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Monday, October 31, 2005 

A weekend at home!

I finally had it - a weekend at home!

This weekend marked the first weekend without a major commitment since Labor Day. Regrettably, I DID have a birthday to attend on Saturday, but have been feeling pretty ill so I begged out at the last minute. It was a good choice, in the end. The good weather and rest has pulled me through my funkiness!

My shipment of Wicked Good Charcoal came in on Friday, so I was set to grill all weekend. I took advantage of the quality weather by cooking dinner a-la-grill both Saturday and Sunday nights!

Saturday's dinner was pure meat and potatoes. A pile of rib-eye steaks from our former cow (see previous post) were the main dish. They were absolutely fantastic. All those thoughts that the meat from that grumpy old cow would be tough have been chucked out the window. The steaks even got rave reviews (and yummy noises) from Farmer Girl who, self admittedly, isn't that excited about steaks.

On Sunday morning, I sparked up the smoker and threw on a pair of chickens. Rather than let the extra grill space go to waste, I rooted through one of our freezers and pulled out a couple of packs of country-style pork ribs. I ordered these as part of the cut sheet for our last pig order and I regret it. I had forgotten how generally useless those ribs are. In hindsight, I should have had them made into sausage or something. But, since they're there, I figure I need to use them! I put them on the grill with the chickens and smoked them for future use.

The ribs went into the freezer. I figure I'll pull them out the next time I'm doing a pork rib chile. They're smoked so it'll be a tasty thing to pull them out when it's -30 outside! The chickens, on the other hand, were part of my dinner. I made smoked chicken quesadillas. I whipped up a batch of homemade tortillas and added black refried beans, corn, monterey jack and the diced smoked chicken breast from my AM labors. Needless to say, they were well received by the family!

The rest of the chicken will be tossed in a stock pot with some veggies and simmered for a day or so. This will make some of the most fantastic smoked chicken stock you can imagine. The only thing better is the same type of stock done with Turkey.

I can’t tell you how nice it was to be able to take a day to cook a meal. It wasn’t fancy, but it was all made from scratch and lasted all day and tasted great!

Slow food rules.

Chris

Man, I just finished dinner and you made me hungry all over again.

tell me about making stock from smoked chickens. I've done it a couple of times and the smoke flavor seems to overwhelm the stock. How do you avoid it?

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