FoodB

Seems odd to blow things up in celebration but that didn't stop me from lighting off a good portion on my friends Nate's 4th arsenal. Fire is fun!

Speaking of fire, for the Fourth BBQ that we went to, I got to cook up some chicken. As I always do, I went to Plowboys to see what selection they had for grilling. I didn't really feel like shelling out for beef and I've never cooked pork on a grill, so chicken it was. They had leg and thigh pieces for about $1.25 a pound so I was able to get three of them for about $4.00. They have a pretty good selection of pre-marinated meats as well but I decided against that because I did just start a food blog and it wouldn't look to good if I wasn't at least trying to find new recipes to make.

To prepare the chicken parts, I brined them for an hour and a half. The brine consisted of 6 cups of water, 6 Tbs. of kosher salt and 3/4 of a cup of brown sugar. This is a pretty basic brine that you can use on any poultry or pork or just about anything you want to. For those of you that don't know what brining is, basically it's a way to add moisture and spices into pieces of meat that will tend to dry out when it is cooked in high heat. Chicken and pork really do well after brining and I have yet to hear a complaint. The only thing you want to watch out for after brining is that you don't want to add to much more salt to the meat because it has already absorbed a lot of salt through the process and nobody but my wife likes a lot of salt on their meat.

After that came the marinade. I tried looking up some poultry rubs but had no success online. Seems everyone likes to add a lot of hot spices to rubs and my wife can't eat really spicy food so my only option was to make one from scratch. I started off chopping some fresh oregano, parsley and a bit of rosemary and mixed it together with some ponzu (Japanese citrus vinegar) and mirin (Japanese rice wine). I was trying to get an asian flavor because I've eaten enough BBQ chicken that I really need to experiment more so I don't end up hating chicken. That tasted all right but could have used something extra so back to the drawing board. I just started adding things to the marinade and seeing if I could improve the flavor. I added paprika (my eternal secret ingredient, don't tell anyone), ground ginger, sugar, and a touch of hoisin sauce and that was the final mixture I went with. There was a lot of adjusting of the flavors by what I was tasting so I don't have the exact amounts of what I put into it. I dumped all of that into a freezer bag as well as the chicken and refrigerated it until we left.

Once the chicken was on I mixed together a BBQ glaze that Jenn had heard about somewhere on TV of Hoisin sauce (Chinese BBQ sauce) and marmalade. I mixed 2 parts hoisin sauce to 1 part marmalade and that seemed to be a pretty good balance of the flavors. I glazed the chicken about 5 minutes before it was ready to be pulled off of the grill and let the sugars caramelize a little. From experience, you don't want to add the sauce onto a piece off meat until you are about ready to pull it off of the grill. You just burn off all of the flavor and end up using more sauce in to get that flavor back. Save your money and wait to sauce your meat.

I thought the chicken was really good. The meat was really moist and the sauce really went well with it. I'm thinking about using that sauce in the future as a dipping sauce for other things such as egg rolls or chicken tenders. I had cooked up some corn as well and it was very sweet and went well with everything we were eating.

Other people at the party brought food as well that I was able to sample. I tried the asparagus, beans and chocolate pie and enjoyed them all. We had a really fun fourth and enjoyed hanging out with friends and good food. It was great as well to beat the heat and jump into the pool.

Jenn cooked up some Cornish Game Hens the day before and I will try to write about that later tonight when I get a chance.