CHEF COOKING TOOLS

Drunken Chicken

1 (3 lb) whole chicken
salt and pepper to taste
1 cup Dijon style mustard
8 fluid ounces of beer
1/2 cup Italian dressing.

Prepare outdoor grill for medium heat.

Rinse chicken and pat dry. Season with salt and pepper. Coat chicken with mustard.

Pour half the beer out into a glass and enjoy (if you wish) and refill with Italian dressing. Place can on disposable cooking sheet. Set chicken on beer can (it acts as a stand) inserting can into cavity of the chicken.

Place baking sheet with beer and chicken on prepared grill. Cover and cook for one hour or until chicken is no longer pink and the juices run clear.

Recipe Notes: Well, in reading the reviews for this recipe a lot of commenters felt the chicken was lacking in a little zip so I gave the chicken a few decent shakes from my trusty lemon pepper spice blend. I have to admit I was a little concerned about the stability of this project, so I purchased a beer can roaster, which didn't work exactly since Mike had bought a "tall boy", making the can too tall to fit inside the brackets. Anyhoo, as it turns out I didn't even need it. The Beer can and chicken together are way more stable , who would've known. This chicken gets high marks for ease of preparation. Once you've placed it on the bbq grill that pretty much it until it's cooked. I actually cooked for the first 30-ish minutes using indirect heat. For the last 20 ish or so minutes I placed the chicken in between the two burners and set it for medium low. See I told you, easy peasy lemon squeezy. Before stuffing the beer in the chicken put a piece of onion in the cavity to help hold the steam in. And that's it, there's nothing I'd really change.

I recently hosted a hearth cooking night at our house, and while I was having too much fun to remember to take pictures during the event, when I repeated some of the experiments on my own later I decided to document it.

It's much easier to cook in a fireplace than you might think! This is the fireplace in my apartment, which is actually rather small. It has a good sized pipkin, a much smaller one, and some chestnuts all in it at once. You could also experiment with roasting (I need a spit!) or grilling, and cast iron will work just fine if you don't have pottery.

Some tips: get the fire going well in advance of when you want to cook. Start with a BIG fire and let it burn down to coals. You'll actually be cooking over small piles of coals moved off the main blaze. For roasting chestnuts, I heated the base of the hearth with coals, then scraped them back into the fire and put the chestnuts (slashed) on that.

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