Upside-Down Pear

One of the first things we bought when we bought our house was a Weber kettle grill; we had visions of steaks and burgers and skewers of vegetables on hot summer evenings, with cool beer to wash everything down.

After a while, we got more ambitious: let’s grill a leg of lamb! Let’s make the entire meal, including dessert, on the grill! (Note: that last turns out to be a bad idea, in general.)

And then: let’s make a whole chicken on the grill! For Nat’s birthday!

Of course, none of our cookbooks had a grilled chicken recipe in them, and the ones I found on the web made me frown. So off I went to the closest bookstore to my old workplace: Caliban.

It’s a used bookstore; I’m fond of it because it tends to have a lot of old newspapers and magazines as well as interesting books. It also has the usual used-bookstore cruft, of course, but I almost always find a gem wandering through its shelves. Luck was with me, because there on the shelf, in like-new condition, was a slim glossy volume: Chicken on the Grill. Inside the cover, in soft pencil, was written $6-. I flipped through it; it contained a lot of advice about the best way to grill various types of poultry, tips & tricks, and shiny recipes with shiny pictures.

It came home with me, and that weekend, we made Nat his birthday chicken. Since that weekend, years ago now, we’ve made a number of recipes from the book, and never once, not once, had them go wrong. It’s become one of my very favorite cookbooks; if you enjoy grilled chicken (or turkey or duck or Cornish hens), you could do worse than snap up a copy.

Saturday night, we had our new neighbor, Tim, over. Menu:

• pasta salad (penne with red cabbage, celery, candy onions)
• green salad (cucumber, green leaf lettuce, homemade balsamic vinegar & olive oil dressing)
• grilled salmon filet
• chopped garnish (sundried tomato, cucumber, capers, green onion, balsamic vinegar)
• tomato mozzerella salad (brought by Tim)

After Tim left, Nat fired up his birthday present — a Weber smoker — and filled it with the pork shoulder we’d purchased earlier in the day.

The pork smoked overnight…and all day today…and the biggest piece of shoulder isn’t done yet (we’re finishing it in the oven, because…damn)! The smallest piece, however, finished around 5:30pm — and a little later, Jet & Drue showed up to assist us in consuming it.

• home-smoked pulled pork
• pasta salad (same as the night before)
• Kansas City-style homemade barbeque sauce (modified from a recipe in Chicken on the Grill)
• sauteed patty pan squash with carmelized onions
• fig tart (rosemary cornmeal crust, fresh figs, orange custard)
• fresh berries & peaches (brought by Jet & Drue)

This week, I have a lot of fruit to be baked into crumbles and tartlets, so my aged air conditioner will be getting quite the workout keeping the downstairs habitable. But first…we need to finish off that fig tart!