will get good results.  The egg really adds a nice glaze too.

 The trick with cooking chicken on a charcoal grill is heat control.  You must brown the skin before you lose your peak heat.  So while on a gas grill I will usually cook at a low temperature, leaving the chicken on it's back for most of the cooking time, on charcoal I find the best success moving and flipping and basting frequently.  The easiest part to cook is thighs.  The kids love them the best, and it is hard to dry them out.  Breasts are the trickiest.  Here I am cooking two breast halves, and 7 thighs. I cook the chicken until the juices run clear, and the meat is falling away from the bone.  The absolute best cut for BBQ is 1/2 chickens, as the connected leg segments help protect the breast, keeping it nice and juicy!

 At left is the finished product.  Unlike at the park, I usually like to finish off with some red BBQ sauce of my choice.  Here I used Maul's, which is a great sauce Erika's Stepfather Jim buys by the case via the internet, and which I brought back from our summer vacation.  When this is gone I will go back to my latest favorite, Stubbs.  I could make my own, but with all the great sauces out there to try, why bother?

Chimichurri Eggplant Dip

Just a quick entry.  I think this may be a complete original.  I had two small eggplants, not enough to use as a main entree, so I though I might try to make some baba ganoush.  I always enjoy this rich, garlicky eggplant dip, and like saying "baba ganoush" even more!  Lo and behold, when I realized I had no tahini, and that making said tahini would take a day and a lot of labor, I looked for an alternative.  After a little research, I found a couple of roasted eggplant dip recipes, but didn't have all the ingredients for any of them.  So I took what I had and improvised.
Ingredients:
2 small eggplants
1 small head of garlic
3 Tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
a small bunch of flat leaf Italian parsley, chopped
juice of 1 small lemon
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp smoked paprika
1/2 tsp sesame seeds
salt
pepper

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.
Clean the outside of the eggplants well, pierce multiple times with a fork, rub with olive oil, or spray with olive oil cooking spray, and roast with the ball of garlic until very soft, about 20 minutes.
After roasting, squeeze the garlic out of the skins into a blender
Peel the eggplant, cut into pieces and also put into the blender.
Roughly chop the parsley and add to the blender, with the rest of the ingredients.
Pulse blend until ingredients are incorporated, then blend till smooth and serve with pita chips.
Delicious!!

Roasted Corn Pudding in Acorn Squash

Autumn is upon us in full swing now.  you can taste it in the air, and on the plate! Our first season with the CSA Organic Farm is still filling our kitchen with fresh produce.  More often than not the problem is losing track of what produce we have to work with.  I need to come up with a chart or something that will show me what we have in stock.  One thing that infuriates me is finding produce that has gone bad because I forgot we had it in the fridge!  It almost happened to some Bok Choy, but I discovered it in time and sautéed it up quick with some garlic, olive oil, white wine and soy sauce!  Saved!  Now I still need to figure out what to do with two Napa Cabbages before they go bad!  On the other hand, Erika and I got one lonely Acorn Squash from the CSA and wondered if it was one too many, as I didn't know what to do with it.

It seemed as though most treatments for Acorn Squash involve baking it with brown sugar.  While that sounded OK, It didn't truly excite, and with only one squash, I figured there wasn't enough to work with for a soup.  That's when I came across the website 101 Cookbooks, hosted by Heidi Swanson.  She had Acorn Squash filled with a corn pudding and covered with cheddar cheese, and this seemed like a much better direction to me!  I varied slightly from Heidi, who diverged from a recipe by Karen Hubert Allison in her book The Vegetarian Compass. 

Ingredients:

One Acorn Squash, Split down the middle, and seeded.

Olive Oil Cooking Spray

Corn kernels from one medium ear, uncooked (about 1/2 to 1 cup).

1/8 cup creme fraiche

1/8 cup skim milk

1/4 tsp fennel seed, crushed

1/2 tsp parsley flakes

2 eggs plus one egg white

shredded cheddar cheese.

Now here is where I usually put in my disclaimer about ingredients.  This time is no exception.  The original recipe called for 1 cup milk, I had creme fraiche and skim milk, so I used half each...  A lot of my experimentation is simply based on what I find available and think will work at the time. The recipe called for anise seed, I had fennel which has an anise taste... the recipe called for one egg plus two whites, I didn't want to save a yolk...  Given the choice I would use white cheddar instead of yellow, purely for appearance. 

First spray the split, cleaned squash halves with the olive oil spray, sprinkle with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper and put them in a 375 degree oven for about 40 minutes.  

Mix the other ingredients well in a bowl, except for the cheese.  

At 40 minutes, remove the squash from the oven, sprinkle a little cheese on it, then fill the cavity 3/4 with the pudding mixture. The amount of filling described in the ingredients will probably be way too much for the squash to hold, but not way too much for you to want to eat!  This explains the ramekin seen next to the squash in the above photo. After filling the two halves of squash (way past 3/4 by the way), I still filled 2 ramekins. 

Bake for another 1/2 hour to 40 minutes, until the pudding is set.  You will be able to tell when you move the baking sheet!  

When they are completely cooked, sprinkle the cheese on the top and carefully finish under the broiler for a minute or so...  don't let them burn... KEEP WATCHING!  

When they came out of the oven, the puddings in the ramekins were twice as tall as in the photo, they fell as they cooled. 

This came out better than expected!  The corn pudding took me back to holiday dinners of my youth, with the creme fraiche adding a slightly more refined tang.  The corn pudding in the ramekin comes in handy when you run out of it in the squash!  A nice warming dish on a cold rainy day!

Thanks to: www.101cookbooks.com