Mexican street corn - My way

Mexican street corn

During the summer we love to eat corn on the cob and we really enjoy Mexican street corn. We often have my mom eating with us and she can't eat corn on the cob anymore, but enjoys the corn. This is how I make our Mexican street corn so she can enjoy it too. You can make it on the stove top or the grill. The grill adds a bit more smokey flavor to it. 

Ingredients:

• Frozen corn - 1 bag
• mayonnaise - 1/4 cup
• Chili powder - 2 tsp
• Paprika - 1 tbls
• salt - pinch
• Pepper- 1/4 tsp
• Cojita cheese
• Sometimes BBQ rub - to taste

Start to cook the corn in a pan on the stove top or a foil lined (especially if the basket has large holes in it) veggie basket on the grill. You can get it going in the microwave and then transfer it to either pan too. Stir it often so it doesn't burn. 

Grilling Mexican street corn.

Once it is no longer frozen add the mayonnaise and stir the corn so the mayonnaise coats the kernels. I also add the salt and pepper at this time. You can let it sit on the heat for a bit and cook. I like to get some charred kernels when I do it on the grill. I like the flavor of the roasted corn. 

Once it is heated all the way through add the chili powder and paprika (and rub if you like) and stir it all up to mix the spices through the corn. Let it continue to sit and cook for a few minutes more. 

Add some cojita cheese and stir it again to mix the cheese into the corn. Remove from the heat and put into a bowl to serve. Top it with some more cheese and cilantro, if you like cilantro and serve. 

I find this is a great side for just about anything I cook on the grill. Pork loin, hamburgers, pulled pork, brisket... anything really. If you have left over pork or brisket and make tacos with them, the corn is really good in the tacos or on the side. 

Review: Grill Pinz

 Creator: Dan Cranston
Facebook
Kickstarter
Price: $13+

Grill Pinz are a cool new grilling product from Dan Cranston. He is kicking of a Kickstarter this month to be able to produce these stainless steel cooking Pinz. They are ideally built for grilling but can be used in the oven or where ever you need to hold food together while cooking it. They take the place of toothpicks.

iGrill Mini Review

Product: iGrill Mini

Company: Weber

Price: @$50

About two years ago I purchased an iGrill mini. This past Christmas I revived another as a gift. . The igrill mini is a little Bluetooth thermometer that talks directly to your mobile devices and lets you track your cook my temperatures from anywhere on the house. I love them. 

Wayfair's Simply Summer Cookbook!

A few Months back Wayfair.com contacted me about including one of my recipes in their Simply Summer Cookbook. I was happy to oblige and sent them my recipe for Grilled Bruschetta. You can download the book from Wayfair.com for free and enjoy this recipe (pg 15) and others.

Have a great summer and enjoy some great grilled food.

Review - Grilled Pizza The Right Way

Title: Grilled Pizza the Right Way: The Best Technique for Cooking Incredible Tasting Pizza & Flatbread on Your Barbecue Perfectly Chewy & Crispy Every Time
Author: John Delpha
Price: $19.99

This is one of the three books I was sent to review back in April. It's been a little hectic lately with end of school and work so I haven't had a chance to review it until now.

The book is by John Delpha who is a former Army officer and Helicopter pilot. He became a chef and cooked in some of Bostons top kitchens such as Clio, Mistral, Harvest, Sorellina and La Campania. He is a member of iQue, who won the 2009 Jack Daniel's World Barbecue Championship and loves to cook with fire. He learned how to grill pizza at Al Forno in Providence, RI and brings his experience and skill to the masses via this book.

I love to use my grill and I love to eat pizza. This book is perfect for people with similar tastes. If you want to try something new on the grill this book will help you learn how to grill a pizza and other flatbreads. It starts with savory pizzas and ends with dessert pizzas. There are a couple parts I found a little confusing, but overall it is a pretty straight forward cook book.

Review - Ultimate Book of BBQ

I received an email a couple weeks ago asking if I would be interested in reviewing a BBQ cook book. My initial response was, "Is this a trick question?" I'm always looking for new recipes, tips on cooking and just improving my BBQ skills in general.

