Honky Tonk Homicide And Delicious Beer Butt Chicken

Our previous experiment with the Italian murder mystery dinner went exceedingly well, so we've been doing more murder mystery evenings with family friends, and of course - food!  Our latest was "Honky Tonk Homicide," which had everyone dressing up as various patrons of a hony tonk cowboy bar.  To keep up with the theme we made "beer butt" chicken, which sounds odd, but is incredibly tasty.

The idea with beer butt chicken is to have both beer and regular seasonings adding to the chicken's flavor. To start off, about half a can of beer is emptied and then a variety of seasonings are spooned into the can.

Our version of this meal gets three distinct stages of seasonings.  The second stage is done by mixing seasonings with butter and applying them underneath the skin, between the skin and the actual chicken meat.

The beer can and seasonings are stuffed up the chicken's backside, which stands the entire chicken upright.  The third stage of seasonings are then rubbed over the skin.

And here's our two finished delicious chickens straight out of the oven, crispy, seasoned, and smelling great!

Megan played the local sheriff, while Glen and Cristal were a televangelist couple. Glen even died his hair gray and went for the cheesy bolo tie, while Cristal got the perfect Tammy Faye style hair and makeup.

Here I am with Megan as "Dusty Diamond," good old boy and country karaoke master.

Matt managed to successfully hold both the beer can and the befuddled expression the entire evening.

Joining live via webcast - Jayne as the bar waitress, unwed mother, and all around floozie.

But the chicken wasn't the only thing on the menu of course!  For Megan's birthday she wanted to try out some new spices, including something we'd never used before - whole vanilla bean.  The bean was used for an amazing layered cake the likes of which we'd never tasted.

Here's Megan slicing open the whole vanilla bean and harvesting the flavorful gunk inside.

The cake had several layers and ended up being a towering masterpiece. Here are the first two layers getting ready to be covered.

Here's all the layers together, along with the recently applied cream cheese frosting.

And here's the final amazing product - insanely rich and layered pumpkin/carrot cake!

Lemon Chicken And Jalepeno Mac

We may be a full week into September, but apparently somebody forgot to notify the Montana skies, as we're still regularly getting high 80 temperatures.  Despite the lack of proper Fall weather we decided to brave the oven anyway and start making some fun baked meals.  Before getting into that though, here's another look at one of our grilled kebab adventures.

This time for a little more fun and flair we wrapped thin slices of zucchini in an "S" shape around the marinated chicken and vegetables.

Here's a look at a similar meal where we grilled large pieces of bone-in chicken, but also threw on mushrooms and veggie strips, which were dipped into a delicious garlic/yogurt mixture.

Now onto the real goods: a whole chicken stuffed with boiled lemon and baked inside a dough crust!  We got this one from an episode of "Oliver Twist" on Netflix. You can also see an herb mixture we ground up in our mortar and pestle in the picture below.

Boiling the whole lemon for a few minutes gets it hot and releases more flavor so the chicken gets cooked from the inside from the lemon and from the outside via the oven.

After putting the lemon inside the chicken, the whole thing gets covered in an herb mixture and then tied up with kitchen string.

A simple flour dough made from scratch gets wrapped around the chicken to keep all the juices and heat inside.

Here's the finished chicken right out of the oven before the dough barrier is cracked open to get at the lemony delicious goodness inside.

To complete the meal we had a salad covered in fruits and vegetables, along with cornbread stuffing and a generous helping of gravy.  It's amazing how much the lemon flavor soaks into the chicken - and not just the skin!  Every bite of the meat has a definite lemon zest going on.

For another fun baked meal this past week we decided to put a twist on the standard baked pasta dish and went with a jalapeno theme.  Rather than breadcrumbs, the top of the pasta was covered in jalapeno flavored chips, which gave just as much crunch and way more flavor. Chopped jalapenos also went inside the pasta, of course.

Hopefully the temperature will start to dip soon so we can get into more Fall baked goodness.  Coming up soon we'll be having a new murder mystery dinner meal, along with more pasta and chicken dinners.

Oh, and just because it was stupidly awesome and I'm still basking in its glow, go back and check out our Fried Chicken Benedict from last year!

Making Our Own Burgers

We've still got a few more great grilling experiences to share before summer comes to a close again.  Lately we've been a bit worried about what exactly goes on during the process of making ground beef and what they may be putting in there to extend the product, so we decided to try making our own ground beef. 

What was amazing is how incredibly easy this process really is. I had an image in my head of needing some industrial machine that glops the beef out in those noodle like strings, but honestly all you need is a food processor and a big chuck steak.  If you normally use a pound of ground beef for a meal, get a steak that's slightly bigger or up to a pound and a half.

To get things started Megan trimmed off the largest pieces of fat and then cut the steak into large chunks.

The meat goes into the food processor and is pulsed until it reaches the right consistency, and we discovered we didn't even need to add in egg or oil or anything to get it to stick together.  It's literally as simple as meat + mixing = ground beef.

