Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Elijah had hot dogs at the church VBS picnic and ever since then, he has been asking us to make hot dogs. So I swung by the butcher and picked up some all beef hotdogs. There’s not much to say about grilling hot dogs, but Elijah was happy.

This also brought our “grill week” to a conclusion. For 28 days, we only cooked dinner using the grill. It was a delicious month!

When I think of chicken breasts on the grill, I think of dried out meat. After reading a couple articles this summer, our chicken breasts are tasting delicious of the grill. Here are a couple things that are part of my grilling plan:

• Thin out the chicken breasts. Put them in a bag and pound them to a constant thickness. This makes it possible to grill the whole piece evenly.
• Marinate! Give it a full 24 hours. If you’re using skinless chicken, don’t put any lemon in the marinade because it will “cook” the outer part of the chicken. You can find plenty of marinade recipes online but I usually just throw stuff in a bag and it’s a little different every time. I usually do something like olive oil, salt, pepper, oregano and minced garlic.
• Get the grill hot! I put it on the grill at about 500-550 degrees. If you flip it over and it sticks to the grill, you needed to let it wait longer before you flipped it. Your goal is to cook the chicken as quickly as possible (within reason) so that it doesn’t dry out.

I’ve only made ribs once in my life and it was one of those prepackaged deals from Safeway. We cooked it in the oven. This time I picked up loin back ribs from the butcher and did them on the grill. Doing them on a gas grill is pretty much the same as doing them in the oven but it worked ok. This meal was probably the dud from the meat week menu. The ribs weren’t terrible but I cooked them too long and they weren’t super awesome. Here’s the recipe/instructions that I used: http://www.food.com/recipe/foolproof-baby-back-ribs-88204

It’s no surprise that steak ended up on our grill as part of meat week. It’s a staple of grills around the country. One of our favorite steaks to grill is the boneless ribeye from Golden Steer. You may remember that this was the winning cut from our Meat Day.

Grilling these is pretty simple: I get the grill pretty warm (500-550), cook for 2 minutes, rotation 90 degrees and cook for another 2 minutes. Then I flip and after 2 minutes I rotate 90 degrees. That gives me those beautiful crosshatch grill marks on both sides. At that point, the steaks are pretty close to done but I’ll finish them off with a couple more minutes as needed to bring them up to ~130 internally.

The trick with steak (and most meat) is to let it sit out on your counter for 30-60 minutes before you grill it. You want to get it closer to room temperature so that you don’t have to raise the temperature as much when you are grilling. And then when you take the steak off the grill, let it rest for 5-10 minutes before you grill. This will result in a juicier steak (here’s why.)

Tyla and Elijah went to a birthday party one night so I was on my own for dinner. I had been to the butcher earlier that day and picked up a couple sausages: Italian and Hot. I wrote about grilling brats before and these are pretty much exactly the same, but that didn’t make them any less delicious.

Since this is kind of a repeat post, I’ll throw in a little trivia tidbit for you: Golden Steer butcher has a lot of different sausages to choose from. They make all of them on site except for the brats. Those come from Bavarian Meets because Golden Steer sells so many it’s not efficient for them to try and make them all. This explains why the brats are a dollar more per pound than the other sausages.