Beer can chicken, baby

Mum was fascinated by beer can chicken, a recipe we saw on a cooking show when she was here. The concept is that you stick a full beer on the Weber, sit the chicken on top so the beer can slips into its cavity, and the beer evaporates and lends flavour to the chicken.

So you can imagine I was delighted that we went to the Weber Grill for dinner last night and they had beer can chicken on the menu. I had to try it. It was delicious, and apparently according to Jez, you can do Jack & Coke chicken or any other type of flavourful can of liquid and shove it in the chicken's keister, with similar tasty effect. The imagination runs wild, doesn't it?

The Weber Grill was kinda fun: a gimmick taken to its fullest extent. The chefs were indeed cooking all the food on big industrial sized Webers, lined up like timpani, and there were Weber base plant pots and Weber lid light fixtures. There were pictures of the Weber brothers and their original BBQs back in the 50s. And I had always thought Weber was an Australian brand. The things you learn.

Last night I asked about the difference between BBQ and grilling. So grilling is what we call barbecuing: cooking meat on a open flame. (What we call grilling they call broiling, cooking under an element/flame.) And barbecue is (slow) cooked meats over an open fire, which are often slathered in bbq sauce, and kind of extends to a whole cuisine type with corn bread, corn, coleslaw or mash...the whole Southern thang. The African Americans who brought the blues to Chicago also brought the BBQ, and Chicago is really into it. The restaurant was a block long.

The rather phallic image above is a colleague displaying how you butter corn American style. The corn is served with a little triangle of bread and a tub of butter, and you butter the bread, and then run the bread on the corn. In the restaurant I only saw men ordering this corn.

I found the food here really novel: I've never seen these items on a menu at home and certainly not served this way. I felt like I was looking for once at true American cuisine that wasn't junk food and hadn't been globalised through pop culture. And for once I didn't go home with a bloated belly.

You should have seen the desserts though. The waiter came around with slices of all the pie and cheesecake offerings on a tray, and the slices were HUGE. I was 'this' close to pointing a finger at the cheesecake, but I stayed strong. You would have been proud of me.