The end result was pretty similar in consistency and color to ground beef you'd buy in a package, although the texture is noticeably different (read: better).  Our own home made ground beef formed into patties just as well as anything we've ever bought at the store.

We wanted to make our burger patties unique and have more flavor than just what comes from the beef, so we also ground up two kinds of mushrooms and white onion.

The two ground mixtures were mixed together, and then we added in a host of seasonings like garlic powder, spicy pepper seasoning, and of course salt and pepper. We were out of Worcestershire sauce, so a few dabs of A1 steak sauce went in its place.

Here are the finished patties, which stuck together easily and didn't require any extra work to put together.  The extra vegetables and seasonings make these smell great!

That same day we found a new grill on clearance, as the grilling season is ending and all the grocery stores are trying to get rid of them. We actually paid less for this nice one than we did for the our other rickety, tiny grill.

The end result was amazingly juicy burgers as good or better than what we would have made with store bought ground beef, and we'll definitely be going this route again in the future. We may try different types of steak in the future, as well as possibly other methods of seasoning, such as marinating the steaks ahead of time.

Here's our finished meal, complete with side salad. It's not really clear from the picture, but we like a lot of fruits and veggies on our salads.  This one has peach, nectarine, tomatoes, onions, carrots, and more.  For my burger I threw on avocado, tomato, cheddar, onion, ketchup, and steak sauce.

That's it for now, and we'll be back soon with the end of our grilling adventures and the start of the fall season. Coming up this fall will be whole chicken with lemon baked in dough, chili made in a pumpkin, and more!

Murder Mystery Dinner, Pretzels, And More!

We've been a little behind in keeping up with our food blogs lately, so this one is going to cover several different topics.  After recently posting a look back at grilling season, now we'll dive into a murder mystery dinner we did a few weeks back, adventures in making some amazingly fantastic pretzels, and even a little more grilled kebab action.

We have a weekly gaming group that plays various role-playing games on the weekend, from D&D to Call of Cthulhu to Toon and just about everything in-between. One week we decided to mix our love of cooking with our weekly gaming and do a murder mystery dinner. The game was Italian themed, so of course we had a delicious pasta dinner.

The first course was an appetizer commonly found in Italian restaurants that's both easy and fantastically tasty.  Take a garlic bulb or two and cut off the top section so the cloves are just sticking out of the top. Pull off the excess layers of skin off the sides of the bulb.  Either put the bulbs in tin-foil, or in a terracotta garlic baker (you can see the bottom half of ours near the top of the photo below), and then top the bulbs with a drizzle of olive oil and a handful of salt and pepper or any other spices that strike your fancy.

Bake the bulbs for around 40 minutes until the cloves get soft. You'll know when they're ready because the cloves easily slide out when you press a fork against the bottom of the bulb. Mash up the cloves a bit with a fork inside a shallow bowl or pasta plate and then pour in olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and fresh ground pepper.  Tear up pieces of French bread and dip it into the garlic mixture for an amazing appetizer.

The cast for the murder mystery required an extra female character we couldn't leave out in case she ended up being the murderer, so we had Jacob play a male version of the character.  Things got, um, weird as the story progressed and it was revealed he was in love with Matt's character, who also had a monkey named Coco.

For the main course we put together a spinach and ricotta cannelloni, taken from the cookbook "Relaxed Cooking with Curtis Stone." Unfortunately we couldn't find fresh pasta sheets and didn't have time to make our own, so instead the dish ended up being manicotti instead of cannelloni.

Fresh herbs do actually make a difference here, so if at all possible get fresh basil and thyme to take this dish from good to extraordinary.

The finished product is made up of three layers: a tomato sauce on the bottom, the middle ricotta filling in the manicotti, and the bechamel sauce on top. Each layer can be made separately and put together at the end, so for instance you can make the tomato sauce well ahead of time and keep it refrigerated.

For our desert Cristal put together a spectacular tiramasu complete with lady fingers, which was a sweet ending to our bloody murder mystery.

After a less than satisfactory experience at a local pretzel shop we decided to try putting together our own pretzels. Megan found a fantastic recipe online that results in soft and delicious pretzels far better than what you'll pay for in mall food courts.  The pictures below are of pepperoni pretzels, which we dipped in marinara sauce.  These are easy to modify in any given direction, and you could even make them more of a desert by using cinnamon instead of salt.

After making these pretzels a few time it dawned on us that the soft texture and intense flavor would be great for a sandwich roll.

We turned them into pretzel themed Philly cheese steak sandwiches with roast beef, caramelized onions, and the same cheese sauce we'd normally use for dipping.

In the last blog I mentioned making kebabs with sausage instead of chicken, and here's the fruit of our labors. We really enjoyed going this route as the sausage didn't need to cook nearly as long as raw chicken, so all the veggies and meat were perfectly done at the same time.  For the veggies we used mushrooms, green and red bell pepper, red and white onion, and potatoes and carrots (be sure to microwave or bake the potatoes and carrots briefly before hand, or they wont get soft on the grill).  A white wine marinade was brushed over the vegetables repeatedly during the grilling process.

That's it for now, check back soon for more of our adventures in cooking!