Help keep AmazingRibs free!
With a $25 donation you'll get a 100% cotton, brushed twill, adjustable, low profile cap with the AmazingRibs.com patch sewn on. I'll even toss in a small bag of BBQ'rs Delight excellent wood smoke pellets.
Click for more info and pictures of the hat.
|
|
QUICK LINKS
| |
|
Show Me Yours
| I've been getting wonderful emails and pix from you. Man, you folks
know how to party! Send me pix of your versions of my recipes or your party and I might publish them on my site.
|
| Smoke Signals is Free
|
|
|
|
About Smoke Signals
|
| 
Smoke Signals is the free email from AmazingRibs.com's Barbecue Whisperer and Hedonism Evangelist, Meathead.
If you like my website, please click here to forward a copy of this to a friend. And remember: No rules in the bedroom or dining room!
|
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
|
| 
Before I share with you my latest recipes and articles, I want to take a moment to thank you.
With your help, I have just made a life changing decision. Until now, AmazingRibs.com was a fun sideline, but I still had to be a freelance writer, photographer, and web developer to afford to buy my charcoal. In 2010, you have turned it into a business by visiting my site so often and telling your friends. It has reached the point where I have decided to devote full time to it, and that means, to you.
According to comScore, an internet rating service, AmazingRibs.com is now ranked #84 in total unique visitors in the Food category in the US among the tens of thousands of food websites, including commercial web sites. AmazingRibs.com is by far the most popular barbecue website in the
world. With almost 1 million pageviews in June, has just passed Oscar Mayer (eat my dust, Wienermobile!) and I'm closing in on Hellmanns! Also behind me are Saveur magazine (a great mag), LeanCuisine (no ribs on their pages), and Emeril (BAM!).
I doubt I'll ever get rich at this, but thanks to your donations and my advertisers (click on their banners please), I am living my dream. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaking of advertising, I have made a difficult decision. My new policy: "I do not accept ads from products that I review such as grills, charcoal, etc." It hurts to turn down those grill ads, but that means you can trust my buying guides. Click here for more on advertising on AmazingRibs.com.
|
I love Upstate NY: Crispy Cornell Chicken
|
|  If you like grilled chicken with crispy skin, say "thank you, to Bob Baker."
Baker was a professor of food science at Cornell University. A specialist in poultry, he helped invent such wonders as chicken nuggets, turkey ham, and poultry hot dogs. But in picturesque Ithaca, NY, where Cornell is located, about 6 hours from Manhattan, he is best remembered for Cornell Chicken. In fact, the recipe has become so popular it is served all across Western New York.
My wife and I lived in Ithaca for 18 years and fell in love with this recipe in a hurry. Every fund-raiser, every fire department cookout, and every little league barbecue, serves this recipe or nobody would come.
Even though Baker died in 2006, his family continues to operate Baker's Chicken Shack at the New York State Fair in Syracuse. It's a pretty simple marinade and mop, that includes raw egg (don't worry, it's safe when you cook it). Strange, but it works. The recipe also calls for poultry seasoning. As regulars know, I hate paying a premium for spice blends, so I make my own. Here's my recipe for classic Poultry Seasoning. Click here to try Cornell Chicken.
|
I Love Upstate NY: Binghamton Spiedies
|
|  Repeat after me: Shish Kebabs, No. Spiedies, Yes!
I'm not a fan of shish kebabs (or kabobs or kebobs for that matter). I like red meat rare to medium rare inside. It is most tender and juicy when pink to red. I like meat crisp and dark on the outside when the Maillard effect has had a chance to work its magic and enhance its flavor (see my article on meat science).
Kebab meat is usually 1" or so square, and it is near impossible to get crisp and red/pink meat that small, especially when you have a hot metal poker running through the center conducting heat and cooking it from the inside. The solution is to cut the meat in larger cubes, bigger than bite size, about 2" square so they don't fall through the grates and so they can remain tender on the inside.
That's where Spiedies excel. Invented by Augustine Iacovelli, who, in 1929, immigrated from Civitella in Abruzzi, Italy, and settled near Binghamton, NY, they are based on Italian Arrosticini. Usually served on a sandwich, although they are great on rice or cous cous, Spiedies became so popular that there is even an annual Spiedie Fest in Binghamton in August. It's been around since 1984, draws more than 100,000, and even has a cookoff and hot air balloon rally. Click here to learn how to kick the kebab habit with Spiedies.
|
I Love Upstate NY: Syracuse Salt Potatoes
|
|  Syracuse was once a major salt production center and is still known as the "Salt City." It has a main drag named Salina Street, and the suburb of Liverpool even has a Salt Museum on the shores of Onondaga Lake, where, until 1920, brine from the salty marshes near the lake was converted to "white gold."
