Easy and Indecent Beer Can Chicken

We're going to make this quick and dirty. Tonight it's time to molest some chickens. Don't worry, they want it this way, and so do you. There are many variations on "Beer Can Chicken." Some do it in the oven, some on the grill, and some in so many different ways it makes your head want to spin. Most use beer, others use salad dressing, and still others use a can of baked beans that they then pair with the chicken after cooking. Whatever you choose, this is a pretty basic and fool proof way to cook chicken. If you are a girl still waiting to approach the grill, this is a great starting point. ANYONE can do this. If you can't, email me so I can laugh help you. In real life, you can do this. If you need some help with something TELL ME.

Look, this idiot did it. you can too!

For the purposes of this blog, let's just consider me a Beer Can Chicken traditionalist. I set out to do my Beer Can Chicken on the grill using actual beer. Call me crazy, but I like to master the basics before branching out and ruining dinner (again). They do make a stand for the chicken that you can buy, but I like to live dangerously and the chicken with the can stuck up it's rear actually creates a nice little tripod.

Here I am... I had a whole fryer that I picked up from the farmer's market. Since these chickens are not pumped full of hormones and other crazies, they are a nice small size that is easy for two people to split for dinner. Meet my chicken. We'll call her Sharon. I have no idea why.

I was kind of surprised to find that Sharon did not have her organs in a neat little bag inside of her belly. I was also surprised to find that cluck still had her neck. At least they took the head. It's the little things. Really. 

Next I found a beer in a can. It was kind of hard. I never realized how many bottles we have. Pop the top and drink (or if you want to be totally chaste about it, throw out) half of the beer. 

Hello Beer.

Pick up ole Sharon (the chicken) and rinse her off in some water in the sink, patting her dry. Then pick out your favorite dry rub. I like Uncle Chris' Gourmet Steak Seasoning. On everything. Especially steak and chicken.

After rubbing the chicken you are going to prepare to shove the beer can where the sun don't shine. Take a deep breath and tell the chicken to spread 'em. 

"You might feel a slight pinch"

See what I said about a natural tripod? Who needs a stand, really?

I had my grill heating up on high heat. When I brought the chicken out I turned off one of the burners and kept the rest running medium high, somewhere around 350 to 400 degrees. It is best to cook the chicken with indirect heat, so you don't want to have it directly over the fire or burners. I have a gas grill, and on any grill really you need to make sure the chicken set up on the beer can will fit with the grill top closed. You might have to remove a rack. In a charcoal grill you will need to make sure the coals are positioned so that you can have the chicken on indirect heat. 

 

I settled Sharon in and closed the top. About thirty minutes later... it started to rain. I called S to see if it was possible to grill in the rain. Apparently it is frowned upon. Quick as lightening I preheated the oven to 400 degrees and got ready to make a switch. After thirty minutes on the grill, Sharon was looking pretty chill.

Word

Using some tongs and an oven mitt, I transferred Sharon to a baking sheet and brought her inside to move into the oven. 

Totally relaxed in the oven.

After 30 additional minutes in the oven, I took the chicken out to cool. We were about to eat it, so it loses it's catchy name. I should have called it "Dinner." 

I really like how the chicken looks like it's sitting on a stool relaxing.

We removed the can and threw it away. That can is nasty. You don't want to keep it. This is why I don't understand the baked beans version of Beer Can Chicken. Once you remove the can, the chicken looks really violated. It's ok, you are about to carve it into pieces. It will get better. 

Violation

And finally, your chicken is cooked.

This one was amazing. I don't know if it was a size bonus or what, it makes me hungry for it all over again. Another cooking trick you can do with this (if you like BBQ chicken) is basting it with your favorite sauce or marinade the last ten minutes of cooking. Of course, that works much better on the grill than in the oven. S does this a lot for foolproof BBQ Chicken. I think it's less messy overall and less expensive. Most of the time buying a whole fryer (or Broiler or Roaster... aka a whole chicken) is less expensive or the same cost as buying three breasts. And who doesn't love drumsticks? Tell me. I'm going to get them! 

Basic cooking for the beer can chicken is 1 hour on the grill on indirect heat with the coals or other burners burning on high heat to maintain 350 - 400 degrees. I'm not sure the exact science of doing it in the oven, I kind of winged it. But if you can't do a grill, the oven seemed just as easy. I'm sure you could google an easy Beer Can Chicken in the Oven recipe. 

Back to food. It feels so good. Go cook your chicken!

