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.

The Insaniwhich 2.0

Way back in 2010 when the "Man Vs. Food" show was still on our regular viewing rotation I put together an insane sandwich which consisted of a seasoned chicken breast, bacon, popcorn shrimp, macaroni and cheese, and buffalo wing sauce. Earlier this year that sandwich was tweaked to become the "Insaniwhich," featuring chicken directly injected with wing sauce and fried clams instead of shrimp.

While this sandwich is amazingly awesome, it's also quite unhealthy, and Megan doesn't care for seafood, which limited its appeal for her. Now it's time for the "Insaniwhich 2.0" - a revamped version of this sandwich that changes up the meat and swaps out the seafood for homemade pico de gallo.

For the pico de gallo, I diced white onion, tomato, and poblano peppers, which were then seasoned with garlic powder. I simply used what was on hand and got a great result, but if you are planning ahead you may want to add in fresh cilantro and a few squeezes of lime.

We had some pork chops in the fridge that needed to be used, so the sandwich officially switched from chicken to pork. 

While unfortunately we were out of bacon, there still needed to be a good-but-bad-for-you element, which meant it was time to start frying! Frying means we needed a breading, so I whipped up a mixture of flour, red pepper flakes, chili powder, garlic powder, onion powder, and pepper.

The pork chops are coated, dipped into a bowl of milk, and then coated again to ensure the meat is covered evenly and that the breading is going to stick and not float off during the frying process.

A pan of vegetable oil is brought to a medium high temperature and then we carefully dipped the breaded pork in and cooked for about eight to ten minutes.

Here's the golden brown awesomeness of a fried pork chop, which makes a great sandwich filling regardless of whether you want to add an insane bevy of toppings.

The pork chops were too big to successfully fit as-is on buns, so we cut ours in half. Here I've thrown on some wing sauce, but anything from mayo and ketchup to ranch dressing would do here.

Next up is the pico de gallo and some monteray jack cheese, or whichever sliced/shredded cheese strikes your fancy.

Remember the peach mustard BBQ sauce we made for the ribs in the last blog?  We had a good deal left over and decided to try it out here - and it was a delicious addition!

This sandwiches' claim to fame was always the macaroni and cheese, which remained the star in this version! The sandwich is still great without it too, by the way, if you'd like something a little less messy with fewer ingredients.

The finished sandwich is essentially a meal unto itself, especially when all those delicious toppings start falling off and turn into their own side dish!

Grilling Season '12: Peach Mustard Pork Ribs

Back in August when the prime grilling days were beginning to dwindle we decided we had to try a few off-the-beaten-path variations on our ribs, which were already turning out great with our custom BBQ sauces and rubs. On the Six Seven Eight Facebook page we asked our readers to vote on which non-traditional sauce to make, and the overwhelming majority asked for a coffee BBQ sauce and rub. After that experiment turned out exceedingly well we still had one more interesting twist to try out - a peach mustard BBQ sauce.

Unlike the other sauces we've covered here, this one doesn't require hours of reducing to thicken up, so it's a snap to make in a hurry. The ingredients include djion mustard (we used two different kinds, picture below), spicy brown mustard, apple cider vinegar, peach jam, and onion and garlic diced very small.

You don't want to bite into something crunchy with BBQ sauce, so first the onion and garlic are cooked with butter in a sauce pan until they are softened and incredibly fragrant.

The rest of the ingredients are whisked together and then poured into the cooking garlic/onion/butter mixture.

After mixing everything up we arrived at this sauce that combines sweet and savory flavors. It's essentially done once it's heated up, but we continued to cooking for about a half hour to further develop the flavor. After cooking this can be stored in the fridge until needed.

Here's our rack of pork spareribs that have been washed, trimmed, and set on plastic wrap to contain the mess that's about to happen between the rub and the sauce.

For these ribs we went with a brown sugar based rub to work with the sauce. If you want to see a more in-depth look at how to put together a rub, check out previous blogs for cherry spareribs or root beer baby back ribs.

The rub is poured liberally on both sides of the ribs and then gently massaged in until all the meat and bone surfaces are covered.

We won't just be doing a rub though, as with the different consistency of this sauce we wanted to try using it as a sort of marinade for tenderizing the meat.

After spooning out a line of the sauce, I went about the messy business of working all those delicious flavors into the meat.

Once rubbed and sauced up, the ribs are tightly packed up in plastic wrap and refrigerated for a few hours.

Since we've done a variety of blogs on ribs before, this time I'll pass over explaining how we set up our charcoal. Here we're starting out by cooking over direct heat briefly to get the grill marks.

After we have the desired level of smoky char, a piece of tinfoil is slid underneath the ribs so the meat can slow cook for about two hours.

During the cooking process, the ribs are rotated and turned, and we brush on more of the peach mustard sauce.

At the end of the cooking time we've got fall-off-the-bone ribs that became this amazing shade of red and had a fantastic smell from the peach mustard combo.

As usual, we're having a  salad with our ribs, and a salad needs to be properly jazzed up - here's our fruit and veggies that will be topping the side.

While the salad is getting put together I'm cutting apart the ribs into individual portions for everybody eagerly waiting around the table.

Here's the ribs from a few different angles so you can see the smoky outer layer and the succulent, juicy meat.

Along with our salad we also had homemade potatoes au gratin, which will be covered in-depth during it's own blog segment later on.

This was our last major grilling event of the summer '12 season, although we will still have another blog coming down the line covering some of the smaller meals we made during backyard BBQ sessions. As summer gives way to fall we'll be shifting our focus soon onto making a variety of interesting pasta sauces and bean dishes, as well as returning to our culinary world tour with the next stop: Iceland!