My Husband ROCKS!

He is indeed the best part of my life. I really like my job, and friends are great, but Jason, he's just above and beyond anything I deserve. On this past random Thursday, I was on my way home, so I called Jason, who had been off that day, to ask what he might like for dinner. He responded that he had dinner "covered". I came home to this:

It was a 2 pound porterhouse steak, marinated for hours in dark Mexican beer, onion, line juice, garlic and peppers ( fill me in if I'm missing something here). It was grilled to perfection with scallions, and giant jalapeno peppers. Under the steak is a mixture of peppers and onions and garlic.
It was delicious. That little brown thing? It's a baked potato. It was huge! Take a look at this picture of it before it was cooked.

That' my second largest pyrex dish. It's big. I opened it up later, and it smelled delicious in there. Now, if you've read about our grilling past, you probably know that Jason doesn't eat beef. So, this was all for me. Yeah, some of it is still in the frige, I think it's for enchiladas later this week. So, it was amazing. Like my hubby. Wow.

Week of Pizza

Believe it or not, we had a LOT of pizza last week, and never saw a delivery man. After our buffalo chicken, we tried a different approach, something Jason had seen online. I present to you Portobello Pizzas.

We started out with four portobello mushrooms. Jason washed them out, oiled the gill side (eeeeeew gills), and put them on the grill for a while. After they were cooked, we topped them. We had two white pizza mushrooms and two regular. On the white we put alfredo sauce, fresh tomatoes and olives. On the regular, pizza sauce, pepperoni, and olives. Mozzarella on both. Yum. We put them back on the gril for just a minute, and the cheese melted into delicious.


They were great. I'm seeing all kinds of recipes that marinate the mushrooms in italian dressing, but we didn't do that and it was delicious. I was assuming that the alfredo ones would be best, but really, the pizza sauce ones were better. Overall, a really easy thing to make. Can you tell, we had corn on the cob with them?

Buffalo Chicken Pizza

So, we have all read about the failbread. But, I have yet to tell you about it's gill buddy and more successful cousin, buffalo chicken pizza. This had become a favorite dish at a restaurant, so we decided to try it at home, and spend less money. It started out with that same dough, whole wheat, I forgot to mention in the previous post, and that's why it's brown. We cooked it for about 20 minutes on the grill with nothing on it. I think next time I'd reduce this time by about 5 minutes, as the bottom was a little more done than I wanted. So, dough cooked, I started to top. First, buffalo sauce. We used Steak and Lube's medium, because it looked like a good, insane, color. Because we're crazy, next time we'll use hot. I also put on some chopped red onion and some chopped celery.


We had some grilled chicken that I chopped up, then dumped in a bag with some more of the buffalo sauce and shook. Last, but certainly not least, I put on some garlic and cheese.


We put it back on the grill and cooked it until the cheese was melted.

Then served.


We ate it with salads, and it was delicious.

Failbread

Last night, we made pizza on the grill. We had bought a new pizza stone for the grill, and also an iron skillet to make deep dish pizza in. I made dough, following about 3 different recipes online and we put some on the stone and some on the skillet. We placed them in the grill. This is what happened.


I didn't oil the stone. I didn't think to. The dough had lots of oil in it, and I didn't remember oiling my ones from pampered chef. Oops. The dough stuck to the stone like there was no tomorrow. It stuck like my finger in the organ bench (gotta be overly informed about my childhood to get that one, ask me if you're really interested) So we had one pizza instead. I'll tell you all about it in just a minute.

Grill adventures!

I finally did it! I made things. Things from scratch! These things being a rib rub and barbeque sauce. Before I get too cocky, both need work. The sauce just lacks, something. It's a tomato paste base with brown sugar, dry mustard, vinegar worcestershire, cayennne, and salt, and liquid smoke, and maybe something else I don't remember. Oh yeah, chili powder, and garlic, and onion. I don't know what I'm missing. My plan is to experiment. Yep! If anyone out there thinks of anything, let me know. Anyway, here it is:

We made ribs. I mixed up a rub, it needs something too, but I think I'm on track for that one. It needs more brown sugar. Then we'll see. The problem I have with that is that I have to make ribs every time I want to try it. I know Jason is out there thinking "what's the problem" Hee. These ribs, our first came out BEAUTIFUL. Take a look. Jason is grillmaster. We tried three different rubs, the one on the far right is a simple one I made, the center the complex one and the far left is "control" from a jar.


Here they are cooked. Check out Jason's pink smoke ring.


Too bad we completely lost track of which rub was which sometime during the cooking. There wasn't one that stood out as best...

We also had the staples (you know if you've grilled with us) of baked potatoes, corn and jalapeños. They were good, but I totally burned my lip on a pepper, and not because it was cooked to a high temperature. Whoa!

So, if you've got an idea let me know! I'm open for suggestion, maybe more garlic? If you want to come over and taste it, let me know!

Danica Patrick is so tired

So, last night I dreamt that I was Danica Patrick, but still married to Jason. We lived in this weird place, and a Christmas tree (a ceramic one) kept catching fire. That, and I kept going to the hair salon. It was strange. I woke up incredibly tired. I don't know if it she dream or what, but I feel like there are weights on my eyelids this morning.

This weekend we had fun though. Sunday, the weather was gorgeous. So, we chopped up more tree. I got to use the chainsaw this time, Yay! I did actually like it. The yard was so wet though, that we didn't do it all. We retreated to grill land. We invited over 2 of Jason's friends, and we cooked out. It was good. Nothing overly spectacular this time. The most complicated thing was probably the lime shrimp. Those were good.

I love making a fire in that fire pit. I don't know why I'm such a pyro. I did one thing for any of you blog readers you there, I made a video. To be uploaded soon, Annemarie's easy way to core a jalepeno. Yum. Look for it soon!

Chainsaw

Okay, he didn't die. He just called me to tell me that everything was all right and and to look at the mess he had made. These are the logs he made. Eeek.

These are the branches that still need to be cleaned up. I want to build a ox or something for them.
This is what the ground looked like. Wow, sawdust.
This is the whole mess. Check out how snowy the ground was, and how thick that sawdust is!
Yay for my manly husband for getting this taken care of. Now we can burn baby, burn, that is, if we can figure out what kind of tree it was. Either that, or we'll decide not to care.

Blackberries and Barbecue

So, I left Jason at home with a chainsaw this morning. I know he can work it, but it makes me kinda nervous to not be there in case something happens. I saw him start on it this morning before I left, and t was going well. I'm a worrier though. Weekend wasn't that exciting. I watched White Noise 2 and Invasion, which I'll get into in a minute. The nicest thing I did this weekend was cook a big dinner on Sunday night. I made chicken with Stubbs marinade. It is the bomb. It is so tasty that it hurts. I also made veggies (woo hoo) and yummy twice baked potatoes with cheese, sour cream, green onion, butter and stuff. YUM. The very best part, however, was this:
Blackberry cobbler. Jason took pictures before I could clean the stove, don't yell at me. It was delicious. I want to make it again, right now, but I don't have enough blackberries. I made it with frozen and they turned out great. I think I'll add more of them next time. So, does anyone out there have a good basic barbecue sauce formula they are willing to share? Let me know!