Ah, warm weather. I hate it. Give me cold any time. I think the fact that I dislike the heat so much is the fact that my office temperature approaches 90 degrees during the summer. This year I bought a portable AC unit that helps, but still can’t cool the room enough. But enough of that…
The barbecue. I use mine year round, but it gets much more use during the summer months. About 2 years ago, I switched from gas back to charcoal. It was a hassle at first but now I can get the coals ready to cook in about 15-20 minutes thanks to the “Weber Chimney Starter(Weber Chimney Starter)”:http://www.weber.com/bbq/pub/grill/accessory/chargear.aspx. I had another chimney starter but it didn’t work nearly as well as the Weber does (not enough air flow.)
Monday (Memorial Day) I got a bug to make a marinade so I hopped on the Internet and did a little searching. I found “a recipe(Christian’s Killer BBQ and Grill Marinade)”:http://barbeque.allrecipes.com/az/ChristinsKillrBBQndGrillMr.asp (a local PDF copy is “here(Local PDF copy)”:http://download.patsoffice.com/pdf/bbq_marinade.pdf) that sounded pretty tasty. We had most of the ingredients on hand and I went out to WinCo to get the rest. Being the optimist that I am, I made a double batch.
Our first test of the marinade came on that day with a fryer chicken. I cooked the chicken after a couple of hours in the marinade using my beer can stand and indirect hear. This stand holds the beer can and then the chicken covers the can and is held upright. During cooking, the beer evaporates and helps to keep the chicken really moist. Everybody loved the chicken. Score one for the marinade.
The second test came with hamburgers. I threw the hamburger into a bowl, poured some of the marinade in and mixed it up. They came out well, but I wasn’t overwhelmed.
Finally, on Sunday I had bought some tri-tip steaks and these were the original impetus for finding a marinade. These steaks had been soaking it in for 2 days now. I fired up the grill and cooked them. Wow! Out of the park good! Everybody loved them and had multiple helpings. Tri-tip is something we have somewhat regularly here at Chez Lawrence and we’ve gotten pretty good at cooking them up well. This marinade, however, is what we will be using from now on.
