TheKitchenSinkRecipes.com

I think that every family has its version of a barbecue. Growing up, the elements of my family’s standard barbecue included potato and pasta salads from Byerly’s, golden cobs of buttered corn, and, if we were really lucky, a trip to Dairy Queen at the end of the night. But the clear star of the show was the giant platter of grilled meats, charred from the grill: burgers, chicken breasts (during my sister’s and my red meat strike that regrettably lasted throughout much of our teens), and, sometimes, brats. The most homesick I ever was during college was at the end of my freshman year in late May, when I called home and learned that my family was grilling. Without me. I could practically smell the grill’s smoke and hear my family’s laughter (mingling, most likely, with the sounds of a Twins game playing in the background). And I could just taste the brats.

With Kevin, my version of the barbecue has evolved to include some elements of his family’s barbecues (skirt steaks, for one) and to incorporate some new ones of our own. These usually include attempts at healthing things up: adding more vegetables, swapping turkey for ground beef in our burgers, opting for whole wheat buns. I suppose that’s where these brats come in. You see, they’re chicken brats. I can only hope that an admission of this magnitude will not prompt my family to disown me.

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I had altogether too much fun making this meal. Maybe it’s because my brain is fried from too much studying. Or perhaps my threshold for finding comedy is extremely low, after listening to legal lectures for hour after droning hour. Whatever it was, these grilled chickens were a real riot.

First, the whole project was like a Jeff Foxworthy bit, only backwards. As in: You know you’re not a red neck when you insist that your beer can chicken is organic. You know you’re not a red neck when you grill your beer can chicken on your gas Weber, which resides on your condo’s roof top deck, which affords a Chicago skyline vista. And you really, really know you’re a not a red neck when your beer can chicken requires trips to several stores because the first couple you tried don’t even sell beer in cans. So, right, I’m not a red neck, then.

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Ali’s request for this week’s FDD (Family Dinner Dessert), conveyed in a mid-morning text message on Monday, was simple and open-ended: chocolate and strawberries. Then, in an unusually social butterflyish turn of events, we ended up out to dinner that night, capping off the night by digging four spoons into a wedge of pie so large it almost made me blush. And let’s not even mention the a la mode-ness of it all. Then, on Tuesday night, we had Kevin’s sister over for dinner and closed out the meal with mini molten chocolate cakes (more on those very, very soon). So come yesterday, I was feeling a bit glutted in the dessert department.

Given this state of glut, I suppose it’s no surprise I turned to angel food cake to grant Ms. Ali’s wish. It would be feather-light and summery, not to mention fun to make. Angel food cake, you see, requires some of my favorite baking tasks: separating egg whites, which I love to do by cracking the egg into my cupped hand, letting the whites ooze between my fingers while cradling the sunny yolk; whipping egg whites into a frenzy in the stand mixer, always having a Strega Nona moment wondering if the whites will billow right up and over the bowl, flooding the kitchen; and using my tube pan, which I inexplicably love, with it’s trick bottom and it’s tripod spikes. (I think this would be a good time to note that I should get out more.)

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Do you ever feel bad for coleslaw? It’s always upstaged by its meatier counterparts on the picnic table—always invited but never the guest of honor. It wilts in the heat, growing more sad looking with each rising degree or passing minute. It doesn’t even warrant two whole syllables, instead being truncated to simply: slaw. Given this sad state of affairs, I usually heap a spoonful onto my plate at a BBQ, purely out of pity. And then I nudge the mound around my plate, trying to staunch the flow of its mayo-y rivulets from dampening the bun upon which my burger sits. And, inevitably, the slaw goes mostly uneaten.

I think cabbage deserves better, frankly. So I’m happy to bring you a slaw recipe that will prompt you to sit up a little bit straighter when you take a crunchy bite, wondering what exactly has imparted the faint heat (cayenne) or the sweet snap (granny smith, julienned). And it won’t suffer from the pitfalls of so many slaws before it: saccharine amounts of sugar, insipidly diluted mayo and a pale green color palette. Instead, it gets a tangy perk from Greek yogurt and a flavor boost from the toasted caraway seeds and an eye catching addition of red cabbage strands.

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As I munched on a slice of this delicious coffee cake—bedecked with sour cherries and infused with almond—for breakfast yesterday morning, I was delighted to read Amy’s responses to a meme at Eggs on Sunday and to see that she’d tagged me. So, here goes:

What were you doing ten years ago?
I was finishing up my junior year of high school, playing a lot of soccer and looking forward to a summer full of college visits, lakes, cabins and grilling. Life was hard.

