Garlicky Smashed Potatoes on the Grill

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After my recent post about the Green Chile Flank Steak I had a lot of people ask about my process for making the garlicky smashed potatoes.

Three S's of Smashed Potatoes - Size, Seasoning, Smash

It is a simple method - boil the potatoes until they are fork-tender, smash them, cook them on a griddle, season them and cover them with luscious garlic butter. The trick is to follow the Three-Ss.

• Size - You can use just about any variety of potato for this, the trick is to use "b-sized" potatoes, which is 1.5 to 2.5" in diameter. We used red bliss potatoes for this batch.
• Seasoning - A simple SPG rub (salt, pepper, garlic) works the best. I like using my NMT Beef Rub V.2 recipe. For commercial, Fire and Smoke BBQ Company's The Classic is an excellent choice.
• Smash - You want to smash the potato thin enough to get the maximum flat surface area you can while still leaving the potatoes intact. For me, that works out to about 1/2 inch in thickness. If you smash them too thinly, they will be pulverized. I find that smashing them between a folded deli sheet or wax paper makes smashing and handling them easier.

For me, the easiest way to smash them is with a recessed burger press. Instead of a flat bottom, this press is recessed so I only smash them to about 1/2 inch no matter how hard I press.  Perfect every time. In lieu of this, you can smash them with any sturdy, flat surface - a skillet bottom, a stiff spatula, a plate, you name it.

Enjoy!

Garlicky Smashed Potatoes

By www.nibblemethis.com

Published 05/05/2022

Green Chile-Crusted Flank Steak on the Griddle

[FTC Standard Disclosure]  I received no compensation for this post. Any link which may earn us a commission will be tagged as [Affiliate Link].  

This weekend, we made green chile-crusted flank steak with chimichurri, garlicky smashed potatoes, and Mexican street corn. 

Green chile-crusted flank steak with chimichurri, garlicky smashed potatoes, and Mexican street corn.

When I enjoy a meal out at a restaurant, I often like to recreate it at home. Last week, Alexis and I went out to dinner with our older son, his girlfriend, and some friends at Point B on their opening day. We saw that they offered all sorts of boards (charcuterie and otherwise), so we were excited to try them out.

There I got the steak with chimichurri, smashed potatoes, and elote. The steak was tender and it was tasty with the chimi. The potatoes were nicely roasted medallions. I'm always a sucker for elote. The place has a ton of potential, and we are looking forward to going back to try out their boards. 

I thought it might be hanger steak. The waiter asked and was told it was flank steak, but I'm pretty sure it was a hanger. The shape was nothing like a flank unless it was a super thick one cut in steaks lengthwise. That said, I love flank steak, so that's what I used when I did my spin on this meal.

I dry-brined the flank steak with my Green Chile Steak Seasoning recipe and then grilled it on a griddle on the grill to get that broad, crispy crust. The kosher salt, black pepper, garlic, shallot, green chile, cumin, and coriander give it a deep flavor. If you don't feel like making the rub, pick up a jar of Albukirky's Green Chile Seasoning, it's fantastic stuff. I used a variation of Steven Raichlen's The Real Chimichurri because I like my chimi to be more like a light dressing than a thick condiment. 

More details and photos are after the recipe.

Green Chile Crusted Steak with Chimi

By www.nibblemethis.com

Published 05/01/2022

Boursin Black Pepper Strip Steaks on the Big Green Egg

[FTC Standard Disclaimer] We received no compensation for this post.

I haven't been cooking many steaks this year because food prices have skyrocketed.  But when I saw a half strip loin of Certified Angus Beef® Brand for under $50, I couldn't resist it. I cut it into thick steaks and the first thing that I made was these Boursin Black Pepper Strip Steaks.

What is Boursin?

Boursin cheese is a brand of Gournay cheese, which is a soft, creamy cheese. I didn't know they had a cracked black pepper version until I saw it at the store last week. The pepper adds a slightly spicy kick. The contrast between the creaminess and sharpness of flavor sort of reminds me of gorgonzola or mild blue cheese. I'm not saying it tastes like blue cheese, just a sharp contrast like blue cheese. 

My immediate impression was that it would be perfect in compound butter for steaks. So here we are. 

Boursin Black Pepper Butter

By www.nibblemethis.com

Grilled Chicken Teriyaki with Pepper & Onion Skewers

[FTC Standard Disclosure] I received a Char-Broil Cruise grill with Cruise Control Technology free of charge for review purposes. I receive no other compensation for this post and I have no business dealings with Char-Broil.

Grilled chicken teriyaki is a classic and it is an excellent recipe for beginning grillers because it is simple yet creates a delicious flavor.

