This post is sponsored by Bush’s Beans. They’re pretty fantastic. The recipe and opinions all belong to yours truly, however.

1. Pick up two deep foil buffet (half size) pans.
2. Using a large screwdriver poke about 20 small holes in the bottom of one pan.
3. Place that pan on the charcoal grate of your grill pushing it as far to one side as possible.
4. Fill the pan about 2/3 full of lump charcoal and a few chunks of hardwood (oak, maple, hickory) or fruitwood (apple, cherry), chips work too.
5. Add about 25 pieces of lit, red-hot coals to the other coals and wood chunks.
6. Invert the second pan over the first. You will probably have to manipulate the two to make them fit. A loose fit is fine. I used a dollar store pizza pan to cover mine.
7. Place the cover on the grill and adjust the bottom air vents wide open for about ten minutes and then close them almost completely for about 15 minutes.

You’ll have to play around with the bottom vents to get your temp right, but you are shooting for somewhere between 230 and 250. Now you’re ready to smoke.

It’s time to talk about the pork chops. This recipe takes a bit of forethought, but is not difficult. To enhance the flavor and seal moisture into the chop, we’re going to use a brine. Your brine should be made up about 24 hours ahead of time.

Combine the salt, brown sugar, sage and thyme and four cups of water in a saucepan. Heat until all the salt and sugar are dissolved. Pour the mixture into your brining vessel, a bowl with a lid or a large zip top bag works well. Add in the crushed garlic. Then add ice and cold water to bring the volume up to one gallon. If the brine is not cold, refrigerate it until it is. Add the pork chops to the cold brine and let them sit and keep cold for 24 hours.

When it’s time to cook, prepare your smoker according to the directions above. Rinse and dry the chops and place on the grate on the side without the coals and close the lid. After 30 minutes, flip the chops and let them smoke for another 20 minutes. At this point, check the internal temperature with a meat thermometer. Your target temp is 145.

The chops are great on their own and will have a wonderful salty, smoky flavor, and the brine will keep them from drying out. You can up your flavor game with your favorite sauce, glaze or chutney as an accent. We went with a jalapeño apricot chutney made with grilled apricots. Start by grilling your apricots.

The chopped apricots combine with red pepper, purple onion and plenty of jalapeños for heat, as well as white wine vinegar and thyme. Simmer until it thickens and you’re done.

Invite a group of friends over, serve up a buffet brimming with food: chops, chutney, beans, potato salad, chips, cupcakes, vegetables and dip, fruit salad and more. Then sit back and enjoy the company.

These directions will lead to great pork chops, but the smoking technique above is great for other cuts as well, try it with chicken thighs or drumsticks. You can even do it with ribs or more exotic meats. Your imagination is the limit here, and once you harness the power of smoking you’ll really learn the versatility of your plain, old charcoal grill.

If you haven’t yet entered the Bush’s Beans Grilling Kit Prize Pack, you have through the long weekend! Enter for a chance to win an Emile Henry Dutch Oven, $50 GC, Rosle Barbecue Tools and a Bush’s Beans apron and can opener.

This post is part of a sponsored series of posts I’m doing for Bush’s Beans.

This is our neighbor Sara‘s margarita recipe. (Sara is pictured above.) We approve. In fact, I made them again 4 days later to make sure I had the right ratios for this post. Painful process that was. Painful.

1. No chains
2. Local/regional is preferred
3. The harder it is to find, the better
4. Use the internet

On a recent trip to Los Angeles I was presented with a bit of a challenge. I knew exactly what I wanted, but tracking it down was another matter.

For over a year I’ve been hearing about the Korean taco trend that has overtaken the L.A. street food scene. The most famous is Kogi BBQ, a truck-based operation that is always on the move. Luckily, they post a schedule of their stops on their website, so finding them shouldn’t have been very hard. Right? Wrong.

I was only in town on Sunday and Monday, and guess which days they don’t run? Yep, Sunday and Monday. Nuts. Additional investigation turned up a ray of hope. Kogi’s menu is served at one bar in L.A. I was in luck. Conveniently, it is only about ten minutes away from the airport, so Korean tacos were back on my menu.