What are five non-work things on my to-do list for today?
1) pick up a six-pack of beer (What? We’re making beer can chicken in a couple days)
2) salt the chickens (a la the Zuni Café dry brine method) for the aforementioned beer can chicken
3) water the plants
4) return some phone calls and emails (I have been soooo bad at this since I started studying for the Bar Exam)
5) get ready for dinner tonight—we’re having Kevin’s sister, who’s in Chicago for the week (!), over

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During the cooler months, Sunday nights usually mean one thing: soup. A big, steaming, bubbling pot of it, ready to be ladled into deep bowls and enjoyed along with our HBO show du jour. Leftovers are promptly divided into Ziploc containers, ready to be microwaved into hearty lunches in an office kitchen on Michigan Avenue (Kevin) and a bank of industrial-strength microwaves in a law school cafeteria across town (me). But this Sunday was 90 degrees, at its coolest. So, soup? It wasn’t happening.

So instead of mirepoix and chicken stock, this Sunday, we opted for limes and tequila. Out with the stock pot and medium-high heat and in with the blender and ice. Lots of ice.

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I’ve already divulged that it’s a minor miracle that these bars came to be. These bars were meant to be the vehicle for the strawberry-rhubarb jam I wrote about yesterday. The only vehicle. But then I had to go and sample the jam and the next thing I knew, everything I saw the in kitchen was screaming out for a slather of jam: english muffins, crackers, spoons!

But somehow the jam survived. Good thing, too, because it went on to become the tart red ribbon running through the middle of these bars, which Kevin declared “Pop Tarts for Grown-Ups!” And that is very high praise, in case you’re wondering. I can see the comparison to everyone’s favorite toasted treat. Like pop tarts, these bars are a marriage of a buttery base and a fruit filling. But that’s where the similarities end, because these bars swap the frosting and sprinkles for a buttery-oatmeal-crumble topping, the high-fructose corn syrup-laden filling for fresh jam (mmmm), and the transfatty pastry for a buttery (did I mention there’s a lot of butter?) shortbread crust.

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I have what one might call a slight magazine problem. I like them. A lot. Too much, really. I suppose it’s not that surprising, seeing as though I was a journalism major in college, with a magazine concentration. The food magazine problem, in particular, has gotten a little out of hand. There are piles of them all over our place, bookmarked, dogeared, stained and all around loved. (It must run in the family: my parents have a collection of back issues of Gourmet that makes my knees go weak.) I have a kind of ritual for savoring my food magazines: I like to read them cover to cover, getting lost in menus and grocery lists and serious armchair cooking along the way.

But I’ve made an exception to this tried-and-true routine lately for Bon Appetit. For the past few months, I do not pass go, I proceed directly to the column authored by Orangette‘s Molly Wizenberg. Without fail, I’m transported by her story and convinced to make something—a savory souffle, fresh mayonnaise, homemade sausage patties—that I had never before dreamed or dared to make. Like clockwork, it happened again this month. Molly spun a story that had me determined to make jam.

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Something happened this weekend and, while I’m no Farmer’s Almanac, I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the fact that our calendars have flipped to June. Yes, June. I’m not sure what June’s arrival brought in your neck of the woods, but here in Chicago, it made the air feel a little more dense, it prompted the bright petals of our begonias to begin to unfurl and it was scented by charcoal embers smoldering in the backyards up and down our block. To June and the summer she’ll usher in, I say: welcome. Come on in. Stay a while, won’t you?

On Sunday, we fashioned our best welcome wagon for June. We walked to a farmer’s market. We sat on our deck. We discussed the possibility of an afternoon ice cream treat no fewer than a half-dozen times. And, of course, we fired up our grill. Because, well, it was the least we could do.

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I’ve had a longstanding infatuation with pizza. It was born at the local Chuck E. Cheese, I think, at some kid’s birthday party where I spent more time marveling at the giant slices than watching those creepy mechanical animals sing and dance. And then there was one of my own birthday parties where we made homemade pizzas, which unsurprisingly resulted in saucy faces and an unfortunate mozzarella-in-the-hair episode. Oh, and I couldn’t possibly forget the Apollo, a “pizza parlor” (bar) in northern Minnesota near my grandparents’ house. We’d arrive early (to avoid the debauchery of the later hours, I now realize) and feed quarter after quarter into the pinball machine (right next to the pull tabs) and jukebox (flanked by neon beer signs that emitted a faint buzzzz). The menu featured a predictable array of jalapeno poppers and deep-fried, well, anything. But, man, was (is) the pizza good, with a cracker-thin crust, a zesty old-school sauce and a modest smatter of mozzarella. It was usually bedecked with bits of Italian sausage that were nearly meatball-sized and sliced into little squares. You don’t even want to know the number of those little squares I could pack away as a small child.

In high school, I fell for a pizzeria in Minneapolis, where the waiters slid the piping hot pizza trays onto old tomato cans, papered with cheery, vintage-y images. In college, I was introduced to deep-dish and the joys of the nearly-free pitchers of beer at Giordano’s on Monday nights. I also had a little frozen pizza habit, usually indulged in the wee hours, but I think that’s best left in the past, no? And then there was my trip to Europe with Kevin, the Italian leg of which involved at least one pizza (and a scoop of gelato, ahem) a day.

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