Two-Phase Glaze

You can't glaze grilled meats with teriyaki sauce too early in the process because the sugar will burn. I like to use a two-phase approach. After grilling for a few minutes, I start basting with teriyaki sauce that has been cut with chicken stock or broth in a 3:1 ratio. This lets the sauce cook onto the chicken without burning. Then in the last few minutes, I use a thicker glaze to finish it off.

I cooked this recipe on the Char-Broil Cruise gas grill; you can find my full review here. Teriyaki can make a mess on your grill, so I wanted to take advantage of the Auto-Clean feature after cooking. It would work just as effectively on a charcoal grill; I was just being lazy...there I admitted it. 

Grilled Chicken Teriyaki with Pepper and Onion Skewers

By www.nibblemethis.com

Product Review - Char-Broil Cruise Grill with Cruise Control Technology (MSRP $699)

[FTC Standard Disclosure] I received a Char-Broil Cruise at no cost for review purposes. All opinions are my own. I receive no compensation for this post, nor do I have any other financial arrangements with Char-Broil or their affiliates.

Product Review – Char-Broil Cruise Grill (MSRP $699)

Earlier this year, Char-Broil introduced their newest, game-changing grill – The Char-Broil Cruise. I was lucky enough to receive a Cruise unit from Char-Broil and have put this new grill through real-life cooking for the past few weeks. Here are my thoughts and experience with this new grill.

Tame The Flame, Change The Game

So what makes this grill a game-changer? Until now, gas grill heat controls have been knobs that control the gas flow at a set rate of consumption. If I set my old gas grill on “medium”, the grill will let the gas flow at that designated rate. That rate of flow doesn’t change regardless of the actual cooking temperature it achieves or factors like ambient temperature or wind.

The Char-Broil Cruise changes this by cooking at a specific set temperature. If I set the grill for 500°f, the Cruise will assess the grill temperature and if it is anything but 500°f, the grill will adjust the gas flow to achieve 500°f and maintain that temperature. No more guessing or adjusting.

The Char-Broil Cruise automatically adjusts gas flow to maintain a specific cooking temperature.

Let’s look at the features that I like and the experience I had while cooking some of the typical backyard basics.

Features

Digital Temperature Control and Auto-Calibration

The ability to set a precise cooking temperature and know that the grill will maintain it gives a cook confidence. This is true from beginning backyard chefs to seasoned pros like me. The Cruise has a thermometer mounted inside the cooking chamber that provides feedback to a processor. The processor controls the two-burner tubes to maintain the set temperature.

The controls are straightforward. The dial controls the temperature setting in 5°f increments.

Eggfest Recipe: Thai Steak Lettuce Wraps

 [FTC Standard Disclosure] We have received no compensation for this post. Any link from which we may earn a commission will be tagged [Affiliate Link].

Thai Steak Lettuce Wraps are sort of like the chicken lettuce wrap appetizer at PF Changs, but ours is a spicier version, and we give it a massive upgrade by using Certified Angus Beef® Brand Shaved Steak. 

This is one of the recipes that we served at the Chain of Lakes (2nd Place) and North Florida Eggfest (1st Place) in the past month. 

I like that they rock with flavor in a small package, and they are super easy to make. They only take 7-8 minutes to cook once you have the sauce made and ingredients prepped. 

Here's the recipe, as promised at the Eggfests. Below the recipe, I have more pics and helpful tips for making these at home.

2022 North Florida Eggfest

I am so stinkin' proud of the Nibble Me This BBQ '&' Grilling Team. This past weekend we cooked at the North Florida Eggfest hosted by Pench A Penny of St. Johns and won 1st Place!  

This is on the heels of them cooking at the Chain of Lakes Eggfest hosted by Mannix Pools and Grills in Winter Haven, FL, where they came in 2nd Place!

I like to share our experiences at these grilled food festivals, so tag along with us at the North Florida Eggfest as seen through the eyes of our team's (including my parents) mobile phones. 

The Trip

Our team comes from Tampa, Jacksonville, and Knoxville. Alexis and I had a 1200 mile round trip. My truck has sat idle for four months because the part it needed was nationally out of stock. We just got it fixed, but I didn't trust it yet, so we decided to rent a car to be on the safe side.  About that....

 Irony of ironies, as we were loaded and ready to pull out, the rental car pooped the bed. 😐 But major kudos to Nick Stamps, the Manager (or should be) at Enterprise. He bent over backward to get us on the road. After troubleshooting, he quickly had a replacement delivered to our house.

We took Ramsay Ramdog with us because he LOVES Aunt Rhonda's house. 

As we arrived in Florida from Tennessee, we happened to get behind the Mister Brisket food truck from Nashville. We took that as a good luck sign. 

