How to Smoke Meat (Without a Smoker)

Personally, I love the taste of smoked meat. They even make charcoal nowadays that infuses flavor into your meat. Sadly, I only have a gas grill.
I finally decided to try "smoking chips" to use in the grill and they work great! You can find them in the BBQ section by the charcoal and lighter fluid.

Here's the one that I bought.For this post I'm using beef ribs because they were an excellent price,
but you can use virtually any meat or even veggies.All I did to prepare the meat was sprinkle on some dry rub and pat it in. It was a "Montreal" blend I believe. The brand doesn't matter.
To prepare the wood chips you just use Heavy Duty Foil to make a pouch that's about 6in x 4in or so. (Enough to hold 2-3 handfuls of the the stuff). Wrap it up and then poke a few holes in the top of the pouch for the smoke to escape. The instructions are on the bag.
Turn on your grill, place the pouch in the center, close the lid and wait for the pouch to start smoking. It took mine about 15 minutes but I'm sure it varies by brand.
Once it's smoking, move it to a corner of the grill and add your meat.

As you can see, my first attempt to add the meat was unsuccessful and caused a fire that was large enough to call for help from the hubby! haha Doesn't look too bad in the pic,
but trust me, the entire grill was up in flames! Luckily, the ribs survived unscathed. I learned that the layer of fat that lines the bottom of the ribs drips when heated and is extremely flammable! Hey, I'm no expert!

My 2nd attempt, with a foil-lined grill minus a hole cut out where the packet goes.After about 20 minutes or so on the med/low
setting with the lid closed.At this point you can mop on barbecue sauce and let it cook a little longer or you can eat them just like this.As you can see, we like our beef a little rare. You can grill for about 5-10 min longer on
med/low for well-done.

Pulled Pork Sandwiches

My grocery store had boneless pork loin on sale for $1.97 this week so I decided it was a great day to make pulled pork and coleslaw sandwiches.

To serve 6 with lots of leftovers you'll need around 2 1/2 lbs of pork loin, (you can actually use several different types of pork roast or even beef). Go with what's on sale because everything comes out of the crockpot tender.

The good thing about this loin is that it has a nice little layer of fat on one side that will really add flavor to your meat.

Put your meat in the crockpot and turn to "low". You'll need to season the meat to get the best flavor. Use any smoke based seasoning or even a bit of "liquid smoke". This time, I used Grill Mates: Mesquite but you could also use hickory or whatever. I also added some garlic and onion powder like I usually do, haha. There are plenty of different combinations of spices that you can add to the meat as long as you have that smoky flavor in there somewhere.

Once it looks something like this, put the lid on and leave it alone for about 2 hours.

The next part you can either do after the two hours or when you first start cooking the roast, (or you can omit this step completely). But I poured in about 10 oz of rootbeer. I read this somewhere and it sounded like a good idea so I tried it.

Cook for another 4-6 hours or turn the crockpot to "high" to reduce cooking time. Once the meat is tender, shred it with two forks, or however you personally shred meat. :) After you shred it mix it up with the juices in the pot and put the lid on for about another 20 minutes so that the meat can soak up all of that goodness.

At this point the meat is so flavorful that you can serve it just like this and get rave reviews or you can add about 3/4 bottle of BBQ sauce, (I used Sweet Baby Rays), and let it cook just long enough to heat up. Maybe 10 minutes.

This time, probably because I added the extra liquid from the root beer, I had to strain the meat somewhat before I added to the buns so that they didn't get soggy. Normally I don't have to do this, but normally I don't add root beer so, yeah, strain the meat of excess liquid. Just use a slotted spoon.
Serve on buns or Hawaiian rolls, top with coleslaw. I make these all the time for family gatherings or parties because you can make a ton with hardly any work.
Let me know how it turns out.

If you want to make your own coleslaw, that's your business. I bought mine from the deli.

Perfect Roasted Barbecued Chicken Thighs

Believe it or not, the best way to cook barbecued chicken is in the oven! (or roaster) If you have a roaster, this is a fool-proof recipe for perfect BBQ chicken thighs every time. If you don't have a roaster, you can cook this in the oven covered in tin foil. I highly suggest a roaster to anyone who cooks often or for a lot of people. They're relatively inexpensive, use less electricity than the oven, and won't heat up your house in the summer. Here's mine:

It's a Hamilton Beach 18 QT which is just big enough to hold my 11x15 pan. Nothing to look at but it gets the job done. It gets the job done better than the oven sometimes.
On to the recipe...
There's not much you need in terms of ingredients, the most important part of getting these just right is method. Let's talk first about how to trim the thighs themselves. I have a large family so I buy the big family pack of thighs with the skin on. As you can see here, they come with an excess of skin. If you leave all of this on, it will just turn out mushy or gooey.

First, turn your thigh upside down, then grab that extra flap of skin, pull up and trim. Like so:

Keep in mind that I left the skin on the front of the thigh, we're only trimming the excess that folds over to the back. You have one other bit of fat that you need to trim off your thighs. (haha Don't we all?)Anyway, it's not skin and it's attached to the meat itself. See here:

There we go. Now we're all nice and trim. Rinse the chicken under cold water, shake off excess water and add to your pan.

Here I used an 11x15 glass baking dish so I had plenty of room. It's perfectly ok to really compact them in there as long it's single layer. As you will see in later pics, they shrink quite a bit after cooking. After adding to the pan, drain any excess water that may have accumulated and add your spice. I used McCormick Grill Mate in Mesquite because I got a bunch of them for free with a coupon. In the past I've also used the Montreal Steak seasoning from Grill Mate or Famous Dave's seasoning. Really you can use any BBQ type seasoning that sounds good.

Once seasoned, pop the pan into a preheated (350 degree) roaster for about 1 1/2 hrs. Or cover with a tin foil tent and put in preheated oven on the middle rack. After an hour and a half or so you will have this:

If you'd like, you can stop here and call them roasted chicken thighs. They are delicious! If you're still set on BBQ, you need to drain about 90% of the juices from the bottom of the pan. Pour BBQ sauce over the tops of the thighs. I don't flip them over, just brush the tops and allow some of the excess to drip down to the bottom of the pan. I used Sweet Baby Rays sauce. For this size, just over half of a bottle was necessary. You don't want too much sauce, you can add more later or serve it on the side. Put pan back in the roaster for 20-30 minutes. I'm not sure why this next picture looks so red. It was not red at all but more like the color of the top pic.

Check for doneness, plate your thighs and you're done. Perfect!