I agreed to review Southern Living Ultimate Book of BBQ - the complete year-round guide to grilling & smoking. A couple days later I received it and two other grilling books which I will be reviewing later.

Pitmaster Christopher Prieto of PRIME Barbecue in Wendell, NC has worked with Southern Living to compile over 200 recipes, creating a hefty cook book that covers the basics to the finer points of BBQ.

A Few of My Favorite -BBQ- Things

Over the past few years of cooking BBQ I have found a few items that I really like to use when I cook. Some of them are very useful and almost necessary and others are just things that I find make the process easier. I've come up with my top ten list of these items and will list them in order of least necessary to ones I use all the time. Feel free to add items you think I missed in the comment section.

Cooking with Fire! - Contest

Cooking with Fire!

This year I had some t-shirts made for the blog by Kong Screen Printing in Austin, TX, and stickers done at Contagious Graphics in Charlotte, NC. Both are great printers and easy to work with. Because I have a couple extra t-shirts and lots of stickers I'm going to run my first contest.

Head over to facebook.com/bbq4fun, like my page and post your best picture of summer grilling or BBQ. There needs to be food in the picture that has been cooked with fire. There will be two winners; the photo with the most likes and the photo that my esteemed panel of judges (my wife and girls)  like the best. The winners will receive a Q4Fun t-shirt (sizes are limited), a Q4Fun sticker and a baggie of my rub. The contest will run until August 17, 2013 and is only for those in the continental US.

The t-shirt.

The sticker.

The Q Rub

Recipe: Grilled Bruschetta

My family loves Italian food and snacks. We love to try new things at home and one of our favorite appetizers is bruschetta. I was watching the Food Network and one of the chefs made grilled bruschetta. It looked good and I thought I can make that and make it better. So I did.

Grilled, Stuffed Pork Chops

Warming up the grill.

I like to try new things on the grill. One thing I have been wanting to try are grilled stuffed pork chops. My wife and I have regular conversations about what to eat for supper and one day she said, "There are pork chops you can grill." That decided what I was going to make. I just had to figure out what I was going to stuff them with.

I had visions of nice, thick center cut pork chops that I could slice into to make a pocket. I was a little disappointed when I got home.

Grilling a London Broil

London broil resting.

It is odd to have it be so warm at the beginning of March here in SC. Our temps were in the upper 70s today so that made for a great evening to fire up the grill and make some good food. It doesn't take long and it tastes so good.

So Friday evening I grilled a london broil and made some sides to go with it. I decided to do a video blog about it too. I grilled the beef and roasted some garlic and potatoes to go with it. It came out great and the family loved it.

Chicken and Noodles

Something that I have always wanted to make is pasta. Why? I don't know I just think it would be cool to make my own pasta. So I finally took the plunge and tried it out. I made grilled chicken which I served over my pasta with a simple tomato sauce. For a first try it turned out ok.

I used a simple pasta recipe consisting of, 2 cups of flour, 3 eggs, 1tbls olive oil, a pinch of salt and 1 tsp of garlic powder. Mixing the dough was simple but the next parts took some doing. I don't have a pasta maker. I hand rolled the dough and cut it with a pizza slicer.

Meyer's Elgin Sausage - Part III (Smoked, Spicy and Oh, So Yummy)

Creator:Meyers’ Elgin Sausage
Location: Cuetopia, TX - Home of the Fighting Sausage Heads
Cost: @$21.50 +shipping
Link: Sausage

All good things must come to an end. Last weekend my supply of Meyer's sausage did. It was a happy but sad day. Happy because I got to savor the wonderful flavors of their Hot Smoked Sausage and Smoked Mexacan-Style Sausage with Jalapeños (Tejano). Sad because I now have no more Meyer's sausage and I'm not sure I will like what we get here. Ok, that last bit is crazy talk because we love sausage, but it defiantly won't be the same.

Last weekend we had some friends over and I smoked some meat including the sausage. Meyer's sausage smokes nicely. It plumps up and the juices are released in the casing making for a nice juicy sausage that is full of flavor. As I said in my first review of Meyer's sausage the casings are firm but not tough, this makes for a nice eating experience. You don't feel like a dog trying to tear through a piece of leather.