After I was done working, I headed over to The Alibi Room to taste what I’d been hearing about. Let me tell you, it was worth the effort. Warm corn tortillas housed a perfect mix of Korean BBQ, dressed with a wonderfully fresh cabbage-based slaw. Now, since this was my first time back to L.A. in about ten years and it could very well be another ten before I get there again, I needed to make the most of my dining experience. So, naturally, I ordered almost everything on the menu.

Well, not quite, but I did have tacos with short ribs (classic Koren BBQ fare), pork, tofu and calamari. You must realize that not only did I intend to sample and enjoy the food, but I also planned to deconstruct the dish, identify the ingredients, and export this local delight back to the frozen lands of my home. After properly documenting my experience, I headed for the airport confident with my assessment of the specimen.

Upon my return home, I began searching for existing recipes for Korean tacos. I did find a few, but none seemed to hold true to the original and my intent was to recreate the experience for my wonderful family. The following is, in my opinion, a fairly accurate remake.

Begin with the meat and marinade. Assemble your marinade using soy sauce, brown sugar, mirin, sesame oil, ginger and garlic. Set a 1/2 cup aside, and pour the rest over the meat. If you have the time, let this marinate overnight, but if you’re pressed, a few hours will have to do.

Regarding the meat: Since short ribs are usually associated with Korean BBQ we’ll go down that road, however, if you’re not into red meat feel free to use chicken, or if you’re not into meat at all, you can try tofu. For our purpose, we’ll talk about short ribs. If you’re shooting for authenticity, you’ll probably need to talk to a decent butcher or go to a well-stocked Asian market for flanken-style beef short ribs. This kind of short rib should consist of a meaty rack sliced around ½-inch thick perpendicular to the bone, so the resulting cuts are long thin rectangles with five bone cross-sections in them. If you can’t find these or don’t want to bother, a good substitute is a bone-in rib steak (or rib eye) cut to about the same thickness.

For the slaw, thinly slice the Napa cabbage and daikon (a little coarser); add bean sprouts and rough-chopped cilantro, too. If you can’t find daikon, you can use water chestnuts cut into strips.

Make a dressing with soy sauce, mirin, lime juice, olive oil, sesame seeds and sriracha chili sauce. This might seem similar to the marinade, and it is, but the difference is that we want this a little more sour (extra lime juice) and have some spice to it.

Pour the dressing over the vegetable ingredients, stir to combine and refrigerate until it’s time to use.

When you’re ready to eat, fire up the grill and scrape it clean. You want a nice hot grill, about 550 degrees or so. Throw your protein of choice on, but don’t go far. These are thin pieces and the grill is hot. The intent here is to flash cook the meat while simultaneously caramelizing the marinade. Flip after about three minutes and remove after another three; wrap these in foil and set aside. If you are doing chicken, you will want to lower the heat a bit and extend the cooking time.

The last step on the grill is to warm the tortillas. Turn your grill down to medium and spread one layer of tortillas on the grate. You’re just trying to warm and soften them a little so flip them after about 45 seconds and remove after another minute. A few grill lines aid in the final presentation.

Head inside and chop your meat into small pieces being careful to avoid some of the tougher bits near the bone.

Now all that’s left is to assemble. Tortilla, meat, slaw, done. I like to add one last squeeze of lime and some extra chili sauce, it looks nice, and enhances all the flavors to boot.

I couldn’t take my family to L.A. with me, but at least I could bring the fresh fusion flavors of the West Coast back to them.

Fajitas are usually something I order at restaurants. I love to get a sizzling skillet full of peppers, onions, seasoned beef and a stack of warm tortillas. The dish is always a feast for all the senses. When it comes to Mexican food at our house, we usually stick to tacos, nachos or burritos. Recently though, I felt the need to leave leave the usual and venture into the chicken and beef fajita territory. Why should the restaurants have all the fun (and my extra dollars)?