The Prep

The prep is the key to a successful Eggfest, and our team has that down to a science. It wasn't always like that. Our prep was more like science fiction when we first started doing this! 😆

Better planning + better ingredients + better prep = a better time at the event + better results

A solid prep leaves fewer things to chance and less cleaning at the event. The only downside is that it might require more cold storage, but that is offset by requiring less onsite equipment and supplies.

We prepped approximately 650 of Jordan's Drunk Pickles. 

We could have had our own Eggfest at Rhonda's house. Don't you love that custom hand-made table? Sean's neighbor, Luciano Gonzales, made it for him. The detailed work is impeccable.

Laurie prepping the smoked green chile pork for the pickles while I was chopping Boars Head ham.

Meanwhile, Rhonda was preparing pans and pans of ooey-gooey mac and cheese.

I did most of the knife work using this gorgeous I.O. Shen knife that I got from Craig Tabor of Playing with Fire Emporium.

Laurie and Alexis crossing swords.

Prepping a ton of garlic for the lettuce wraps.

Reinforcements arrived later in the afternoon when Scott and Carson arrived from Tampa.

And they brought food! Carson made smash burgers to fuel our prep army. Everyone is watching here because we were having a spatula issue (it was too thin), so I showed them how to use tongs to reinforce the weak spatula. A few minutes later, the spatula fell off the handle anyway 😂

It takes a LOT of hands to slice, core, and stuff that many pickles.

Eggfest Set Up

The first thing you do when arriving as a cook at an Eggfest is to find out where your spot is if you haven't already done that the night before. Then you want to get your Egg fired up so it can be warming up while you set up your booth.

The event was held at Trout Creek Fish Camp in St John's County. It is a sprawling venue with live oaks providing a canopy of shade.

The few hours before the gates open is a beautiful symphony of smoke in the air, teams setting up their booths, and saying hello to friends you haven't seen since the last food festival.

There is a buzz of activity at each booth - setting up decor, writing up menu boards, and doing final preparations.

When presales of the demo Big Green Eggs are down, you typically don't get as many grills to use at the festival. One Egg isn't enough for our production or menu, so we brought our parents' large BGE. Carson brought his Mini-Max, which has attended many an Eggfest.

If your Egg isn't getting hot fast enough, it helps to get 4 people to stare at it (kidding, of course).

We have our processes down, and we get a lot of comments about how well our team works together. It is something of which I am quite proud. It is even better when people ask us where our restaurant is located....since we don't have one.

One of my favorite things about Eggfests is catching up with my BBQ brothers and sisters.  From left to right, Cowboy Kev, me, Mikey Kay, and Trace Scarborough. But there are so many others as well - Don James, Brad Stuart, Captain Ron, Mel Chmilar,  Bob Kolky, Kim and Ginny Youngblood, and countless others.

Scott and Alexis loading up trays of pickles for their "spa treatment" in the Big Green Egg (20 min at 350f with a pickle spritz). 

One of the excellent gifts for cook teams was this custom engraved santoku knife from Rhineland Cutlery. Alexis uses one of these for her primary knife in our kitchen and loves it - super sharp blade, and it fits her hand perfectly. They support several Eggfests, so check out their website.

One minute until the gates open....bring on the crowds!

Here they come!

Here is our menu for this event - minus the breakfast casserole.

Carson's Breakfast Casserole

We usually try to have a breakfast item on the menu, and this time it was Carson's Breakfast Casserole. It was fantastic with potatoes, sausage, smoky bacon, onions, chiles, eggs, cheese, and Meat Church Holy Voodoo. I'll post the whole recipe as soon as I wrangle it out of his hands ;) 

Breakfast casserole is good because a lot of it can be prepared ahead of time.

Scott and Alexis dishing up our first servings of the day.

Let the feasting begin.

Jordan's Drunk Pickles

These fantastic stuffed pickles are our quirky, award-winning signature item. They are basically a Cuban sandwich stuffed into a pickle and roasted - slow-roasted green chile pork, Boars Head ham, Boars Head salami, swiss cheese, and mustard.  RECIPE 

Jordan's Drunk Pickles - a flavor that explodes in your mouth...and sometimes all over your shirt.

Carson and Alexis loading up an Egg with trays of pickles. Multi-tiered racks like the Big Green Egg Eggspander [Amazon Affiliate link] or the Adjustable Rig from the Ceramic Grill Store are worth their weight in gold when cooking for big crowds.

The pickle juice spritz is essential for the big pop of flavor.

Carson and I working the grills. 

We get about 36-48 pickles per batch, but they disappear about as fast as we can make them.

Going in for the second bite!

The pickles hold a special place for our team. They are named after my sister's only son, Jordan, who passed away in 2016. We love that he can be a part of our team in a meaningful way.

