Let's say you've fired up the grill to treat your family to a fine meal of grilled venison roast, baked beans and homemade potato salad.
That roast is sizzling fine and almost done. Now's the time to brush on that tangy sauce. You open the 'fridge and search high and low. No barbecue sauce.
You're cool as a cucumber because you know how to make your own finger-licking sauce to put the final touch on that grilled venison.
Here at the shack-ri-la, we've found it's easy to whip up a cup or two of barbecue sauce using only a few ingredients you likely already have in your kitchen at home. Give it a try and you may find you like your own homemade barbecue sauce better than your favorite from the grocery store.
Here's how to make it. Squirt one half cup of ketchup into a measuring cup. Add two tablespoons brown sugar, one tablespoon white wine vinegar or any vinegar you like, one tablespoon Worcestershire sauce, two teaspoons paprika and an optional one-quarter teaspoon of cayenne pepper or ground black pepper.
Stir it all together and you're set. This is a great recipe to tweak the second time around. You might like a little less ketchup or more Worcestershire sauce. Maybe try half Worcestershire and half soy sauce.
Here at the shack we fire up the grill winter and summer. Even if it's raining, we sometimes roll the charcoal grill under a metal porch awning and light the briquettes.
Back in the day when my pal Hog Ears and I lived in our backwoods bachelor cabin far beyond the middle of nowhere, we pretty much lived on barbecued chicken. The side dish was most always boxed macaroni and cheese with that wonderful orange powder that magically turns into imitation cheese. To us it was five-star cabin cuisine.
Nowadays Hog Ears lives in Alaska, and I haven't moved far from that backwoods cabin. We're both grill fanatics and always have something smoking over the coals, including our fair share of poultry. Now and then Hog Ears will text me a photo of his latest creation, such as the smoked pork butt he whipped up last week.
Every now and then I think of all the fun we had in that simple cabin in the woods next to a creek that flowed clear as tap water. I get the urge to whip up a batch of barbecued chicken just like Hog Ears and I used to make it.
We'd cut a whole chicken into pieces for grilling and put them in a large bowl. We'd squirt some yellow mustard into the bowl, pour in a little Italian dressing and sprinkle on some black pepper. We'd stir the whole mess with our hands until the chicken was well coated, then let it soak while we got the fire ready.
Back then we grilled our chicken over a wood fire in a campfire ring close to the front porch. We never used charcoal. It was always just wood we'd pick up here and there around the cabin, like gathering campfire wood.
A discarded wire grocery store bread rack served as our grill. When the sticks of wood burned down to coals we'd place the bread rack over the coals and get that poultry sizzling.
Later we got really high-tech. We'd set an old metal refrigerator vegetable bin upside down over our chicken to smoke it. When our bird was almost done, we'd slather on some cheap store-bought barbecue sauce. That is, if we had some.
It's no problem to run out when you know how to make your own.
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Flip Putthoff can be reached at [email protected] when he's not grilling.