One night I grilled a chicken and then Traci made these incredible salads for dinner. Nothing better then a salad with avocado, tomato, grilled chicken and romaine lettuce. The chicken was "Egged" of course but first I "spatchcocked" it by cutting the backbone out of it and sort of butterflying it. This allows the chicken to cook a little more even and the breast doesn't dry out. The chicken was very moist and had a good flavor.1. In the 7th grade I was hit by a car and broke both my legs. Shattered both bones in both legs just above the ankles. First doctor said “He will never walk again”, my Dad immediately fired him and hired a rough and tough German orthopedic surgeon who not only had me walking again but I was back on the football field in the 9th grade!
2. I’ve had 27 jobs, but only 4 since graduating from college in 1986.
3. I drive a commuter van to and from work with 13 riders and we cross the world’s longest bridge twice a day.
4. I absolutely love the beach! I’ve been to the beach every summer of my life except this year! However, I’m missing the beach for a good reason, we had our little daughter Jillian June 6th and I wouldn’t trade that for any beach in the world! She is so adorable and I just love coming home from work and seeing how she has changed since I left earlier that morning.
5. I live in New Orleans Louisiana, Love the FOOD, but hate the crime, pollution, corrupt politicians, and the searing HEAT and HUMIDITY!
6. I love to travel and have been in 26 of the 50 states in the US.
7. I love music! I have been to over 2000 concerts over the years, my first being Foghat in 1977. (wish I had all the money I’ve spent on concert tickets, t-shirts, hats, plane tickets, food, beer, hotel rooms).
Favorite Bands: Sister Hazel, Edwin McCain, Dave Matthews Band, Ocean Street, Will Hoge, Theresa Andersson, David Gray, Bonnie Raitt, Toby Lightman, Sting.
Who’s in your CD player/iPod?
8. I HATE green peppers (bell peppers). It’s probably the only thing that I just can’t eat. My Dad who was an incredible cook use to say “you have to use green peppers it’s part of the ‘trinity’ and you can’t taste them anyway”. So my response was “then why put them in there if you can’t taste them”. I wish my Dad was still alive, I’d love to cook for him now (might even season it with green peppers!!)
Saturday evening some dude knocked on our door selling shrimp! He said he caught them earlier in the day out in the Gulf of Mexico and was trying to sell what he had left. He had several coolers full and was selling them for $3.00 a pound. They seemed fresh and pretty big and he tried to sell me a whole cooler full for $100, but I felt like that was too much shrimp and didn't want to deal with getting them cleaned and ready to be frozen. MISTAKE! I bought 20 pounds and should have bought the cooler full! They were nice shrimp and since we just bought a new freezer and a Foodsaver it sure would have been nice to have a freezer full of shrimp. Oh well, next time. So, Traci made a pesto sauce out of all the basil we had growing and we skewered them and put them on the Egg. Wow these were good!
(I need a shrimp platter to go with my cow platter!)
Having grilled shrimp and salads for lunch this week!
I usually bring my lunch everyday to work, so I try and cook a bunch of things on Sunday night and then we have some dinners and lunches already made. This weekend we were busy (see post below) so I Egged these Monday night. I marinated the pork chops in Bronco Bob's Mango and Chipotle marinade. The shrimp I marinated in a sauce that is sold by a local Chinese restaurant called Trey Yuen. The sauce is called Tong Cho and is pretty good, not too spicy, not too overpowering. We also tried cooking one skewer of shrimp on a cedar plank that we got free from a festival we went to. I don't think cedar is the way to go! It reminded us of our grandmother's cedar chest! Not a good smell at all. I will try it again but next time on Alder wood planks. The pork chops were great! Nice and juicy! 
On Sunday afternoon we loaded up the Big Green Egg (Hazel) and headed to my in-laws house. It was both their birthdays and we were going to grill steaks. We bought a whole ribeye at the store and had the butcher cut them into 1 1/4 inch steaks. Got Hazel cranked up to about 900 degrees and seared each of them for about 90 seconds on each side and took them off and brought the temp down to about 400. Put the meat back on till the interanl temp was about 138, let them rest a few minutes and served. They came our GREAT! I used a combo of apple wood and Jack Daneils Barrel chips and the smoke flavor was not too over powering. All in all a very fun night.
Trying to eat a little healthier these days so I found a recipe for grilled turkey burgers on Gourmet.com which had great reviews so we gave it a shot. Egged them direct at 325 for about 45 minutes with just a few apple chips.
Traci and I are going to try and do this "Weekend Cookbook Challenge", the idea is to "crack open" a cookbook you've never opened before or haven't used in awhile and make a recipe from it that pertains to the "theme" of the challenge. This is "Challenge 17" and the theme is "Cornmeal". So we opened Emeril's cookbook, New New Orleans Cooking and made Spicy Beef Empanadas with fire sauce and cilantro cream, the recipe is on Emeril's website here. We highly recommend keeping the dough for the Empanandas as cold as possible. If you don't, they will crack and make handling them a real pain. Of course we had to use the Big Green Egg to bake them! We used the place setter with legs down and placed our pizza stone on it. Got the egg fired up to 500 degrees and baked them for about 30 minutes. We will more than likely do this recipe again. 
