January and February are always up and down, weather-wise. This last winter (although not over yet) will be considered the "Winter That Wasn't" in Cincinnati. La Nina did her thing, and the weather was ridiculously mild. The problem for cooking outdoors, though, was that although the temperatures were seasonable, it rained an awful lot. Back towards the end of January the local paper stated that if what we had in rain actually fell as snow (like it normally would that time of year) we would have had over 100 inches of snow that month! Crazy! Today was one of those rare occurrences where not only was the temperature nice, it was also sunny, and on top of all that I had a wee bit of energy. Lately I have been both mentally and physically exhausted, and cooking hasn't always been a priority. Regardless, it would have been inexcusable to not grill today, so I went with the Tipsy Chicken on page 242.
Oddly enough, the only thing I had to pick up from the grocery store was the chicken. SHHH! Don't tell The Bride, but I used some of her Basil Hayden's Bourbon for this. :) Personally, I don't drink bourbon, but I can appreciate many of its qualities. Just sniffing the stuff, you can immediately pick up on the various oak tones, like vanilla, butterscotch, caramel, etc. This, along with the dijon (good stuff that I received for my birthday), the maple syrup (leftover stuff from a trip to northeast Canada), and the garlic (from the local Kroger) should make an interesting marinade. Because I am a dork, I got out my small mortar and pestle for the garlic. I've found that there really isn't a better tool to make garlic paste.
I marinated the chicken in a Ziploc bag for a little over two hours, and then took it out of the fridge to remove the backbone. I reserved the marinade for sauce-making later. Here we are, ready to go to the grill for some indirect cooking. The green beans are not from Weber's recipes, but I had prepped them for my side so I included them in the picture.
I've got grilling whole chicken down to an art now. Thanks Weber!
I prepared the green beans, and plated. This was a clean, simple, and a super easy recipe. This is the plating that I normally would have gone with.
However, as I mentioned earlier I had reserved the marinade so that I could have a sauce. I boiled the sauce for five minutes to avoid calling in sick tomorrow, and then used a little corn starch slurry to thicken up the consistency.
The chicken was quite juicy and tender. While the green beans were cooking I simply pulled off the wing to nibble on something. I still don't like chicken breast (it's one of three foods that I don't like), but the thigh and drumstick were perfect. Flavor-wise, to enjoy this recipe you had better like oak and garlic, especially the oak. Those were, by far, the dominating tones. The "candy" flavors of bourbon - mentioned earlier - were nonexistent. The mustard and maple syrup played minor roles, but again, I kept coming back to oak and garlic. If I were to make this again, I would cut back on the garlic by at least half, and probably also switch bourbons. I'm not sure what I would switch to, given that I don't imbibe the stuff all too often. In fact, now that I think about it, if you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments!
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