-RT

Using the Word Hate and Fooducation

Hate is a four letter word. Have you heard that before? In our recent culture of terms like "fml" it seems that no one takes words very seriously. A friend I follow on facebook who lives off of her trust fund and is constantly circling the globe doing exciting things once had a status update that said "stuck in traffic AGAIN. FML." I'm pretty sure she was just being dramatic. If you don't know about FML, click here and ignore the first definition, although it is semi hilarious.  Now that you know how being dramatic works, I want to talk about how much I hate whole wheat bread. 

The Drama.

So, I hate whole wheat bread. In the same ways that I hate cardio and the ways that I hate that chocolate, wine, cheese, nutella, and Hawaiian rolls are not the five major food groups. I eat whole wheat bread (begrudgingly) and tell myself "this is bread, you should just be happy to eat it and shut up." But I'm not happy. I long for the oh so bad for you plain white bread. Preferably wrapped around a ham and cheese sandwich or a PBJ. 

Recently I had an awakening. I follow the blog 100 Days of Real Food. While I am not 100% real food eater, I find their posts on food interesting and like to read up. The originator of the blog and website was also a lover of white before starting to eat clean. She said she always hated wheat bread because she only ever had the typical store bought kinds. When she had real whole wheat bread it was a totally different experience. So I was on a mission to find a good whole wheat bread that was light on the ingredient list. At Whole Foods I picked up their "Basic Whole Wheat." Checked over the ingredients and took it home. 

Basic pic from a basic internet search.

I was making Landy a ham and cheese sandwich for lunch and took a bite of this bread and WOW. It doesn't taste like cardboard, or dirt, or particle board, or any of the other tastes I associate with wheat bread. I will now have to recall if  I have ever actually eaten any of those things. Hopefully not. This bread was a revelation. I would eat this with just butter or with peanut butter. It is a life changer in my bread relationship. It's kind of like bread and I just got engaged after going through an amicable divorce. We just fell in love again guys. Sometimes you can't escape your fate. 

Some food rules are easy ones to stick to, others are tedious. I know that the less ingredients listed on your food, the better, but I also don't have time to look up ingredients that I am unsure about. Here is where I change your world.... There is a free app called Fooducate. The basics of Fooducate are as follows: you enter in some personal info, sign up, activate, and then you can scan barcodes of food items and Fooducate will give your food a grade to let you know where you are heading health wise. You can also set it up to alert you about GMOs. It's my new best food friend. Not to overshadow my new fiance, Basic Whole Wheat.

Speaking of healthy eating, I wonder if the six pies I am making in the next two days would receive passing grades? I knowingly chose to not acknowledge the answer. At least they are made from scratch.

Keep Calm & Pie On,

- RT

The Easy Bake Oven is Heating Up

I just had to search "vintage easy bake oven" to find the one I had. Effffff.

 L recently received a play kitchen and she is LOVING it. It reminds me about how much I loved my Easy Bake Oven and my most treasured play iron and ironing board. Yes, that's right... I used to pretend iron. I'm not sure what insights that provides into my psyche, but I loved it. A lot. So there you go. Apparently some babies like to cook and clean.

While ironing is cool, chess, apparently, is not.

RT's First Ironing Board. I don't own one now, so this would be my last one as well.

 Now I have a real life oven and I made a pledge to get to know my oven better this winter. Even though it's eighty something degrees today, I am prepping for having a warm oven making my kitchen nice and toasty in the cooler months. I stumbled upon a simple roasted chicken and vegetables recipe on a blog (Life as Ashlet) I found through the Writer's Workshop. On Saturday I was wandering through the Urban Harvest Farmer's Market and picked up a frozen whole chicken and some root veggies to take home. 

Our week got a little topsy turvey, and I forgot the take the chicken out of the freezer, but we already had some boneless, skinless chicken thighs in the fridge for L. So I got home yesterday, hung out with L, sent her to bed and got to chopping.

Chicken, Sweet Potatoes, Onions, Celery, Garlic, Carrots, and EV Olive Oil. That's it.

 Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Take your chicken out to bring it to room temperature and clean your veggies and then chop them into uniform - "ish" pieces.

Combine all of your veggies and season with salt & pepper. You can also add in rosemary or parsley or whatever floats your boat. 

 I took out the thighs and placed them on top of the veggies, then sprinkled them with salt and fresh cracked pepper.

