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Celebrating Our Independence with Gran Dan's Bar-B-Que Sauce

A.A. Bondy - American Hearts (buy)
Estelle featuring Kanye West - American Boy (buy)

First, a happy belated 4th of July to you all. I hope yours was filled with friends, food, and fireworks. And freedom! Can't forget the freedom.

It rained for the third or fourth year running here in New York, but not before some friends and I got in a solid 7 or so hours of beer drinking and barbecuing at my friend Eric's house (home of the garden, not to mention two grills). Somewhere over the last two summers, it seems we all reached an implicit understanding that each barbecue would have to be better than the last, which means that the food keeps getting better and more elaborate. I couldn't tell you the last time someone dared show up with hot dogs. Or actually, I can, but it involves getting scalded by a core of molten cheese that exploded forth from the cheddar dog belonging to a woman sitting next to me, and I'd really rather not relive the details.

Anyway, this year's 4th of July feast included grilled jalapeños with cheese and grilled tortillas, mesquite smoked baby back ribs; elotes with cotija, chilli, and lime juice; a garden salad with Japanese turnips (I figured out what to do with them), fennel, red onion, and orange-almond dressing; roasted Chioggia beets and lemon thyme; grilled skewers of zucchini, golden zucchini, and summer squash; and what is definitely the best barbecued chicken I have ever eaten.

Dan's mom emailed him a copy of his Gran Dan's barbecue sauce recipe a couple weeks ago, and he had been itching to give it a try ever since. I couldn't wait, either. Growing up in New England, we didn't have much of a barbecue culture -- grilling, sure, but not barbecue -- and I'm still in the process of learning the intricacies. Vinegar, mustard, or tomato base; smoking or grilling; wood, coal, or gas. I had no idea it was so complex.

This particular barbecue sauce is straight from Dan's home base in Raleigh, NC, where vinegary barbecue reigns supreme.

White Chili, My New Best Friend

It's a cold, very blustery gray day in Brooklyn today - the kind that makes it hard to believe it's the first day of spring. And since I evidently have the circulation of an 85-year-old, my fingers and nose are freezing as I sit here typing. So, what better time to talk about cooking up a big pot of bubbling chili?

When we were in North Carolina for the New Year, D and I spent a night at his folks' place in Raleigh before heading out to the coast. His mom sent us on our way with a fresh batch of white chili, which I'd somehow never encountered in all my years of eating. How sad not to have experienced such deliciousness earlier in life! But Jean made it easy for me to play catch-up... when she packed up the chili, she also packed up a copy of her recipe.

White chili is so called because its primary ingredients are white beans and chicken, making it a considerably paler relative of what the word "chili" normally conjures up. Most recipes for it tend to be milder, too, but that's easily remedied.

Not long ago, I spent a couple afternoons preparing for and tinkering with my own pot of white chili.

I probably opted for the most time-consuming method possible (read on), but in the end it was worth it.

Chickeny Goodness

I think chicken gets a bad rap sometimes. It's become this sort of default protein that just gets fried, drowned in sauce, or reconstituted into fun shapes to distract from how supposedly boring it is on its own. Not so! Give the chicken its bones and skin back and then give it a chance, I say.

Last winter, I was turned on to the whole roasted chicken. Not those sticky rotisserie jobs at the supermarket, but rather the raw thing, rinsed, seasoned, and then tucked into my oven for a couple hours. It's incredibly easy, plus it makes the kitchen (and then some) smell delightful.

The only trouble with roasting a chicken for one or two people is that, once I've enjoyed my serving fresh from the oven, the remaining chicken goes into the fridge, after which it's impossible to duplicate that fresh-from-the-oven taste ever again. So what does a person do with all that cold chicken?

Well, it may be February, but I'll tell you what: roasted chicken makes the best chicken salad I've ever had. Lots of recipes call for boiled chicken, particularly of the boneless and skinless variety, which almost always makes for a dry and generally disappointing chicken experience. But roasted chicken holds on to the fat and juices that keep the meat from drying out, and using a whole bird also means being able to use the dark meat, which I've always found to be more moist and flavorful, anyway.

(Chicken salad pictured here with Bread Alone's whole grain health bread, my new sandwich love.)

And hey, once you've carved all that meat off for the salad, plunk that chicken carcass into 4 quarts of water with some onions, celery, carrots, garlic, fresh parsley, salt, peppercorns, and cloves; simmer for a few hours; and you've got yourself the base for some nice hot soup. (In my case, it was kale and turkey meatball.)

Vive le poulet!

Turkey Day

It says a lot that "Turkey Day" is synonymous with Thanksgiving at this point.  I have never met a person who had much interest in the history of the holiday, but I think just about everyone I know agrees it's not Thanksgiving if you don't stuff your face.

Thanksgiving in my family happens at my parents' house with my dad's side of the family and occasionally an aunt or my grammie on my mom's side.  Regardless, there are always at least 16 people and enough food to feed each of them for about five days.

There was the requisite bird, weighing in at almost 20 pounds.

Our one attempt at raw, healthy vegetables -- a salad my mom concocted of red leaf lettuce, clementines, cranberry Wensleydale, and spiced pecans, with a dressing of almond oil and ginger vinegar.

And everything else.

The two staples we have at every Thanksgiving are thanks to my dad's Portuguese roots: simple Portuguese rolls, which aren't terribly different from other rolls except that they are inexplicably superior, and my aunt Winnie's stuffing, which is spicy with chourico.  This year, I was thankful for the fact that she made a double recipe.

Dinner was topped off with four pies -- pumpkin, squash, orange-pecan, and apple -- and a plate of cupcakes, since two of the kids in our family have birthdays right around the holiday.  A vanilla cupcake with sprinkles and chocolate frosting may not be traditional, but dear god it tasted good.

The rest of my weekend was spent at the Scrabble board, eating leftovers, and/or visiting with friends from home.  It was lovely.

I hope everyone's Thanksgiving was peaceful, delicious, and lazy.  Enjoy those leftovers.