Hot Smoked Sausage
This sausage is great. The flavor is like the smoked sausage but they add a bit more red pepper to give it a nice kick. Some "hot" sausages are so spicy you don't taste the meat because your mouth is on fire. Not with this sausage. It gives a nice burn but you still can taste it. It just enhances the flavor and eating experience. For some this sausage would be too spicy but I think it has just the right amount of heat.

Tejano
I really liked the flavor of this sausage. This was also my wife's favorite along with the Smoked Jalapeño sausage I reviewed in Part I. It has a great chorizo flavor and the jalapeño brings the sweet pepper flavor to it. It is no surprise why this sausage won a second place people's choice award.

The hot sausage would great in scallop potatoes, chowder or any number of dishes. The Tejano sausage would be great in enchiladas, Mexican stews or other dishes with a south-of-the-border twist. I had left overs of both so I chopped them up and made a gumbo with some pulled pork I had. The sausage brought the right amount of extra spice to the party and made my families mouths happy.


Both of these sausages receive a full rack of ribs with a side of sauce on the Gibbs' Ribs* scale. I definitely recommend ordering some from Meyer's Elgin Sausage and try some of their other goodies.

*When I do reviews, books or otherwise, I rate the items with ribs (they are my favorite BBQ dish). A full rack is great and a single rib is poor. I will tend to stick to a full rack, half rack or one rib.

Review: Meyers Elgin Sausage Sausage - Part II (Beef and Potatoes)

Creator: Meyers’ Elgin Sausage
Location: Cuetopia, TX - Home of the Fighting Sausage Heads
Cost: @$21.50 +shipping
Link: Sausage

After the first set of sausages we had from Meyer's my wife kept asking when we would be eating the others. I decided Sunday night would be a good night for a pack. I was home and the ladies were out shopping so I decided to make supper for us.

In the variety of sausage I got from Meyer's Elgin Sausage was a pack of beef sausage. I really enjoyed the other sausages they made and thought they would work well with scallop potatoes. So, I decided to make scallop potatoes and sausage. Normally I cook the sausage with the scallop potatoes but since I knew the ladies wouldn't be home soon, and the potatoes would take an hour, I decided to smoke the sausage.

I put the charcoal in the chimney starter and lit it so the charcoal would be ready when I put the potatoes in the oven. I thought about smoking the potatoes too but didn't have a disposable pan. I got the potatoes in the oven and got the cooker fired up with the ready-to-go coals.


The cooker was at 250° so I put the sausages on and let them cook. I checked them once after about 30 minutes and turned them over. About 10 minutes after my wife and girls arrived home supper was ready.


The beef sausage is really good. The spices in it bring out the beefy flavor of the meat and they have a little bit of heat, like good sausage does. They seemed to be a bit juicier then the previous sausages and the casings a little tougher. I think I could have cooked them a little longer as they didn't quite split. My wife said these were her favorites along with the jalapeño and cheese ones. After making sausage for so many years Meyer's really knows what they're doing.


These sausages go great with scallop potatoes and would go great with sautéed peppers and onions or just by themselves so you can enjoy the full flavor of them.

On the Gibbs Ribs* scale these also get a full rack. I'm looking forward to trying the next two packs I have.

*When I do reviews, books or otherwise, I rate the items with ribs (they are my favorite BBQ dish). A full rack is great and a single rib is poor. I will tend to stick to a full rack, half rack or one rib.

Review: Meyers Elgin Sausage Sausage - Part I

Creator: Meyers’ Elgin Sausage
Location: Cuetopia, TX - Home of the Fighting Sausage Heads
Cost: @$21.50 +shipping
Link: Sausage

One of the BBQ people I follow on Twitter is @cuetopia. He is the official Twitter spokesperson of Meyers Elgin Sausage and the Fighting Sausage Heads. Since I have been following him he has tantalized and taunted me with pictures of their smokehouse making sausage. I finally procured some to test and do a review on.

Some friends invited us over to watch a football game, eat chili and socialize. I figured this would be a great time to cook up three packs of the sausage and get some other opinions about them.

