K's Chicken Abomination Recipe

In response to a friend's request for the recipe, K wrote:

Weeelll...see...um...part of it is from the Best Recipe "grill-roasted chicken" recipe. And part of it is from stuff I read. And I made the rest up.

I'll do my best to remember everything. Here we go:

Ingredients:
1 chicken
1 can of beer (quality not important; I use Pabst Blue Ribbon)
1 cup (or so) herbal chicken rub
1 cup (or so) kosher salt

The herbal rub:
I use the paprika-based chicken rub in The Best Recipe. You can use any chicken rub, really, as long as it does NOT contain salt. You are brining this bird, and that would be way too salty to eat if you use a salt rub. Go for things like rosemary, paprika, oregano, sage, basil, cumin, and just a little hot stuff like cayenne. Google "chicken spice rub" and you'll get lots of ideas.

The night before:
- Get a non-reactive (glass or plastic) tub or pot just big enough to contain the chicken. Fill with enough water to cover the chicken (best guess is fine).
- Dissolve the salt in the water, stirring until it's clear.
- Put the chicken in the brine and put the tub in the fridge.

The morning before:
- Dump the brine out.
- Rinse the chicken in cool water and pat dry.
- Massage the chicken, inside and out, with the herb rub.
- Put the chicken back into the fridge.

1-2 hours before mealtime:
- Take the chicken out of the fridge.
- Open the beer and pour off (or drink) just less than half of it.
- With an old-style triangular can opener, punch two extra holes in the top of the can so it looks sorta like a radiation symbol.

Okay, now at this point, you do different things depending on whether you're grilling or oven-roasting.

Oven-roasting (less prep, weather-immune, milder flavor)
- Remove the top rack from the oven and set the bottom rack as low as necessary to fit a vertical chicken.
- Preheat the oven to 375 or so. Anything from 350-400 is fine.
- Get a pan with raised sides and put a cake cooling rack or roasting rack in the bottom of it.
- Shove the beer up the chicken's butt.
- Stand the chicken on its drunsticks and the beer can in a sort of tripod setup, with the beer can on the rack and the drumsticks poking through to rest on the roaster pan bottom.
- Put the pan with the chicken in it into the oven.
- Monitor the temperature. It's ready when the deepest part of the breast meat is 170. Depending on your oven and the size of the bird, it'll take an hour or two.

Smoking (tastier, much more macho)
NOTE: You need a grill that has enough headroom to fit a vertical chicken under its lid.

- Fire up your charcoal grill. Get 4 or 5 big (3") hardwood chunks, soak them in water for an hour, and add them to hot barbecue coals.
- Or get a handful of hardwood chips, make a double-thick tinfoil tray, soak the chips in water for an hour, then put them in the tray and set the tray on the grill.
- If you have a gas grill, fire up your gas grill to low/medium, then use the chip try method above.
- Stand the bird on the grill, using the drumsticks and beer can as a tripod. I find that it's more stable if the drumsticks are jammed between the grill bars.
- Cover the bird. Check on it every 15 minutes or so and adjust the temperature of the gas grill, or add briquets to a charcoal grill, to keep the heat up while not scorching the outside of the meat. Replenish wood chips if they burn off.
- Monitor the temperature. It's ready when the deepest part of the breast meat is 170. Depending on your grill and the size of the bird, it'll take an hour or two.

Okay, now the tricky part: removing the beer can. This recipe makes fall-apart chicken that is very moist and tender. So you will have some trouble getting the beer can out without making a huge mess.

First, get the beer out of the can, otherwise you risk spilling it all over your chicken during extraction. Not great. Take a meat fork (you know, those ones with two big ol' prongs) and punch a hole in the bottom of the can and let the beer drain out. For effect, I sometimes do this while it's still on the grill. (Stab! Pfffsssshhhh!!! Oooo! Aaah!)

Now you can set the brid down horizontally and gently twist and pull until it's free. Remember, it's hot! Sometimes a knife needs to be inserted and run around the perimeter of the can to free it.