 

Then I popped it in the oven for 45 minutes. The magic of this is that the cooking juices from the chicken drip down into the vegetables and give it fabulous flavor and juicy chicken cooking goodness. That's a thing. Promise. Forty five minutes later, the chicken looks like this:

And then also like this:

Let it sit for ten minutes for all of the juicy juices to do their thang. The blog suggested the following veggies as options for roasting: pearl onions, butternut squash, brussels sprouts, fingerling potatoes, asparagus, green beans, or turnips.

So I know I throw around the word "easy" a lot. Because of this issue, and this recipe, I now need to find a word for something that is easier than easy. The Internet gave me some suggestions and I have chosen the word "effortless" to describe this. Seriously.... wash, chop, combine, sprinkle, top, sprinkle, place, bake, remove, set. Those are the steps you take and you not only have a complete dinner of chicken, starches, and veggies, you also have a world of leftovers. Landon loved this. It reminded me of chicken soup, but in a pan. This is definitely an effortless (see what I did there?) and tasty meal that you could do once a week and recreate in different ways. I'm already looking forward to trying this out again with a whole butchered chicken and some different vegetables. 

Increase the Ov Love in your life. Get after it!

-RT

Bean There, Done That

One of my most favorite things to cook is a pot of beans when the weather is cool. 1. It's easy. 2. You can make it healthy. 3. It's tasty. Please hold any 4th grade "magical fruit"/"good for your heart" jokes until the end of this blog post. 

Last week I put up a pot of black beans and they were fantastic. Someone asked me once what it means to "put up a pot" of something. I was kind of perplexed. I've always used that expression. I'm fairly certain it's southern if not Texan. I never really questioned its exact meaning and always use it to talk about cooking beans, peas, or other things you would cook for a long period of time in a pot on the stove. If someone has a proper history for this expression please fill me in... any linguist expert type people? No? Shocking.

The sorted life of black beans....

SO, I made black beans. I used dried beans, so they required some soaking. Step one in bean management involves sorting and picking through the dried beans to make sure there aren't any rocks or other non bean type items in there. Some people skip this step. I used to. Then I bit into a rock. Lesson learned. 

Bean Rinse aka Clean yo Bean

After you finish sorting, you want to give the beans a rinse in a colander. Then you have a few options.  All options start with you putting the beans in a pot (or large bowl) and covering them with LOTS of water. Specific amounts will likely be on your bean bag - mine said six cups. If you did the large bowl, make sure it is very large and cover it with a dishtowel to keep random mishmash from getting in there. Then leave the beans on the counter overnight or for at least 6-8 hours. You can do this same thing in a pot. I personally prefer the quick boil method. Mostly because I get tired at night and forget to soak the beans. For a quick soak, the beans need to be in a pot. Bring the water to a full, rolling boil, turn the heat of, cover them, and leave them to sit for 2-3 hours. 

 

Water Covered Beans

Boiling Beans

I did this first thing in the morning since I was making the beans for dinner that night. My plan was to have everything in the pot simmering by 4pm. When L went down for her nap I got to chopping. 

Back to the Grid Method.

Finished Product

I chopped one VERY large onion, sliced about six cloves of garlic (If you don't like garlic you should leave now before one of us gets hurt), and took the beans out of the pot to do one last rinse. I make this one a quick rinse so that I don't lose a lot of the goodness that is naturally in the beans. Next I got out my cast iron pot and turned the stove to medium to heat it up. Once it was nice and hot I added about a tablespoon of EV Olive Oil and tossed in the onions and garlic. 

My Garlic Friends

My lovely garlic press that has a slicing mechanism. Thanks wedding registry! 

Once in the pot, I stirred the onions and garlic until my house smelled amazing and the onions were soft and becoming "clear" in appearance. 

Clear Onions, Full Heart, Can't Lose...... it's late. shut up. 

I put a smoked ham hock in the pot and gave it a little browning on the sides before adding in about 4 cups of chicken stock. You can always add in water, but I prefer to use stock if I have it.  

Stock

Stock and Hock

 After bringing that up to a boil, I added the beans back in along with two more cups of water and two Goya Ham seasoning packets. It's like Ham bouillon. It's magical. 

Ham Flavah.

Full pot.

 I wanted the broth to cook off of the beans so they would be less like soup, so while I boiled them I left the top off and checked in on the broth level. I cooked them over a low boil for about 2.5 hours. You'll want to check the beans after two hours to check the consistency and see if they are getting to what you prefer. I like mine to still be firm, so 2.5 hour timing works well. 

Low boil, badly captured.