I looked at what we had and decided two "regular" and a spicy one would be good to try. I pulled out the Smoked Sausage, Smoked Sausage with Garlic and the Jalapeño & Cheese.


I didn't want to do a long smoke, so I decided to grill the sausage. I used some Kingsford Hickory charcoal. Once the fire was going I put the sausages on.


About every ten minutes I rotated them so they could cook evenly and move them around so no sausage was on a hot spot too long. The temp on the grill was low so it took about 30 minutes to cook them. The sausages cooked up nicely. Swelling up, splitting and releasing their juiciness into the coals making for a mouthwatering aroma.


Once they were cooked I put them in a dish with cheap labels and tinfoil separators. After all we didn't want them to get mixed up.


All three of them were juicy, not greasy like some sausages. Their casings gave a nice crisp snap when I bit into them or cut them. They weren't tough like some, where the whole casing tears off as you try to gnaw through the outer casing to get to the tender meat on the inside. Just the right toughness to hold it all together to grill or smoke.

Smoked Sausage
The Smoked Sausage is great. I took a bite and thought, "WOW! That's good sausage." It has just the right amount of smokiness so you can tell that it has been smoked over hickory wood but not too much where it's overpowering.

These sausages are great by themselves but would make a dish of scallop potatoes really good. My wife makes a great corn chowder and these would make it even better (that is hard to do as it is very good.)

Smoked Sausage with Garlic
I love garlic. Most dishes I cook have garlic in them, even my BBQ pork. I was looking forward to these sausages and was not disappointed. These sausages are just like the Smoked Sausages but with garlic. It is not overpowering, in your face, breath-of-death giving garlic. It is a subtle garlic flavor that enhances the overall taste sensation of the sausage and bumps it up a notch.

These sausages stand well on their own but would be good in an Italian sandwich with onions and peppers.

Jalapeño & Cheese
I like spicy. Every time I eat jalapeños or jalapeño flavored anything I feel ill. These sausages scared me. I thought, "Great, I'll eat these and my stomach will feel like it's turning inside out and my mouth will be on fire." Boy was I surprised!

These are my favorite sausages I have tried so far. The spice is there but not the, "grab-a-gallon-of-milk-my-mouth-is-on-fire" type. It is a nice slow burn. You really don't notice the heat at first but after a couple of seconds your mouth is pleasantly warm. My wife, who is not a fan of spicy, really liked them too. The smokey flavor and the heat make for a happy mouth and I had no ill side effects from the jalapeños.

These sausages would make great enchiladas or other Mexican style dishes.

All three of these sausages are great. I wish there were a local store I could by them at. If I had a BBQ restaurant I would serve these. To quote one of my friends when I asked him what he thought of the sausages, "Mmmm...mmm...mmmm...good. On the Gibbs Ribs* scale these easily get a full rack of ribs with extra sauce on the side.


*When I do reviews, books or otherwise, I rate the items with ribs (they are my favorite BBQ dish). A full rack is great and a single rib is poor. I will tend to stick to a full rack, half rack or one rib.

App Review: On the House – Great Backyard Grilling

Creator: CulinartMedia, Inc.
Requirements: Compatible iPad. Requires iOS 3.2 or later.

Cost: $3.99
Link: Great Grilling

This app is well designed with intuitive navigation and great-tasting recipes that are easy to follow.

My likes:
There are some cool features that make this app shine for me. When I find a recipe I like, I can add it to my favorites, menu or shopping cart. Favorites help you find the recipes you like quicker. The menu helps you put together a menu for a dinner party or a grill night. The shopping cart puts all the ingredients in a list so you can figure out what you need to buy.

Being able to change the number of people cooking for and having the app modify the amounts of ingredients automatically is a great feature for chefs like me who may cook for my wife and kids one night then for the neighborhood block party the next. When the recipe calls for you to cook an item for a set time, you can touch the time in the recipe to open a timer and track your cooking time.

My dislikes:
A grilling app should not tell you to preheat the oven to make ribs. And working with multiple recipes simultaneously means I need multiple timers. Some recipes, for example, have you cooking a sauce on the stove and the meat on the grill. You need to time both. The currently empty video tips section needs to be populated. That would be an excellent addition to the app.

