Grilling Season '12 Recap

October has arrived and the temperatures have officially started to plummet, with the first snows of the Fall expected by the end of the week here in Montana, which means the grilling season is coming to an end. We had a great time this year learning new techniques and trying many different things outside the normal backyard BBQ purview of steaks and burgers. In fact, we didn't end up doing a single standard beef burger this year!

We've covered a lot of ground in previous blogs on the 2012 grilling season already, including some interesting and non-traditional meals like spicy turkey and pork-apple burgers, the double pork rollup, and grilling both store bought and homemade pizzas. This summer Megan and I also tried many different methods of cooking up pork ribs, using our own homemade rubs, sauces, and injections. To see how our technique progressed over the last few months, check out the highlights: our first babybacks, our first spare ribs, root beer ribs, cherry ribs, coffee ribs, and peach mustard ribs.

Even after all that, there's still a good number of meals that never made it on to Six-Seven-Eight, as we were grilling one to two times a week fairly consistently. To catch up, we'll be doing a few entries now covering some of those delicious grilled dinners that slipped through the cracks. Today we'll start with something fairly simple. Although we've done plenty of complicated dishes that have plenty of prep time or loads of ingredients, the grill is also great for something incredibly simple: just plain old marinated pork.

When using pork sliced this thin you don't even need to do indirect heat, just simply turn as needed until you've got the desired level of char.

Here we've got some awesome smoky pork complete with grilled corn on the cob and some rice topped with veggies. Serve with a lime beer like Miller Chill or Bud Light Lime on a hot summer day!

One of our fun meals that mixed BBQ and indoor preparation was the southwest pork salad. We did another version of that same idea later on with beef. Here we've got very thin sirloin marinating in a store-bought packet marinade (this one was before we got seriously into making our own sauces and rubs later on that summer).

You have to be careful with meat this thin on the grill - and not just because of the possibility of burning - but rather because it can slip through the cracks, and you don't want to be chowing down on charcoal. For meat this thin you may want to put a cover on the grill. You can find thin metal covers meant for cooking sliced vegetables on the grill in grocery stores during the summer or hardware stores year-round in the grill section. To see it in action, check out the fajitas we made during the 2011 grilling season.

Here we've got our finished beef and some grilled corn on the cob ready to come out of its tin foil wrapper.

To give this a southwest, taco-style feel we're going to put it onto a tortilla. But first, we've got an avocado we're mashing up to make some guacamole. For more info on how to put together a great guac, check out our previous blog on breakfast burritos here.

The base of the salad is guac and sour cream, which gets spread across a flour tortilla. To add more color and flavor, use those large flavored wraps like sun-dried tomato or spinach.

The beef is cut into strips and layered over a handful of whatever lettuce or bagged salad combination you like.

Next we throw on the grilled corn, some black beans, and a handful of shredded colby jack cheese.

Our smoky jalapeno ranch, or an avocado-based dressing, would be fantastic here, but this was before we made our own regularly. Here I'm using store-bought thousand (but don't forget to check out our look at making home-made thousand island too!)

I of course finished mine off by dousing the whole thing in hot sauce, but this step is definitely optional if you don't like it too spicy.

Pork is always a fantastic option for grilling, but don't forget about chicken when planning a back yard cooked meal. While chicken breasts or thighs are the traditional ways to go, just about any part of the chicken works as well on the grill as in the oven if you cook it up properly. One day we decided it was too hot to cook leg quarters in the oven, so we decided to grill it up with a rub and injection. Here's the rub I whipped together quickly just using things on hand in the cabinet - chili powder, Mrs. Dash Southwest Chipotle, garlic powder, onion powder, and spicy ghost pepper salt.

For this particular grilling session I pulled the skin off the chicken to get the rub directly onto the meat, but if you want that crispy skin on feel free to leave it there and just turn the chicken more frequently as needed.

These are the skinned and rubbed leg quarters, smelling and looking great, but we aren't done with the seasoning process just quite yet.

We've also injected barbecue sauce directly into the meat, as well as brushed some onto the outside of the chicken for that extra level of flavor.

We start off cooking directly over the coals to quickly cook the outside and get the pretty grill marks...

...then we move the chicken off the direct heat and close the lid so the meat cooks completely through without burning or drying out.

After brushing some extra BBQ sauce during the cooking, here's our amazing finished leg quarter, along with our homemade Italian style potato salad.