Pork Chops, Shrimp and corn!

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!

We will do the pork chops again and the shrimp just minus the cedar Plank.

Happy Birthday Mimi and Sarge!

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.

Turkey Burgers

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.

3 medium yellow onions

1 clove garlic

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 1/3 pounds ground turkey breast

3 tablespoons dried bread crumbs

2 tablespoons barbecue sauce

3 tablespoons quick-cooking oats (not instant)

1 teaspoon dried basil1 teaspoon dried oregano

1 tablespoon toasted wheat germ

1/4 teaspoon salt or 1 tablespoon liquid aminos

Ground black pepper

I couldn’t find wheat germ and used salt instead of liquid aminos (whatever that is).
These came out great! Nice and moist and hint of smoke.

Pizza! Pizza!

Pizzas on the Big Green Egg come out incredible! They have just a small hint of wood smoke and are nice and crispy. We made 2 pizzas tonight, one with Pepperoni, sausage and baby bella mushrooms, the other a "Taylor Special", Canadian Bacon, Pineapple chunks and cheese. The crust is a recipe I found on-line here, and is very easy to make. The recipe will make about 3 medium size pizzas. I like my pizza deep dish style so I made the pepperoni, sausage and mushroom pizza in a cast iron skillet. Taylor likes her pizza thin and crispy, so we rolled hers out thin and placed it directly on the pizza stone. The Egg was cranked up to about 650 degrees and we cooked each pizza about 10 minutes. I've had great luck on pizzas with the Egg and I've only burned one or two. Main thing is to watch them closely or the crust will burn.

Pepperoni, Sausage and Mushrooms ready for the Egg.

Canadian Bacon and Pineapple ready for the Egg!

Canadian Bacon and Pineapple Done!

Weekend Cookbook Challenge (Challenge 17, Cornmeal)

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.

Memorial Day Weekend

Rubbed/injected a pork butt and rubbed a slab of ribs for the Egg on Saturday. Our little girl Taylor was promoted from kindergarten to 1st grade and I asked her where she wanted to go to dinner to celebrate the big day, she said "I want pulled pork and ribs". So Pulled pork and ribs it was.




So on the Egg they went.




I did the 3-1-1 method on the ribs straight out of Dr. BBQ's Book, Big-Time BBQ Cookbook and they turned out great. 3 hours indirect at 225 with a drip pan of apple juice underneath. Then 1 hour wrapped in foil with apple juice inside the foil. Then 1 hour direct and applied sauce the last 20 minutes or so. Came out GREAT!







The pork butt stayed on for about 10 hours, the internal temp was 170 degrees and the bone pulled out very easily!



Sunday we decided to make Green Chili sauce to go over some pulled pork enchiladas. You need to check out this blog, Playing with Smoke and Fire and try some of his recipes. We did the Green Chili but left out the ground pork so that it made more of a sauce. We also left out the Serrano chilies to keep the heat level down. Turned out GREAT!!



We then smothered the pulled pork enchiladas in the green chili sauce and cheese and baked them in the oven at 350 for 20 minutes. EXCELLENT! We will be doing these again.

T-Rexed a Strip and Italian Hamburger Slices!

Sunday night we got a big 2 ½ inch NY Strip, rubbed it with Bad Byron’s Butt Rub, seared it on the Big Green Egg at 800+ degrees for 90 seconds on each side, pulled it off and brought the temp on the Egg down to about 425. Then threw it back on with 2 pieces of the Italian Hamburger slices, roasted both to about 138 degrees and pulled them off to rest about 10 minutes. Talk about good. This is the first time using Bad Byron’s Butt Rub and we really liked it. Wasn’t as coarse as some of the other rubs and seemed to let the rub penetrate the meat a little better (thanks Traci).

Got the recipe for the hamburgers from Emeril on the food network website. We will be doing this again! The Egg does an incredible job on burgers anyway, even if you over cook them, they are still very moist!