The recipe for Salt Potatoes came about in the 1800s when, legend has it, Irish salt miners made lunch by putting potatoes in baskets and lowered them into the kettles of boiling brine. The spuds were then crowned with gobs of butter.
I think of Syracuse Salt Potatoes as big, thick, warm, fuzzy, buttery potato chips. I offer here the traditional recipe, and a modernized one for the grill.
|
I Love Downstate NY: Wonderful Waldorf Slaw
|
|  My favorite slaw draws inspiration from the famous Waldorf salad. The original Waldorf salad was invented in 1896 by Oscar Tschirky, the dining room manager at the renowned Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Known as "Oscar of the Waldorf", Tschirky also is credited with inventing Veal Oscar, veal cutlets with crabmeat, asparagus, and bearnaise sauce
My riff on the classic Waldorf salad uses cabbage rather than lettuce, but like the original, it has apples, walnuts, and it is crisp, delicate, crunchy, sweet and sour, and downright addictive. Click here for Wonderful Waldorf Slaw.
|
I Love Upstate NY: Canandaigua Grape Pie
|
| 
Naples is a quiet agricultural village at the south end of Canandaigua Lake in the Finger Lakes wine district of Western New York, about 40 miles south of Rochester. There is one high school and no McDonald's.
The lake is a long slender stringbean surrounded by tall bluffs green with grape vines clinging to the steep slopes. Many of the vines in the Finger Lakes are now the great European wine grapes such as Riesling, but many are still traditional native American grapes, especially Niagara and Concord.
When I first met Irene Bouchard in 1978 and wrote about her in the Chicago Tribune, she was baking her wonderful purple Concord grape pies in her kitchen, and selling them to local restaurants and at a roadside stand in front of her house. She started in the late 1950s and her little business grew until, at her peak, she was making 18,000 pies a year during the two autumn months that Concords were available. She would preheat her two regular kitchen ovens at 2:30 a.m. when the lake air cooled her kitchen and not quit until 4:30 p.m., baking four pies at a time in each oven. One year she made 6,000 grape pies in the fall, and another 12,000 other pies the rest of the year. People would come from miles around, among them many restaurants, and stop by her living room to pick up their orders. She is now retired, but other local women have taken up the tradition. The recipe has not spread very far because it is labor intensive. But my wife and I think it is worth it, and as soon as we see Concords in the stores in August, we make a batch.
So here's a new twist for faithful readers. Click here for my wife's Foolproof All-Purpose Pie Crust recipe. Click here for an article on the Zen of pie thickeners, and click here for Irene Bouchard's Grape Pie.
|
I Love Upstate NY: Free Maple Syrup Giveaway
|
|  The very first month after we moved to Upstate in 1971, we pulled over to help a man put out a barn fire. Only it wasn't a fire. He was boiling maple sap and the smoke was really steam. We stayed to watch him concentrate the clear watery liquid into liquid gold. Maple syrup. Folks, there is nothing like it. There is just no comparison to the pancake syrup made from corn with artificial flavor.
Last week I stumbled into a FaceBook page to http://www.facebook.com/MapleSyrupWorld and posted this message. "Meathead drinks Maple syrup straight from the bottle!" If you are a FB member, go there and tell them "Meathead sent me" and tell them what you like to do with Maple Syrup and they will select one post and send the winner a Maple Gift Basket.
|
I Love Upstate NY: Turkey & Chicken Pot Pie
|
|  My first winter in Upstate I tasted smoked wild turkey. With the leftovers we made pot pies. Ever since then, we make my Ultimate Smoked Turkey not only at Thanksgiving, but during the summer, and we and can't wait for the leftovers to make pot pie.
Here's the fascinating story of the origin of pot pies (Bob Cratchitt probably carried an antecedent in his pocket), how they caught on with the invention of frozen meals in the 1940s, and how the first indication of my future career was when Mom left the teenage Meathead at home with frozen pot pie for dinner, and how I washed it down with Scotch purloined from Dad's liquor cabinet. Oh yeah, there's a good Pot Pie recipe there that uses the same All Purpose Crust for grape pie (above).
|
|
Fun Gifts for the Barbecue Fan
|
|  Visit the AmazingRibs.com Gift Shop for a chuckle. There are more than 30 BBQ-themed designs, about 30 steak-themed designs, about 20 hotdog-themed designs, and more than 30 wine-themed designs. Order aprons, hats, shirts, sweatshirts, intimate wear, and
other apparel for men, women, kids and pets, beer mugs, posters, and
other tschotschkes.
|
|
|