Ta da! Ready to carve and serve.

Weekend Update

Sorry no posts last week. Couldn't talk. Too busy.

Last week was actually rather stressful, so I did the Girl Thing and rounded it off by getting a nice pink pedicure. Yes, pink. Rather a bit more pink than I'd planned, but the color was leftover from an impulse buy in San Diego (we were there for cousin M's excellent wedding). It's kind of a happy pink, so it'll do.

Saturday I headed out with some girlfriends to visit another girlfriend who has moved to Merced. We had a fantastic day at their pool in the 90-100 degree weather. There was one moment when I was lying in the pool on a green floatie and thinking that I felt just about perfect. There's nothing like idleness, a little Vitamin D, and kahlua brownies to cheer up the soul. If I can get a chauffeur to drive me to/from Merced next time (~2.5 hours), it'll be perfect. Now where could I find one of those? Sweetie?

This past week was more relaxed, partly because my boss it out of town, and partly because my brain was fried. The main excitement Friday morning was the 4.2 earthquake, some 5 miles from our house. We're used to the occasional rumbler, but this one jolted us out of bed and really zapped us awake. Small earthquakes aren't usually that scary...unless you're right on top of them! We did learn a few good lessons, like the fact that my glasses were sent tumbling to the floor and I couldn't find them, not great if it were the Real Thing. But there's really no knowing what'll happen in the big one. I'll take all the 4.x earthquakes in the world, every day of the week, rather than anything bigger, thankyewverymuch.

We don't have too much lined up for this weekend (lunch with friends, dinner with Dads), and we're continuing to test out the "one weekend day free" hypothesis so I get a chance to recharge my batteries. So far, so good.

Vacation Week

K and I took this past week off for some R&R, which in this particular case stood for Roadtrip and Point Reyes.

The roadtrip took us up to Oregon City, Oregon (just south of Portland) to visit with K's siblings and their families, with children ranging in ages from 8 months to 13 years, all brilliant and well-spoken and a ton of fun and totally exhausting. K's sister S had rented a beach house out in Pacific City. To me, Pacific City seems like just about any beach town I've stayed in, whether that's Hawaii or California -- salt-bleached houses, boating detritus, quiet suntanned locals, and a distinct local pace of life. In sum, very enjoyable and relaxing.

We spent one day down at Netarts Bay, where the RV park folks will rent you an aluminum boat with a motor and some crab traps, bait, and measuring doo-hickeys and you can try your luck at crabbing. We found no dungeness that qualified, but did pull up two small red rock crabs. (nasty little fellers)

We also made the trip over to the Tillamook Cheese Factory. This was something of a pilgrimage for K, the inveterate cheese-lover. We got to see the assembly lines where cheese is sliced, weighed, and packaged, as well as the slightly less interesting cheese fermenting vats. And then we got samples and ice cream! Fantastic. And I have verified that cheese curds do indeed squeak when you chew them.

Finally, this past weekend we went hiking in Point Reyes with two friends, E and S. They are getting ready for a trip to Alaska in August, so they were testing out various vegetarian backpacking recipes (tasty) and equipment (Jetboil - cool) and general communication/compatibility while hiking (seemed good to me). Some of the things they'll have to deal with in Alaska I don't envy - bears? Hungry bears? Hungry smart bears? Okay, maybe I'm just scared about the bears. They were saying that you have to put the clothes you cook in into the same bear-proof storage as your food, otherwise they might think you're tasty. *shudder*

No bears for us! We saw white deer, turkey vultures, berries, poison oak, other deer, red tail hawk, quail, rabbits, lizards, burned-out trees, the ocean, lots of fog, and a decent amount of sun. Pt. Reyes National Seashore is truly a wonderful place, and surprisingly close to the husle and bustle of San Francisco (we picked up E from downtown SF at 5pm and were picking up our camping permit in the park by 7pm, and that includes a packing break at S's in Marin). I'd like to go there more often. As for Alaska, assuming I go there someday? I'll take the tourist route.