Weekend gastronomica

June 04, 2007

I cooked a beer can chicken this weekend. If you’ve never created such a thing, it’s when you roast the bird with an open beer can stuffed up it’s cavity. It’s obvious I don’t write for a food magazine; it was much tastier than my blunt description.

So I prepared the grill, medium heat on one side, and placed the beer can and bird on the cold side, all upright. It looked as though it might do a little dance, but no, it just sat there and dripped. Perhaps it need motivation. Perhaps it needed to not have a beer can stuffed up it’s cavity.

I have this remote thermometer which is pretty cool. I can be in the kitchen, and know the temperature of the bird on the bbq out back. It will even alert me when a set temperature is reached by beeping in an annoying fashion which prompts immediate reaction because I need the beeping to stop now thanks. And it has a flashlight built in, which is always a sign of a high quality device. Once a friend suggested I hook it up to the internet so everyone could know the temperature of my meat. Take that as you will. The only thing that could make this device any cooler would be if it actually worked. It was at the point it wanted me to believe that the internal temperature of my beer can chicken was 330 degrees (which would be a little over done, I think) that I decided maybe it wasn’t to be trusted, and instead pulled my old analog thermometer out of retirement. Sure, it doesn’t have a flash light built in, but it does have the novel ability of giving an accurate temperature reading.

Ultimately the bird turned out just fine, no thanks to the fancy thermometer. I pulled the bird apart and used a third of it in a chicken and artichoke calzone on Sunday.

Yum.