We bought this crazy looking thing a week ago and brought it home on Saturday. This is our "Big Green Egg", which is a combination smoker/grill. It is made of ceramic. The inspiration is from a Japanese cooker called a "kamado". This is a new version of that type of cooker. It uses charcoal in a fire ring, which is at the base of the egg. See the metal plate at the base? That's a vent and where you clear out the ash. The charcoal is about at the top of that ring, about 1/4 way up. Then you have a ring, then you have the grate. There's also something called a "plate setter", which is ceramic as well. You can put it in, feet down, which allows you to put things on top of it and do things like pizza, breads, etc. If you put the plate setter in feet up, you can then put your grill on top of that, then put a drip pan underneath. That prevents flare ups from the fire getting drippings in it AND it keeps the grill a bit cleaner.
We started out small--we made hamburgers and hot dogs in it on Saturday. I also made some chicken legs for lunches for this week. Those will last all of tomorrow as my son and daughter will likely eat 2 of them and the hubby and I are taking them for lunches. Today, we made a roast and baked potatoes. I don't think we'll be making potatoes any other way now. These were just too good! We put them on the grill for about an hour, then we wrapped them in foil and finished them baking. The roast was incredibly juicy and not at all dry.
I am going to try my hand at roasting vegetables too. We have an eggplant in the refrigerator which was supposed to be for ratatouille, but as we do not have bell peppers, we will just try grilling the eggplant.
Next weekend I'm going to make several things that can be cooked easily on Monday and for the rest of the week. I'm already planning for next week.
I'm going to
