Grilling Season '12: The Double Pork Rollup

Burgers and ribs are classic barbecue fare, but there's a whole lot more that can be done with a grill and some charcoal. This summer we're challenging ourselves to try as many different kinds of grilled meals as possible, and one of our most recent adventures involves a double dosage of pork. This rolled-up meal takes inspiration from two different sources: bacon wrapped meat, and cream cheese stuffed jalapenos. We decided to blend the two ideas together, and it ended up being a match made in heaven.

To start off with, we put together what's going to be the stuffing of the double pork rollup. Our first ingredients are roasted red and yellow bell peppers. If you ever see a recipe calling for roasted peppers, you don't have to buy an expensive jar at the store. Instead, cut a bell pepper in half and flatten it out on a baking sheet, and then set the oven to "broil." Leave the oven door slightly open and broil for 5 - 10 minutes until the skin is blackened.

After the peppers have had time to cool, the skin is pulled off and they are cut into thin slices. There's plenty more going inside the pork though - here we're chopping up both jalapenos and artichoke hearts.

Stuffed peppers or meats frequently have an outer breading or are coated with bread crumbs. To simulate that, we put butter crackers into a plastic bag and then rolled a rolling pin over it to create a fine crushed powder that tastes much better than normal bread crumbs.

For the main layer of meat we're using several large pork chops. To reduce on the cooking time and increase the surface area we can't keep them this thick, however.

Using a meat mallet, Megan pounded out the pork chops, which reduces their thickness. This can be a messy process though, so to keep it simple and clean the chops are placed between two layers of plastic wrap.

For the "double" part of the double pork roll-up we're going to wrap the chops in bacon. The roll-up creation starts in earnest by laying down a layer of tin foil and then placing strips of bacon on the foil.

Now that the pork chops are properly flattened they are going over the bacon. Here we've layed down the first two pieces.

And here all the pork is now covering the bacon on the fin foil layer. When the tin foil finally gets rolled up it will result in a meat roll with bacon on the outside and pork chops on the inside.

Don't forget about those stuffing ingredients we put together! Here we've got a layer of cream cheese and the crushed crackers.

Finishing the roll are the roasted bell peppers, the jalapenos, and the artichoke hearts. The entire thing is then tightly rolled together.

When cooking thick meats (or in this case, several layers of thin meat), you want to use indirect heat instead of direct flame so it cooks evenly without burning on the edges. For indirect heat, spread your coals out onto two sides of the grill, leaving an empty strip in the middle.

After turning several times and being cooked over the course of an hour, we opened up the tin foil to see how things were progressing inside.

Besides just the flavors of the meat and veggies, we're brushing on a sauce as well consisting of mustard, honey, and beer.

As you can see below, unfortunately the roll-up started to unravel. While this didn't change the amazing taste or texture, it did mess up the presentation a bit (although this still looks pretty on it's own - it's amazing how much it resembles a sub sandwich made completely out of meat!)

Although there were vegetables inside the roll-up, we still wanted a side salad to complete our meal. To put together a perfectly topped salad, we sliced up tomato, bell pepper, peperoncini, green onions, and avocado.

This is the base of my salad, where the vegetables are starting to get layered on before adding the dressing.

I prefer thousand island on my salad (and even made my own recently - which will be covered in an upcoming blog), while Megan goes for Ranch instead.

To complete my salad, I've tossed on some wasabi peas and the leftover cheese curds from the poutine we made during the Canadian stop of our culinary world tour.

Remember how the roll-up came apart a bit before? Unfortunately this prevented us from putting the roll on direct heat for the last few minutes of cooking to get the bacon crispy. We ended up finishing the roll-up under the broiler to crisp up the outer edge of bacon. You can also see kitchen twine in the picture below where we tried to "patch up" the meat to cook directly above the flame, but by that point the roll was falling apart too much to salvage.

We primarily use this twine for tying up whole chicken or turkey, and to see how it's utilized in the kitchen check out our Easter chickens, lemon chicken baked inside a dough crust, or orange injected chicken.

While it didn't end up as pretty as we'd hoped due to overstuffing and unraveling, it still smelled amazing and retained it's basic shape.

Here I've cut up several slices to get laid on a plate next to the side salad. To get the right presentation next time we'll use thicker bacon and put twine on from the beginning so the roll doesn't unwrap during the cooking process.

Here's my finished plate, filled to the brim with piping hot veggies and a double helping of delicious pork, along with a delicious and filling salad.

