Your Summer Weekend Menu

Traditional comfort food is great, no matter when you care to indulge.  Recipes are easy to find from family, friends, in magazines and online. However, I have this habit of tinkering with recipes, even those that usually don’t need “fixing.”  This habit has generated some truly awesome homebrewed beer (triple chocolate oatmeal porter, anyone?) as well as incredible food for family and friends. 

Last weekend, friends from the Gulf coast came to visit. Incidentally, their arrival would coincide with a beer tasting I already had planned. The more, the merrier, right?  Anytime you get that many friends together, food is definitely in order.  What better way to make large amounts of food than to fire up the UDS and smoke some meat?  I already had a few pounds of frozen pulled pork, so that put me slightly ahead.  Whole chickens are pretty easy to cook and help feed the masses, but which way to prepare them?   The “beer can” method is pretty good for making wise use of grill space, but I’ve yet to notice if the beer/soda/can contraption makes much of a difference, other than leaving more things to clean up.  So I decided to spatchcock, or butterfly, two chickens.  Some folks like to leave their chicken halves connected; I go ahead and cut them completely in two for the sake of convenience.

I promise I’m getting to the tinkering part – soon.  Prepping the chicken was easy after cutting in half: loosen the skin a little to allow application of rub; I chose a Savory Poultry Blend from Tasty Licks BBQ: a good dusting then rubbed and pushed into all the nooks and crannies under the semi-loose skin.  For aroma and flavoring for those who like to eat the skin, I gave that a good sprinkle of a homemade Cajun rub. 

I asked friends to bring sides like buns and cole slaw but I still needed a good hot side item to make the menu complete.  I have wanted to make smoked mac ‘n’ cheese for some time and thought this would be a great chance to try it out.  I had found a couple of recipes online that I liked, at least parts of, and here’s where the tinkering comes in.

While preparing breakfast that morning, I cooked an extra half-pound of bacon. This was promptly set aside so it would last until the evening.  Sometime in the mid-late afternoon, I prepared a 16 oz. box of elbow macaroni.  After the macaroni was drained, I set it aside and chopped up the bacon.  In another pot, I combined:

2 cans of cheddar cheese soup
3/4 cup milk
2 cups of shredded sharp cheddar cheese
¾ cup grated hard parmesan
¾ cup Sierra Nevada Tumbler Brown Ale
½ cup grated English mild cheddar cheese
Chopped bacon

Whisk all of these things together well, no heating is required.  Once blended, the cheese sauce and the macaroni were mixed well in a disposable aluminum pan.  For the finishing touches, I layered another cup of shredded sharp cheddar, a half-cup of shredded parmesan and a half-cup of mild English cheddar on top of the macaroni.  After that, a very light dusting of Dizzy Pig Pineapple Head rub and the pan (with its delectable contents) waited its turn in the smoker.

The chicken turned out fantastic. The aroma of the chicken with the two rubs was amazing. The smoker had reached 280-300 degrees when the chicken was removed, and that would be perfect for the uncovered pan of mac and cheese.  It took about 25-30 minutes for all the cheeses to melt and the edges begin to brown a little.  The top layers of the cheese absorbed the pecan-maple wood smoke very well.  The taste of the blended cheeses, with a touch of malt, bacon and smoke created a dish that was raved about all night. 

This recipe begs to be tailored to your personal tastes, and is easy to make as a half receipe. Use whatever kind of pasta you like: bowties, ziti, shells, rigatoni or large elbows.  Use the cheeses you enjoy the most; feel free to change or leave out the beer.  Bacon can be left out if you prefer ground beef or crumbled pork sausage.  And finally, it cooks just as well in the oven (325 degrees for 20-25 minutes); or by indirect heat on a gas or charcoal grill.

The menu ended up as such:  smoked chicken, pulled pork, smoked mac ‘n’ cheese, cole slaw and homemade BBQ sauce.

Coming up:
HOToberfest:  October 1, 2011: Glenwood Park Community in Atlanta, noon-7 pm. Free public area, live music, kids area, artist market.  Beer garten with 170+ brews, tickets $30 in advance/$40 at gate.