Chokin' His Chicken

So I go to buy a pound of barbecue and. . .

No, that's not how this begins. Rather, this town has a scarecrow contest every October and all the local businesses create, dress, and put on the street their own life-sized scarecrows, all very fanciful, and then the townspeople vote for their favorite. The post office's scarecrow is dressed like a postman. The bank's scarecrow is a woman in a garden hat watering a money tree. The gym's scarecrow rides an exerbike. Some are so elaborate that the owners cover them like mummies in plastic when it rains.

As the pumpkin lattes, pumpkin beers, and pumpkin snickerdoodles come out, so do the scarecrows, and the barbecue place took its scarecrow out of storage and this is the first I've seen of him--the swine! So I thought I would overshare. He reminds me of someone I used to know. The expression on the chicken's face is precious, so here's  a close-up.

I'm so grateful I moved to Missouri where there's barbecue and humor.

Notes on Barbecue

• My favorite barbecue place is Super Smokers and I'm so satisfied with their pulled pork with the applesauce side I never order anything else. I sauce it with Texas Hot.
• Texas Hot is their only sauce not available in stores.
• My personal sauce recipe: half Hunt's (and only Hunt's) bottled barbecue sauce, and half medium salsa. Hunt's because it is the least sugary of the commercial sauces. I don't understand Maull's or Pappy's or Kansas-City-style any other bottled sauce. I don't want corn syrup on my barbecue.
• I never ate barbecue until I moved to Missouri. In Wisconsin and in upstate New York "to barbecue" meant "to cook on the grill" weenies, bratwurst, and hamburgers.
• I buy a half-pound or pound of pulled pork, sauce it and heat it up a bit, and toss it in green salad.
• I'll settle for barbecued chicken if that's all there is, but it's only good until you peel the skin off. After that it's not barbecue.
• Invite me to a barbecue.
• Don't buy the ready-to-eat pulled pork that's in the supermarket meat case. The meat's tough and fatty.
• I took two really classy Perry-Ellis shoes-made-in-Paris Cafe-Napoli-in-Clayton Ph.D. friends for barbecue, and they loved it, proving everyone can love it.
• Bandana's, once a favorite, has gone downhill.
• I don't, myself, make and serve barbecue, believing it's best left to professionals.
• Re the bumper sticker: radio station KPIG in California plays rock, country, and bluegrass.

Grilling Flat Iron Steak

During

Oh buy the steak, said the little devil perched on my shoulder. The angel opposite said, It costs nine dollars! You've never grilled steak in your life! What a waste if you mess up! The devil won this argument and I took home a "flat iron steak" -- never heard of it before; it looked kind of like the flank steak I'd wanted. Surprised to learn that flat iron steak is a new and fashionable cut from the shoulder. Cut vertically, that muscle made gristly top blade steaks. Cut horizontally, it makes flat-iron steak, the second-most-tender beef cut after the tenderloin. More fascinating info about the invention of the flat iron steak here on a butcher's blog. And either I'd grill the boneless 1.1-pound steak that afternoon or be too intimidated and waste what I'd spent on the Lodge cast-iron grill. My reluctance might seem odd, but in my middle 50s I have never grilled anything except corn and a hamburger and that was last week. Steak is a big step up.

After

Online (source of all knowledge) instructions said to grill the meat for 16 minutes for medium rare. I didn't marinate or rub it with salt and pepper, just brought it out raw on a plate, laid it on the hot grill and watched and waited to flip it at the 8-minute point. Surprise again; turned over, it looked awesome. Finished grilling and tented the (clean) plate with foil for10 minutes so the meat could finish cooking and redistribute its juices, becoming easier to slice. Then I sliced, to throw some steak strips into a salad. It came out magazine-perfect and so tender and delicious I turned ecstatic cartwheels and wished you were here to share. There was no fat or waste to speak of. Feels good to be building a new skill and I can hardly wait to serve this to friends. There's a marinade that's supposed to make it spectacular.

Scared to Grill? Who, Me? Nahhh....

Grilling is counterintuitive: You don't put the food on while there's fire? You wait until the flames go out? I finally accepted this as a reality and chose this year to acquire grilling skills. I have had $10 tabletop grills whose bellies burnt through on the first use; no good. Can't lift the propane tanks for gas grills. My best previous experience was with a cast-iron hibachi, so the next step up was the Lodge Cast Iron Portable (sort of; it weighs 35 pounds) Grill. Followed the step-by-step "be a grilly girl" article in the latest issue of Taste of Home Healthy Cooking magazine: Get self-lighting coals. Pile them in a pyramid. Don't skimp. Light. Light. Light, darn it! Why won't they *#***@* light? (Tuck a sheet of newspaper underneath those coals, girlfriend!) Oil the grill so food won't stick. Go away for 45 minutes and return with food packaged in aluminum foil. Grilling seems to require lots of foil.