As this year's grilling season continues we'll soon be covering ribs injected with homemade root beer barbecue sauce, more unique twists on traditional potato salad, and the continuation of our culinary "world tour" as it heads to Greenland. Check back soon for more cooking at Six-Seven-Eight!

Interconnecting Meals: Habanero Pork, Chipotle Mac, and Caesar Wraps

There's no question that we love putting together impressive meals with many delicious ingredients, but unfortunately we also have to balance that with the reality of our bank accounts. To keep having top-notch culinary adventures and not end up spending our entire paychecks at the grocery store, we strike a balance by building several days to a week's worth of food around the same ingredients, as well as planning our meals based on what's on sale that week.

By connecting ingredients together across several lunches or dinners, we ensure the ingredients we buy are completely used and we make the most of our weekly shopping. For a look at our previous methods of interconnecting meals, you can see how we made a variety of meals around one main ingredient, how we kept Easter dinner leftovers going so nothing got thrown out, and check out our article on turning chicken leftovers into delicious chicken salad sandwiches you can't get at any store or restaurant.

This week, we're taking a look at three different meals that all have a major component that was used for more than one dinner: habanero pork chops, a chipotle macaroni and cheese bake, and chicken caesar salad wraps.

Previously we had made an apple habanero sauce to turn cheap seafood into a restaurant-worthy meal, but there was more sauce than we needed, and right around that same time we got lucky and found some great pork on sale for around $2. Combining the two seemed like a perfect fit. Even though the sauce was originally meant for seafood, its hot-yet-sweet flavor would compliment pork just as well.

Before adding in the sauce we seared each side of the pork until they were just changing color, as each chop was fairly thin and didn't need much cooking time.

Here the sauce is going on, which also includes chipotle pepper, onion, garlic, and white wine pulsed together in a food processor.

Meat doesn't make a whole meal though, as there's got to be a hearty side as well. A big salad covered in fruit and vegetables is a regular occurrence on our dinner plates. For this salad, we're using strawberries, tomatoes, green onion, and some shredded colby jack.

Plop a baked potato on the plate - complete with sour cream, cheese, and pepper - and we've got one fantastic dinner with very complementary flavors. Because all of the ingredients were also being used for other meals that week, the whole thing ended up costing very little but still tasted as good as anything you'd eat spending money at a restaurant.

Remember how I mentioned the chipotle peppers? A can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce is fairly cheap, but because of how hot they are there's always more peppers than are needed for any one single meal. To make sure we get our money's worth and don't end up having to throw any away, we also put together a spicy mac and cheese using the chipotles.

After being chopped up, the peppers go into a pan along with heavy cream and as much cheddar cheese as you care to add!

Megan and I frequently make whole chickens, as they are not only beautiful on the presentation front but also cost effective, so we often have left over chicken ready to be used for any number of meals. Here we're chopping up some chicken meat to go into the macaroni and turn this into a complete casserole style meal.

Regular cooked macaroni noodles are the base of the casserole, which are being mixed up with the chicken along with the cheese sauce.

Everything then gets spooned into a casserole dish. If you want to jazz this up even further, or make it even spicier, you could add in sliced jalapenos or any number of vegetables - from zucchini to squash or tomatoes.

A casserole can't be completely soft, and a more firm layer on top really makes the texture much more appealing. For a topping we're using a mixture of melted butter and butter crackers. See that little tube in the background? That's the ghost pepper salt we always talk about, and yeah, we added some of that in too :)

Fresh out of the oven, the casserole's top has baked to a perfect golden brown and the cheese inside is a bubbling, gooey, wonderful mess.

A bowl of this spicy casserole works great as a meal on it's own, or you can throw it on a plate with a side salad or a side veggie, such as broccoli or cauliflower.

For our final look at interconnecting meals this time around, we'll explore another use for leftover chicken. One day at Quiznos I had a wrap filled with caesar salad fixings and chunks of white chicken meat, and I decided I had to make my own at home. For my version of the wrap, I'm using burrito style tortillas, chopped leftover chicken, tomatoes, green onion, and romaine lettuce.  These are also great with flavored wraps, such as spinach or sun-dried tomato.

To create the wrap I spread out a layer of store-bought caesar dressing on my tortillas and layed down a heaping handful of lettuce. Homemade caesar is of course always a treat, but this particular week we didn't have all the right ingredients.  We'll be sure to cover how to make restaurant-worthy caesar dressing in an upcoming blog.

Here's the overstuffed chicken caesar wrap as I'm getting ready to fold it up and dig into a very satisfying lunch.

