No Hassle Fourth of July Menu

For those of you that want to have a bunch over for the Fourth of July, I would suggest you having Pulled-Pork Sandwiches, Bar-B-Q Beans, Potato Salad and Coleslaw.

Why this menu?

Because you can do it a day ahead of the party and be able to enjoy the party on party day. All you have to do is to ice your drinks, heat your beans and BBQ, and enjoy your party as much as your guests do.

If you have a smoker, use wood chips for about 3 hours at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. If your grill does not have a smoker, place a piece of metal over a burner and place wood chips on it. On my gas grill, I use the lid off a 5 gallon metal bucket. It will take about 1 hour and 15 minutes for each pound of raw meat. I would first trim off any loose meat, as it will burn easy. What I do is place them on a cookie cooling rack, fat side up, so I can move them around easily. I then leave them there for 3 hours. Next remove and wrap in heavy duty aluminum foil and place them in your oven so you can regulate your temperature. Next, you want to check them with a meat thermometer. You want it up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit. Remove the aluminum foil and place it back in your grill at about 220 degrees Fahrenheit. Baste with a basting sauce made from 1 part of your favorite BBQ sauce and 1 part apple cider vinegar to mop with. I would mop about every 15 minutes until they reach 195 degrees Fahrenheit. Next, wrap in heavy duty aluminum foil and let rest for at least one hour (make sure that your meat is 195 degrees). When it is cool enough, you need to pull it. That way you can get all the fat and gristle out. You can leave it stringy or chop it. Finally, roll it in some sauce very lightly. Don’t over sauce it. Let your guests add their own sauce. If you have trouble you can email me at foodsofthesouthland at comcast dot net

Have a safe and Happy FOURTH of JULY!!

DAVE

Grilling and Chilling

Well, I have been dragging my feet lately with my blog updates. I hope to catch up. I have been judging week after week. We’ve travelled all over. You wouldn’t believe! One week in Southern Alabama, next in Southern Georgia. Then we traveled to Salisbury, Maryland, then Northern Mississippi, and then spent a week in Memphis. We had little time to rest, because after that we travelled to Sevierville, TN and then back to Stone Mountain, Georgia. So we’ve been all over recently! Now, we are home for two weeks, and the 4th is right on us.
And it is definitely grilling and chilling time.

I have so much catching up to do, I am going to make this short and sweet.

So let us grill some chicken thighs. I think they are the best: more flavor, more meat and easier to do. Don’t let the Mayo fool you like it did me!

Now we are grilling:

L.R.B.’s Bar-B-Q ‘d Chicken

Use thighs that are the same size.

To make marinate, use one bottle of Kraft Spicy Italian salad dressing. Let it sit then pour off the oil and leave the goodies. Then take the juice from a jar of sliced and pickled jalapeno peppers and fill the dressing jar. Shake.

To make glaze use

1 part Memphis style B.B.Q. sauce or what you have

1/4 part Pure honey

1) Clean thighs, place in zipper locking bag and add marinate. Leave in for 2 hours.

2) Pull skin down over top and sides and pin.

3) Start fire and bring up to 275 degrees Fahrenheit (use wood chips if you can)

4) Take your thighs and pat the skin dry

5) Add a heavy coat of mayonnaise to skin side.

6) Put into the smoker for 1 hour

7) Wrap in Heavy Duty foil for 1/2 hour, and test internal temperature. You want it to be 165 degrees Fahrenheit.

8) Remove from foil and wipe off excessive mayo.

9) Glaze with your glaze. Then put it back into the smoker to caramelize. DON’T LET IT BURN!

Now we are chilling:

Blueberry & Lemon Chicken Salad

This is one that you can play with. You may want more of this and less of that, so do your thing. Another is if you are calorie conscious, you can use yogurt instead of mayo.

Here is what we need:

4 Lg. split chicken breast, with skin and bone.

1 red bell pepper (med)

1 celery hearts

1 bunch green onions

1 pt. fresh blueberries

2 fresh lemons (if you get lemon yogurt you will need only 1 for garnish)

1 pt. yogurt (now you can get lemon yogurt) or mayo

Salt and fresh ground black pepper

You will need some good crackers

1) Let’s boil our chicken with a little salt and pepper till just tender.

2) Get it out of the hot water. Let it cool, then pull off the skin and bones.

3) Cut into 1/2 inch squares and chill in the fridge.

4) Cut your red peppers and celery in 3/8 inch squares

5) Slice green onions 1/4 inch thick, white and green parts.

6) What I like to do is to fix everything the day before and let it chill in zipper locking bags. I like to wash and look my blueberries. I use a chilled S/S bowl, add everything BUT the chicken, including the mayo or yogurt If you don’t have lemon yogurt then take the zest of one lemon, then add salt and pepper.

7) Now it’s ready to eat except for the chicken.

8) Lastly, fold (DO NOT MIX) in the chicken. Then transfer to serving dish that the edge is garnished with thin slices of lemon around the edge of your dish.

Serve on a lettuce leaf or with crackers

Jack's Bar-B-Q Sauce Recipe

Hello everyone!

I have been as busy as a Downey woodpecker on an oak tree trying to get my cooker ready to travel, because I will be gone most of April. I am a certified judge for Kansas City Bar-B-Q society and the Memphis Bar-B-Q Network. I will be in Jackson, GA on April 3rd & 4th, cooking in Maynardville , TN on the 10th & 11th, Salisbury, MD on the 17th & 18th and Southaven , MS on the 24th & 25th. Then I’m on to Mountain Home, AR on May 1 & 2, Pulaski, TN on the 8th & 9th and cooking in Servile, TN on the 15th & 16th. Then I get 2 weekends off!
Here is a really good and easy BBQ sauce recipe that my brother used for years. He would not tell it to anyone. Then out of the clear blue sky, he said here I am giving you my sauce recipe. You could have knocked me over with a feather. When I read it, I told him that I should have known that it was easy if he could make it. I got his permission to let it out. So hear ‘tis.