The magazine's recipe was for grilled corn with olive oil and garlic. In a cookbook I found the recipe for grilled potatoes with onions in a packet (not shown; they were cooking in the coals). Online were instructions to shape the beef patties with a small hole in their centers. This way you can ascertain when they are cooked through. To keep fat from dripping and flaming fat from charring the meat, cook in a disposable aluminum pan until the last few minutes; then move them directly onto the grill to get that smoky taste and grill marks. The corn is that "butter and sugar" bicolor cultivar so popular and good they almost don't sell anything else around here anymore.

While waiting for the food to grill, sit down, enjoy the beautiful Missouri spring day and perhaps a beer. I didn't have one because I now get plastered and loop-legged after a single bottle.

The result was not bad for a novice. Practice makes perfect. I see so many great grilling recipes and don't want to miss out. (P.S. The following week I grilled a flatiron steak, my first grilled steak, and wrote about it.)

Grill or Privy?

This rectangle of stones in my yard, old foundation of something, has always been here and always had dirt in it, so I put native plants in it. After a few years I noticed flagstones, almost sunk into the yard, that formed a path from the kitchen door to this rectangle. The original cabin, built around 1930, had no bathroom or a kitchen; we know this because they are obviously add-ons. So I thought this might be the foundation of an old privy. Its measurements, 3.5 x 5 feet, are standard for a double-seated privy. (Double seating was not a luxury, or a his-and-her thing. There was a small hole for children to sit on, and a larger one for adults.)

While raking a few days ago my tines struck stone in front of the "privy" and, curious, I dug there and uncovered a flagstone apron nicely fitted to the foundation with concrete. No privies at Scout camp had stone foundations or flagstone aprons -- privies are not permanent structures, because they fill up and have to be moved -- so I thought this might instead be the foundation of a stone barbecue pit, the kind everyone's dad wanted in the '50s. The other house on this property, built in the 1950s, had a flagstone patio with a stone grill that was crumbling when I first saw it and has since been demolished. Maybe both houses had barbecue pits built simultaneously to keep each tenant happy.

Thanking the Jesuits for my training in logic, I figured it's a barbecue pit. The flagstone path leads from the kitchen door and there was no kitchen door when the cabin was built. The rectangle is situated on three inches of soil atop twelve solid inches of hard yellow clay sloping toward a cliff edge, so it is unlikely a 10- or 12-foot privy pit could have been dug here. Although it is without traces of firebricks or lining and must have been a flimsy one, it's a barbecue. And I thought, darn, wish it had been a privy!

Eating Well is the Best

If you lived here, or if you came over, I would take you to town and buy you some Lions Club fundraiser barbecue, a must-have during the spring weekends around here, Fri and Sat. 10 a.m. to dusk, sold from a yellow trailer that backs onto rows of men, volunteers for the cause, sweatin' it over the grills. What would you like? I favor the pork steaks -- hard to do well -- but will never turn down a bratwurst ($6 buys you two). Nor will I ignore a half a barbecued chicken on my styrofoam plate. Midwestern men are the best barbecuers in the world.

Dinner is Served

Knights of Columbus barbecued in the parking lot by the ballfields today, and at dusk I got my dinner there, and would like to share it with you, so here it is, the Midwest's finest meal: Barbecued chicken with sauce, corn on the cob, cole slaw dressed with oil and vinegar, and baked beans (not too sweet. I like to slice a jalapeno into them).

Leave the city. Y'all come on over for dinner -- I'll buy you your own dish of barbecue, just like this one -- and you will know true bliss. Say grace first! ("Mumble mumble thy bounty, mumble our Lord Amen.") Happy first day of summer. I love your company. To my British and Aussie readers: This is what we eat in America.

Cooking for Midwesterners

I’ve discussed Midwestern dating. Now I address Midwestern dining, specifically home cooking for company. I’m a cook so I know.

• Fry it, they’ll like it.
• Grilled Sea-Bass Tacos with Fresh Peach Salsa and no one will ever marry you.
• Serve Four-Cheese Macaroni and 3 of your cheeses are wasted.
• “Seafood steaks” is an oxymoron. I made tuna steaks & cream sauce for my mom and stepdad in 1994, and the only meal they hated more was my cousin’s new wife’s Duck L’Orange in 1971 -- and I still haven’t heard the end of it.
• Midwestern adults aren’t afraid of squash.
• These are the best people to invite to a potluck, but they call their own such parties “pot blessings.”
• A Midwestern all-day picnic is the greatest experience life has to offer.
  
• God gave you elbows so you can put them on the table and eat more.
  
• I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter should be served in its tub so as to prove its authenticity.
• Midwestern men are the best grillers in the world.