That's all we've got on interconnecting meals for now, but there's still plenty more coming up at Six-Seven-Eight. Soon we'll be sharing more pictures and recipes on making southwest chipotle potato salad, a grilled south-of-the-border salad, amazing root beer based barbecue sauce, and more!

Potato Salad: Chicken Bacon Ranch And Classic Veggie

There's been a lot of great meat sizzling on our grill lately, from tender pork spareribs to spicy turkey burgers, and a main course that good deserves an equally sensational side. Lately we've been experimenting with different ways of creating the old barbecue meal standby of potato salad. Today we'll look at two very different versions of this classic side dish: a traditional vegetable potato salad and a chicken bacon ranch salad.

For our first standard potato salad we diced celery, green bell pepper, red onion, white onion, and some anaheim pepper to give the dish color and a bit of crunch.

The base of a potato salad recipe is simple baking potatoes, cut into small squares or wedges with the skin left on, and boiled as though you were making mashed potatoes. After the potatoes are tender enough to easily be pierced with a fork, we add in the veggies.

Some fresh ground pepper and a little salt is all the seasonings we went with for this classic take on potato salad.

Finishing off the dish is a mixture of mayonnaise and sour cream, which is mixed in thoroughly until everything is evenly coated. A few hours cooling off in the fridge and you've got a fantastic side for just about any meat-based meal. This version of the potato salad ended up going on the side (along with baked beans and corn on the cob) of our smoky raspberry beef ribs. This recipe is easy to change up and make your own by using different mustards, adding in different seasonings, and using different vegetables or varieties of potatoes.

While the traditional potato salad always hits the spot, we also wanted to try something a little more daring and off the beaten path, so we decided to translate the chicken bacon ranch sandwich into a potato salad. Here we've got some chicken drumsticks about to have the skin removed, along with a packet of ranch dressing mix.

For an all-around flavor, we're going to both coat the drumsticks and inject them. To start off, we mixed some of the ranch seasoning packet with onion and garlic powder.

For the injection, we mixed most of the ranch seasoning packet with a good amount of melted butter, which is whisked together.

It's easiest the add the outer coating first, as the injection tends to get a bit messy. Here I'm patting the ranch rub all over the outside of the drumsticks.

Next is to fill the inside of the meat with ranch flavor by injecting the seasonings and butter directly into the meat.

These are the drumsticks with all the seasonings added and injecting complete, as they are about to hit the oven.

What came out was unexpectedly amazing - the strong ranch scent and flavor turns average chicken into something truly extraordinary. We had a hard time not just easting these as they were instead of using them for potato salad. We've made some really fantastic poultry meals before, from our orange chicken to Asian rice bowls and many others, but this easily among the best we've ever tasted - homemade or restaurant style! We will most certainly be making a whole chicken using this rub and injection combination in the near future.

For our chicken bacon ranch salad we're using both regular baking potatoes and red potatoes, which are cooked in boiling water the same as with the last variety.

Of course we need a good deal of delicious crispy bacon to make a proper chicken bacon ranch concoction!

All the bacon is sliced up into small squares in the same way I diced the vegetables for the previous potato salad.

When I think of a chicken bacon ranch sandwich I usually envision tomato, so to translate that to potato salad we're using grape tomatoes sliced in half or quartered, depending on their size. To keep things more in the potato salad realm, I've also got green onion and a bit of anaheim pepper here.

We love avocado on sandwiches, so it seemed like a great addition to this salad. To add a little bit of heat, we also diced up some jalapeno. If you want more info on how to use peppers such as anaheim and jalepeno, check out our extensive pepper comparison guide.

Now that all that chopping and baking is finally done everything is staring to come together. Here we've combined the cooked potatoes with the veggies.

The crispy bacon pieces get thrown in next as this mouth-watering twist on an old favorite is getting nearly done.

After the chicken drumsticks cooled I removed the meat from the bone, which was then chopped up into small pieces and added to the salad.

Instead of mayo and sour cream like the last version, here we're using mayonnaise, dijon mustard, and a bit of ranch dressing.

The dressing gets added in and mixed well to coat the vegetables, chicken, and bacon for an unusual but delicious take on potato salad.

Since there was already vegetables and meat in the salad, we decided to just have a bowl for dinner that night, and here's the finished product after cooling off the fridge.

There's more potato salad variations coming up in the future, including a southwest chipotle variety and a unique blend we came up with where Italian pasta salad and potato salad collide. Also on the horizon are more homemade barbecue sauces, succulent root beer ribs, and a grilled double-pork monstrosity you have to see to believe!