These particular fajitas are called “top shelf” because we chose to use a very nice New York strip steak as the beef offering in the dish from our local Rainbow Foods with their new Roundy’s Black Angus Beef by Swift line. Don’t let that stop you from using your own cut whether it be sirloin or skirt steak or anything else you fancy.

While the steak might make up the bulk of this dish, the seasoning mix is the heart. Sure, you could buy a premade fajita seasoning packet, but where is the fun in that. Follow the recipe below to make your own mix that will blow the doors off a packet in both freshness and flavor.
In a large freezer bag combine the oil, lime juice and two tablespoons of the seasoning. Seal the bag and shake well to combine. Then add your steaks to the bag and refrigerate for an hour.

During the marinading process cut up some peppers….

…and onions.

Get your grill hot (around 450° F) and combine your peppers, onions, oil and a teaspoon of the fajita seasoning and stir to combine and stir frequently to evenly cook the mix.

After the veggie mix has been on the grill for five to eight minutes. Add your steak. The grill should still be around 450° F. You want a good sear on the outside and a nice pink inside. Give it about three minutes on each side, and then another two minutes between the second and third flip (rotate it for nice cross hatches). Gently press to determine doneness. Your vegetables should be softening up but still retain a hint of crispness. Then bring everything in.

Thinly slice the steak against the grain and place in foil along with as much of the juice as you can save (there’s flavor in there!).
Assemble your fajita in a warm flour tortilla with all your favorite fixin’s. Layer steak, peppers, onions and add cheese, sour cream, your favorite beans, salsa, guacamole or any combination of toppings.

These fajitas were a big hit with the O6, mostly because of the top shelf meat and the fresh mixed spice blend. So next time you want fajitas, skip the restaurant, and make them yourself. Your tongue and your wallet will thank you.

We were provided with a gift card to try out the new Roundy’s Black Angus Beef by Swift Beef at our local Rainbow Foods store, which happens to be just two blocks from our house.

Frequent readers of this blog should be well aware that during certain times of the year our local grocer marks down the beef tenderloin to a price more representative of sirloin. When this happens, we stock up. We have shared a few ways we prepare this: on the grill as bacon-wrapped fillets or in a pan with a rich cognac cream sauce and plenty of pepper – au poivre – or herb-crusted and grilled.

Occasionally however, I don’t feel like doing either one so a few weeks ago when I found myself in this boat, I scoured the kitchen to see what I could come up with. I found ginger, garlic, soy sauce, wasabi and honey (among other things) so I thought, why not try a teriyaki skewer? The result was an extremely tender, mouth-watering kabob that went perfectly with the spring vegetable fried rice that Shaina had going in the wok. In fact, the final product was so tasty we have already made them again. Now it’s your turn.

I started with two and a half pounds of trimmed tenderloin, cut into one-inch cubes.

In a zip-top bag combine soy sauce, honey, oil, ginger, garlic, brown sugar, mirin and white pepper. If you have wasabi, you could add that too for some extra punch, but it’s just fine to skip it too. Close the bag and shake well to combine.

Open the bag and toss in the beef cubes. Press out as much air as possible and reseal the bag. Allow it to sit in the fridge for an hour or so (more if you have the time, less if you are really hungry). While the beef is marinating, soak your skewers in water to keep them from burning on the grill.

After the hour is up, start your grill. Go inside and assemble your kabobs by skewering four or five cubes per stick. Don’t squish them; leave a little space between each piece to let them cook more evenly. Once you are done, give your grill a good scrape down and adjust the heat so the temperature is around 400° F.

Place the kabobs on the grill at a slight angle and close the lid, but don’t go too far, you are going to be flipping these in about three minutes.

When those three minutes are up, quickly flip each one and close the lid for another three minutes. During this time head inside and prepare a plate with foil.

The beauty of this dish is the short cooking time. Back at the grill give a few cubes a gentle press with your tongs, they should feel slightly springy, but not too firm. Once you determine they are done, remove them to your plate and wrap them in foil for about five minutes.

Pair these with your favorite Asian sides. We like fried rice, cream cheese wontons or spring rolls. Be sure you make enough because the finished product is super tender, and with its sweet and spicy kick, they won’t last long.