1 Cup apple cider vinegar
1 Cup Catsup
1/2 Cup Sorghum molasses
1/2 Cup brown sugar
2 Tablespoons garlic salt
1 Tablespoon Bell pepper
The recipe calls for 2 Tablespoons of hot red pepper flakes

This is Jack’s recipe down to here. And after that it’s mine.

But I think it makes it too HOT, so I leave out the hot pepper.

I add:
2 teaspoons chili powder
1 teaspoon of dry mustard

Throw it all in a sauce pan and bring to a boil then turn down and let it simmer for 20 minutes. STIR, STIR, STIR! Don’t let it burn. A double boiler would be great!!

A Little Update!

Well Halloween has come and gone. I guess we will need to start on the turkeys and all the trimmings next. I am going to work up a complete menu from start to finish. But that is to come later. I am going to talk about the past for a while.

I had one of the best weeks of my life last week. As you know I have been working on my new cooker for months. Well it is finally finished, and I was able to use it. Then, I found out how much help I was going to need, which is hard to find, at least help that is dependable. When we start, the competitions are all over the country, from Texas to Kansas, Kentucky to Virginia, Vermont to North Carolina, South Carolina to Florida, Georgia to Mississippi, and then back to Tennessee. These are 5 or 6 day trips and my people can’t get off that much. So I am taking up JUDGING.

This past week I went to a training session for the MEMPHIS BAR-B-Q NETWORK in Bolivar, TN on Friday, Oct 31st, and judged the cook off on Saturday, November 1st, which I really enjoyed doing. To say nothing that it was my 80th birthday.

After the cook off Betty and I went on down to Memphis, and stayed with my brother and sister-in-law for a couple of days. I had three first cousins to come and visit. Boy did we swap some tall tails! But the thing that bothered me was that they were from 1 ½ to 3 years older than I am, and all of them had a hard time walking. I am really blessed and plan on staying active. I had a lady ask if I thought that Bar-B-Q was healthy with all that grease in it. I tried to explain to her that if you cook a pork shoulder right, you will render all the grease out of it, not to mention it takes 18 hours to do. She said that there was nothing that was worth cooking for 18 hours. I told her that I started Bar-B-Q’ing when I was 14 and had been eating it and working ever since. She said you are lucky and walked off. I could not help but think, not lucky but BLESSED! This is enough history, so I will stop and get to work on our Thanksgiving special.

Thanks May GOD Bless You and Yours

Dave

The Lil' Red Barn in the making!

Below, you'll find pictures of The Lil' Red Barn in the making...

This is the main smoker with 2 in. of boiler-type insulation
and polished stainless steel

This is the fire box for main smoker with opening to add wood chunks, and a charcoal feeder that will (hopefully) burn for 13 1/2 hrs @ 230 df without having to open and add any charcoal.

This is a rough opening to add wood chunks without opening the door. Once the fire is going, the front will be covered with a insulated panel.

This is an old wood stove that will be the fire box for small smoker. It will also be insulated.

The back side of main smoker and fire box.

A look inside the main smoker. It is large enough for a whole hog. We have 2 remote thermometers with 2 prongs each that can be read from a 100 ft away and 4 regular thermometers that read air temp coming in and going out of both of the air chambers.

And for a yummy preview... Above is real West Tennessee Bar-B-Q being made on our old smoker.

Intro

Welcome to my blog built to feature my newest adventure and all that goes with it, competition bar-b-q'ing! Here is where you'll find lots of updates and information, as well as a few recipes and pictures, that are solely about my long-lived hobby of bar-b-q'ing.

Stay tuned for pictures of the Competition Bar-B-Q Pit I'm building!

But before that -- Here's a little something I wrote up to introduce myself --

I am David (Dave) Franks, Author, Pit Master and Flunky!!!

This is my first time at bloggin’. For all of you that have been getting our newsletter, a lot of this will be sour grapes. But the new ones might get something out of it. I was born in Whitehaven, Tennessee. That is now part of Memphis. I went to Whitehaven School; the grammar and high schools were all together. My Grandmother was the first teacher hired there. My Grandfather was the first doctor there, and my great uncle was the first dentist. I started cooking (helping) when I was 4 or 5. The biggest thing that I did was bring in the wood, keep the fire going, and the stirring. We raised, canned, dried and cured a lot of meat by using sugar, salt, red pepper, black pepper and smoking. We would sit around the fire and listen to the battery radio and shell corn to take to the grist mill the next day on the back of our mule to make meal. We would take butter and eggs to the country store and they would credit us for them. Then, when we needed some things, they would debit our account.

When I was growing up, there were only three Bar-B-Q joints in the Memphis area that I can remember. The one in Memphis is where I got my eating sauce recipe from, the one down at Bullfrog Corner, Mississippi is where my basting sauce recipe came from. I learned how to Bar-B-Q at J.C. Harbin's while working for him because he was our sponsor for the Doc Hollom River race. We would swim 5 or 10 miles down the Mississippi river. As most of you know, I have a cookbook out, Foods of the Southland, with over 250 good Southern recipes.

We are putting our Lil' Red Barn Bar-B-Q sauce on the market real soon. We plan on getting into competitive Bar-B-Q’ing next year. I am building a new pair of smokers that are trailer mounted and enclosed in a Lil' Red Barn.