Overall the app is really useful. I recommend it for the recipes and ability to set up menus. The little extras make it nice, but the timers and lack of videos detract from its overall usefulness.

This was a tough decision to rate this app. It is so close to a full rack but in the end it receives a 3/4 rack of ribs on the rib's Gibbs scale*. Multiple timers, videos and turning the ribs recipe into a grill recipe would allow me to change the rating to a full rack.

*When I do reviews, books or otherwise, I will rate the items with ribs (they are my favorite BBQ dish). A full rack is great and a single rib is poor.

Best Christmas Present - for Q

Last Christmas I received one of the most useful gifts for Q. Silicon gloves. These are one of the most useful tools in my arsenal of Q tools I have. They are insulated black silicon gloves that allow me to grab meat off the hot cooker, pull pork without getting third degree burns and are easy to clean.

They are not good for grabbing a hot grate or stone as it will melt the silicon. The meat doesn't tend to get as hot as the metal or stone so I have never had any trouble with that. To clean them I leave them on, get a little dish soap on them and wash my hands in warm water. This insures I don't get any water inside the gloves. Once they are grease free I lay them down to dry or dry them on a towel.

Many cooking stores carry these gloves and they can also be found on Amazon for about $10. If you make a lot of Q it will be some of the best $10 you will spend.

Drunken Chicken

I had heard about the drunken chicken for years and finally tried it last summer. It is one of our favorite grill dishes (yes I know this is supposed to be about BBQ. This also works well on a smoker if you have one.) I have had friends try it with soda and they say it is good too. I have tried with different beers and found that they will give you a different flavor profile. You can also stuff the rest of the cavity with other aromatics. The juice left in the pan after cooking makes great gravy. I have also made it in the oven set at 350 but it doesn’t taste as good as coming off the grill.

Ingredients

• 1 can of beer
• 1 Whole Chicken
• Your favorite rub or seasoning salt ( I use my homemade one)
  
• 1 cup yellow mustard
• ¼ cup honey
• 1 onion
• 4 cloves of garlic

Directions

1. Preheat an outdoor grill for low heat.
2. In a bowl mix together the honey and the mustard
3. Brush the honey mustard all over the chicken
4. Put your favorite seasoning all over the chicken (rub it in)
   
5. Drink 1/2 the beer, leaving the remainder in the can.
6. Place can on a disposable baking sheet. Set chicken on can, inserting can into the cavity of the chicken.
7. Chop up the onion and garlic and place it in the cavity above the beer.
8. Place baking sheet with beer and chicken on the prepared grill. Cook over low heat for about 3 hours, or until internal temperature of chicken reaches 180 degrees F (80 degrees C).

What is BBQ?

I grill and I BBQ. Aren’t they the same thing? No. Don’t you fire up the BBQ for burgers and hot dogs? No. Grilling and BBQ are two different animals. Both are good and give you great results. But, they are very different.

Grilling and BBQ both use fire to cook your meat on a cooker of some sort. It can use gas (though that doesn’t make great BBQ, IMHO), charcoal or wood. You get a fire going and throw the meat on until it is done. That’s about it for similarities.

Grilling is hot and fast. You can fire up your grill and be ready to go in a few minutes. You put your meat on it for 10 minutes to 2 hours, depending on what you’re grilling. Usually your cook temps are around 300° F. It creates a hot, quick cook. I love to grill burgers, hotdogs, steaks and chicken.

BBQ is low and slow. You fire up your grill, usually charcoal or wood, and bring it up to about 230°F and your cook time can be anywhere from 3 hours to 18 hours depending on the meat and the weight of it. BBQ usually imparts smoke to the meat and breaks down the connective tissue slowly giving you an awesome tender piece of meat as a finished product. Pork, Chicken, turkey, beef, ribs all work great for a low and slow cook.


So when I’m talking about BBQ, I’m talking low and slow. As I continue to blog I will be adding some BBQ recipes and some grilling recipes. But the main focus will be on BBQ.