where we cook entire meals on our new grill

Beet photo from Darwin Bell's Flickr photostream

On Friday, we got a new grill. Not just any new grill, mind you, but a Traeger. If you don't know about Traegers, go here to read up. I had some other ideas for where to spend that $600, but I was over-ruled. Actually, I wasn't even asked, but that's a whole other post. And after you read what's coming next, you wouldn't argue either.

In order to inaugurate said new grill, we had a few people over on Friday evening for meat. We cooked/smoked a beef brisket. OMG was it good. I mean really good. After we served the meat course, I remembered I had some fresh asparagus left in the fridge from last week's event, so I doused it in evoo (I hate Rachel Ray, for the record, but didn't want to type out the whole 4 words) and salt and pepper, and we roasted that on the new grill. We stood around the bar and ate it with our fingers after it came off the grill...it was that good. Finally, after the vegetable course, we had dessert. How, you might ask, did we do dessert on the grill? Well, I had stuff for strawberry shortcake (real whipping cream and all) and wanted to make the Bisquick shortbread. I got it all mixed up and ready to put in the oven to bake, but when I opened the oven, smoke came pouring out. Yes, I admit, my oven was so dirty that smoke was actually pouring out of it. So, we baked that shortcake on the 'ole grill too. Damn, it was good. Guests who insisted on not having dessert were begging for some after they saw everyone else. Too bad, I didn't take any photos for you.

I know you might not even believe this, but last night we again cooked our entire meal on the Traeger. We started out with beer can chicken...it came out so golden brown and moist. I stood at the counter peeling hunks of the skin off and eating it before it even came off the beer can. I also had some leftover fresh beets from last week's event to use up. I remembered hearing about some recipe for butter and garlic roasted beets, so I made up something similar. I sliced up the beets (I didn't even know I was supposed to peel them first) salted and peppered them, and added evoo. I also sliced up several cloves of garlic (the more, the merrier, right?) and threw them in there. Todd roasted them on the Traeger, and my god were they delicious. To make things even better, I whipped up a loaf of fresh bread from this book and we cooked it on the grill too. Really...what is better than roasted chicken, beets and warm fresh bread?

Maybe the only thing would be beef brisket, asparagus and shortcake...