Grilled Butternut Squash with Aleppo Pepper Yogurt Sauce

I'm all in for the sweet-and-savory combo—I go as far as tossing caramel M&M's into my salty movie theater popcorn—but the wife, not so much. If it were up to me, I would pair roasted sweet potatoes or butternut squash with so many main dishes, but there's fewer contexts my better half finds combos like that acceptable. It's often my goal to really make the sweetness of roasted vegetables shine, but I wondered what could be ways to go the opposite direction and make such things veer more savory than sweet. That question, along with a similar dish I saw on Cook's Illustrated, led me to create this recipe for grilled butternut squash with an Aleppo pepper yogurt sauce.
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Smoked Chicken Salad

When I first got out on my own, I could cook four things: bacon, eggs, toast, and cheekun salad.  I'd learned the chinese method to cook a juicy breast: bring water to a boil, drop in one or two breasts, slap on a lid and kill the heat; let it set for an hour, and you have perfectly juicy (if bland as hell) chicken breast, which I'd zip up in my $60 Oster with mayo and sometimes celery.     Haven't made it in decades.  This past week I noticed a recipe for "Smoked Chicken Salad" in the Texas BBQ Monthly newsletter, decided to give it a go:   Smoked Chicken Salad 330 grams smoked chicken* 60 grams celery (1 stalk, halved lengthwise and finely chopped) 30 grams pickles, finely chopped 80 grams mayonnaise 10 grams sugar 20 grams pickle juice or apple cider vinegar Chopped fresh herbs like parsley, tarragon, or cilantro A few dashes of your favorite barbecue rub Juice from 1/8 lemon Salt to taste Debone the chicken (if necessary) and pull, chop, or mince it. In a large bowl, combine the chicken, celery, and pickles. Combine the mayonnaise, sugar, and pickle juice, and mix well. Pour the dressing over the chicken/celery/pickle mixture and mix again. Add herbs, barbecue rub, and lemon juice, and mix again, adding salt as needed for taste. I like to let the chicken salad spend a few hours in the refrigerator before eating. Enjoy. *Be sure to weigh the amount of chicken you use to get the correct ratios for the dressing. The quantities are shown by weight because I swear to you that it is so much easier to cook using a scale when measuring is necessary, and it’s time you bought one. Are you texans using metric now?  (four thighs weighed 315 grams, so I went with that and eyeballed the rest).  I thought the dressing was a bit bland, thought about adding some minced chipotle en adobo, thought that might clash with the pickle, but saw on another ewetube someone used curry powder; I added a tsp and that was the ticket (I also left out the sugar, and forgot the rub).     Toasted some weird buns, made two sammiches w/the salad, tomato, lettuce, and cheese on one and a bit more mayo on the other (the mayo was better).  These were good.     As I mentioned on my "Question for CenTex Smoker" thread, this time I dropped a small chunk of cherry into the bottom of the LBGE bowl, below the KAB, then lit the lump top-dead-center as I usually do.  I didn't notice any "dirty" smoke coming out of the egg as I had when burying the chunk off to the side, so I think this may be my new method; the cheekun tasted great and the chunk was used up at the end of the cook.       While browsing videos on chicken salad (Retirement: Life in the Fast Lane) I came across Sam the Cooking Guy's:     He did a neat trick that I'm also gonna try.  He started with a pre-rotisseried chicken from the supermarket, and then carefully peeled the skin off in one (well, two) pieces (insert some Hannibal Lector morbidity here), layed them flat on a wire rack, and then hit them, both sides, with a blowtorch, making the skin deeper brown, toasted, and amazing; oh Hellz Yeah!  He used that skin as the top layer of his sammich (bacon on the bottom.  Bacon?) and I bet that's delicious!     This is definitely into my rotation, especially this summer when it gets hot.  
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A Throwback to Childhood

Everybody is making a mad dash to the grocery store and gas stations now that snowmaggedon is winding down here in Texas. But hey, I trained for this in 2020. So to avoid going to the store (haven’t been in 10 days) we decided to make tuna casserole for dinner. This was just a, “Hey, we’ve got tuna and noodles and stuff - let’s make a casserole.” I can honestly say I probably haven’t eaten this since the late sixties as a kid. We went all out and had Texas sheet cake too.  I suggested that my wife put on a frilly apron along with heels and pearls to serve it to me. Well, that didn’t work out. I couldn’t even get her to make me a Manhattan. What’s the world coming to? We drug out my 1956 copy of Betty Crocker’s Cookbook to make sure we did it right. I don’t think this is a flavor profile I’ll crave again any time soon but it was fun and nostalgic.  I may set this out for her to read later. If I don’t respond on the forum for a few days you might check in on me. 
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Chicken Wings of the World

Chicken wings are one of my favorites. They are great as an appetizer or a meal, depending on how many you eat. And there are so many creative ways to cook and flavor wings. Most people have a favorite cooking method and favorite seasoning or sauce for their wings. I find the most difficult part […] The post Chicken Wings of the World appeared first on Barbecuebible.com.
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Add This Technique to Your Repertoire: Smoke-Braising

Braising outdoors on your grill not only keeps your summer kitchen cool, it gives you the option of seasoning your dish with fragrant wood smoke. We like the technique so much, we call it “smoke-braising.” The post Add This Technique to Your Repertoire: Smoke-Braising appeared first on Barbecuebible.com.
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Christmas Prime Rib On a Pellet Smoker

Prime rib slathered in garlic and herbs, slow smoked in a Green Mountain Grills pellet smoker, then blasted with 550 degrees to finish off for the perfect Christmas dinnerAuthor informationScott ThomasScott Thomas, the Original Grillin’ Fool, was sent off to college with a suitcase and a grill where he overcooked, undercooked and burned every piece of meat he could find. After thousands of failures, and quite a few successes, nearly two decades later he started a website to show step by step, picture by picture, foolproof instructions on how to make great things out of doors so that others don’t have to repeat the mistakes he’s made on the grill. | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | Pinterest |
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How To Roast A Perfect Chicken On The Grill

Back in the Dark Ages when I was attending cooking school in Paris, one of the most difficult things to cook perfectly was a roast chicken. If you mastered the perfect roast chicken, it was assumed you could cook anything. Truth be told, I don’t do much oven-roasting of chicken these days, but I’ve cooked […] The post How To Roast A Perfect Chicken On The Grill appeared first on Barbecuebible.com.
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