 After a couple of hours my beans looked like this. I took out a spoonful to sample.

Taste Test

 This is the point where I see if my beans need added salt. Because I am cooking with broth and a ham hock, and ham seasoning, I like to see how much natural flavor and saltiness I can get out before adding more in. I also (just to remind you again) don't really salt things that can be easily salted to taste after they are cooked. 

I love chopped tomatoes in my black beans. BUT tomatoes and cast iron are not friends. Also, if you put the tomatoes in too early, they wilt into nothing. I took about four roma tomatoes, gave them a rough chop, and put them in to cook for about 15 minutes with the beans. 

Tomato Party

Now  I want this again.

 The last thing I do, right before serving, is take an entire bushel of washed cilantro and tear it into pieces over the pot, dropping it all in but the stems. You have a couple of options with the ham hock. I usually leave it in and then add it to the leftovers, keeping it until all of the beans are gone. You can also pick all of the meat off of the hock and add it in with the beans and throw the non meat rest of the hock away. Do as you please. 

Up close and personal.

Finished product.

 We are usually a brown rice family. I like brown rice and if it's better for me, then bonus. I happened to have the brown and wild rice I used with the chicken soup that is fantastic, so I decided to try that out with the beans. WINNER. Here is a photo op in case any of you want to seek it out and try it. 

You know it's good because it says "Arroz"

Cooked to perfection, even though I need a new rice cooker. Suggestions appreciated. 

Things that are great to serve with this meal include: sliced avocado, Mexican cotija cheese, sour cream (or non fat plain greek yogurt), salsa, or pico de gallo. We did avocados and Cotija cheese. 

The final product. Perfection in a bowl! 

Because I was making this for us AND Landy, I didn't add jalapenos, which I usually do and love. If you want to do that, I like to add in one jalapeno (deseeded then chopped) with the onions and garlic, and then take a second jalapeno, chop the top off of it to expose the seeds and insides, and drop it into the water to boil with the beans. I remove the remaining whole jalapeno before serving. 

Cooking in pots is the best thing about cool weather. And if you happen to be home with the kids or on a Saturday or Sunday, you can work on it little by little throughout the day and still have plenty of time with your kiddos. This is also something you might be able to adapt to a slow cooker if you work during the day. I'm not great at slow cooking, but it's one of my goals to figure that out this cool weather season. Here's a quick recap of my ingredients:

1 16oz package of dried black beans

1 T EV Olive Oil

1 very large white or yellow onion

6 cloves of garlic

1 smoked ham hock

4-6 cups of chicken broth or water

1-3 packets of goya ham seasoning (to taste)

4 large roma tomatoes

1 bunch of cilantro

rice

Optional:

Jalapeno

Avocado

Cotija Cheese

Sour Cream (not really optional)

pico de gallo

This is one of my absolute favorites. I think I make it twice a month during the fall and winter. It is another warm, filling dish that is actually pretty healthy and simple. It is also EXTREMELY cost effective. On the health front, just remember, you are in charge of your own sour cream intake. I love sour cream, so I try to sub it out for plain, non fat greek yogurt. Can't even tell. Share your beans with someone you love. They are magical, after all. 

-RT

What's for Dinner?

Lately I have felt like I'm letting my Cooking Light subscription go to waste. It is easier for me most times to not follow a recipe, or maybe just less time consuming. I also feel like when I am following a recipe I end up spending more at the grocery store. I tried to challenge all of that and looked for recipes that were inexpensive (or that I had most of the ingredients for) and that took an hour or less to cook. Cook along with me and compare experiences, or wait and see how it goes before you try these out. I picked three recipes knowing that they would provide leftovers for at least one to two nights. 

Here is what we are up to this week:

Chicken and Orzo Skillet Dinner

Photo from Cooking Light

Pork Chops with Roasted Apples and Onions 
served with Haricots Verts and a Mustard Vinaigrette

Photo from Cooking Light

Roasted Chicken Thighs with Mustard-Thyme Sauce
with Roasted Potatoes and Green Beans

Photo from Cooking Light

In sickness updates, after a quick dr visit this morning, Landy is on the mend and it has been officially confirmed that there is still not a cure for Tantrums. If you discover one, let me know. I'm just going to keep working with general lack of attention even though it gets difficult when a small person is clinging to your legs. Motherhood. So glamorous (flossy, flossy.)

Time to mentally prepare for cooking through a tantrum. Nap time is a survival gift from God. And a BIG Happy Birthday to L!

-RT