Team Jello Shots

A few years ago, we did a menu comprised entirely of dishes in "shot glasses." It was a fun theme, but it hogged labor and grill resources, so we only did it one time. But we continued the tradition of our team having jello shots at Eggfests. 

Carson made sure we had "enough" jello shots this year :)

Wonder Twin Jello Shot Powers ACTIVATE!

Thai Steak Lettuce Wraps

This recipe is an upgraded version of PF Chang's lettuce wraps appetizer. We stir fry onions and peppers in a wok and add garlic-marinated, shaved Certified Angus Beef steak. Then we add about a quarter cup of salty, sweet, and hot Thai cashew sauce to the mix. We serve that in lettuce cups with crushed cashews, cilantro, and more Thai cashew sauce. I'll post the recipe soon.

These bites pack a lot of flavor in a small package. 

The Mini-Max was a stir-frying beast on this day, making 10 batches of the recipe.

Our setup was a 16" cast-iron wok, a woo-rig (Ceramic Grill Store) as the wok ring, and a Mini-Max.

Tommy Lee, eat your heart out! Carson got these great 2 pics of me doing the "drum stick flip" that the drummers used to do in rock videos back in the day.

I love cooking at this event because it is close enough to my hometown that my parents could visit. Pictured with my dad here.

I typically use a carbon steel wok, but we used the cast-iron wok since we were cooking all afternoon. It handles the long-term high-heat a bit better.

I'm not pointing, I'm holding the boats down. The breeze would whip up into a gust from time and time. If you weren't careful, a tray full of paper boats would go flying across the booth.

Smoked Mac and Cheese

Smoked mac and cheese is always a crowd-pleaser. For this recipe, we did a variation of Chris Lilly's skillet mac and cheese from his second book - Fire and Smoke - A Pitmaster's Secrets. 

Stay golden, Pony Boy! Our gold comes from smoked gouda, cheddar, and smoked gruyere. 

Alexis plating up serving cups of mac and cheese.

Laurie serving up mac and cheese while Alexis works on pickles. We did a better job at this Eggfest of serving multiple dishes simultaneously.

Scott and Laurie serving more golden goodness.

Laurie's Dessert Pizza with an assist from Sean

It is always good to serve a dessert option at Eggfests. Using this recipe was Laurie's idea, but Sean offered a modification, so it was fun listening to them "bicker" about WHOSE recipe this was. I'm not a big sweets person, but this was a super easy and delicious recipe. We are writing it up this week, and I'll post it.

We always like to use local, in-season ingredients, so you have to use fresh Plant City strawberries when you're in Florida in Springtime.

Rhonda and Alexis slicing strawberries. Next time I will bring my egg slider which does that a lot faster.

Slicing one of the dessert pizzas.

I felt bad for Laurie because we forgot the mini-spatulas, which would have made this job so much easier. 

Crispy and sweet, but not cloyingly so, this dessert pizza is a tasty bite.

This is my first time cooking at this location and I like it. The overhanging trees provided welcomed shade, but leaves would drop onto our food every now and then. We just started joking that they were our secret ingredient.

We could not have asked for a more beautiful day - sunny, warm but not hot, and a nice breeze.

We did our best to keep the food coming and our line short, but sometimes the crowd converges on your booth all at once.

Love this shot of me taking a moment to be with my mom.

We had a wonderful time serving our guests.

Everyone loved Sean's shirt - "Best pickle in town, and that's a big dill"

One of the reasons that I prefer these "people's choice" events compared to the KCBS BBQ contests that we used to do is the judging. Instead of 6 anonymous judges that you never see, we feed a thousand judges in person and they pick the winner. Here Sarah P. graces us with her vote in the form of a gold coin.

This picture cracks me up so much. Sean was positioning us for a picture, but it looks like he is lecturing the team on food safety or something.

Finished and waiting on the awards announcements. We have the best team we could ask for. All of us are accomplished cooks and could run the grills. But we have no egos, and all find our roles to fill.

I'm glad it wasn't a tie because, in the event of a tie, the two times had to duel using the pair of field guns at the campsite 😁😂😃

When the fires were extinguished, and the smoke cleared, we were thrilled to hear our names called for First Place. It meant a lot to us because this Eggfest is our hometown, it was where we won our first championship, and we were competing against friends who I highly respect as chefs and people.

We all had friends and family visit our site, which was special.

My mom with some of the team.

The hottest boy band since Boys 2 Men? 😂😆😅😄 Album dropping soon ;)

Best group of friends and family ever.  The composition of our team changes depending on where the event is, the type of event, etc. Some of our teammates who were not at this event include John and Anna Mae, Jeff Greene, and Carrie.

Photobomb! 

See you all next year!