Easy Summer Grilling: Chicken & Beef Brisket

To learn how to grill a whole chicken, I turned to YouTube; it looked so easy! I had a whole chicken and some beef brisket as well, and I wanted to use the method of first slow cooking the meat over beer or wine, then grilling it to perfection at the end. Plus, I was dying to use a handcrafted pecan beer I got at the local beer festival – in the South – to perform this duty.

Since I was cooking chicken and brisket, the meat only needed about an hour in the oven at 250 (it made the house smell so good!) then I put it on the grill to finish the cooking and crisp up the outside. The leftover beer plus drippings in the bottom of the oven pan smelled so good, I used it to make a sauce.

For the sauce:

Pour the liquid from the pan under the meat through a sieve into a sauce pan. Bring to a boil and add a bit of butter. Cook until it reduces by about half and serve alongside the meat.

For my next backyard dinner, I decided to marinate and grill a whole chicken. The marinade in this Chardonnay Marinated Chicken recipe captured my heart and I set to work. I doubled the amount of chardonnay to almost cover the chicken, and created a custom herb mix made from every herb growing in the garden around my house, including rosemary, thyme, parsley, lavender and mint. I also used good, local olive oil and large sea salt. Turning the chicken in the marinade a few times during the evening made me lick my fingers! I couldn’t wait to eat it.

To grill, I followed my handy YouTube instructions, and it turned out perfectly cooked. 15 minutes before the chicken was done, I added zucchini, asparagus and broccolini to the grill. This went great with warm spicy-vinegar potato salad, grilled veggies and salad to fill every last bit of space in my guests’ tummies.

My grill is now the most popular kid in town.