Memorial Day Yummies

Let me start this off by saying that I ate WAY too much tonight.....The main course is what we call Hillbilly BBQ. It utilizes a rather unconventional cooking utensil - it's the ultimate in recycling of old items which would have otherwise been headed for the junk pile, and then the land fill.

1 50 gallon drum, top removed. Drill some holes around the bottom and top it off with an old Webber BBQ lid. The only other thing you need are metal rods - such as rebar - to hang the meat from. Now, meat is not the only thing you can cook in these puppies - you can cook whole meals in here, everything from sides to desserts. Here you can see the smoke coming from the top of the barrel as well as off the sides - they get REALLY hot and even the painted outside smokes.

Today's menu was barrel cooked chickens, corn on the cob, dill pickle and olive potato salad, super garlic bread and dessert of fresh blackberry cobbler.

The chickens are easy - pour a whole large bag of charcoal into the barrel, give it a good dousing of lighter fluid and set it aflame until it's all gray. While that's happening, rinse your whole chickens, hang them with wire hangers (see, they are still good for something!!) and liberally coat with season salt or your choice of other seasonings - today I did one with Lawry's Season Salt and the other with Garlic Salt. Hang them over the hot coals, cover with the lid and walk away.

After 2 hours or so, they look like this:

Remarkably, this chicken is super moist, even though it's cooked hanging over the hot coals. You know they're done when the skin over the legs is nearly translucent. And, when you lay them in a pan to serve, the legs will usually pull this number: 

The potato salad is a little different than the typical - it has NO acidic flavor and is really yummy - you'll need potatoes, whole kosher baby dills (I opted for garlic ones), sliced olives, mayo, hard boiled eggs, celery and salt & pepper. I mix the egg yolks with the mayo before adding it to the rest of the ingredients. The pickles and celery should be diced up pretty small - including some of the celery leaves as well.

The bread was an experiment that went rather well - pick your choice of soft bread rolls - these were some "un-named" rolls in a bin at Save Mart. The key is to look for SOFT bread. I'm sure crusty bread would work as well, but I've always made oven broiled stuff with soft breads. I mixed "spread" (Country Crock) with several tablespoons of garlic - you can either mince up your own, or use the stuff in the jar - I didn't feel like mincing up several tablespoons of garlic. Add an amount of granulated Cotija cheese (or Parmesan in the green container) equal to the spread and some parsley for color. Mix well and spread thickly over the bread. Place under the broiler and watch carefully - you want them golden and just crispy on the top but not burned. I got a little impatient and didn't quite let them cook long enough. The garlic flavor was intense and there wasn't much bread left after dinner.

Corn.... well, that's pretty simple - boil water, add corn, boil some more. Serve with lots of butter, salt & pepper.

And finally, the blackberry cobbler. I followed PW's recipe for the fruit, but was out of eggs for the topping so I sort of winged it....

While this was a good cobbler, I wasn't a big fan of the lemon taste. Though, I'm still searching for something comparable to the cobbler we had several years back at the Trinidad Bay Eatery... Oh man... THAT was amazing stuff.

Good thing we didn't have to go do anything else, cause this meal was a food coma waiting to happen!