So Long Chad, We Hardly Knew Ye!

It's hard for me to believe that Chad week has been over for a few days.  As I type this, I am sitting in a hotel room in Lansing, Michigan, at about 20 minutes past midnight, after finishing my homework for tomorrow.  I'm smack-dab in the middle of an intensive one-week residency for my graduate program -- Today was Tuesday, and I'm done at lunchtime on Friday.

Anyway, back to Chad.  Our final recipe was on Friday, and Gable picked out the meal.  He picked out corn/sausage/bacon/prune skewers for the grill and bread that's cooked by wrapping the dough around a stick and cooking it over a fire.  Stick bread.  It even sounds fun.

So, yet another "when I got home from work" anecdote, I guess.  Angel and Gable were deep into making the skewers, chopping corn into segments and trying to ram skewers through the cob; wrapping bacon around L'il Smokies and prunes; generally having a good time with food.  I was enlisted to hammer a metal skewer through the cobs, so the bamboo ones would go through.

The recipe is easy enough.  Honestly, it called for good sausage, twisted to nip it down to Lit'l Smoky size, bacon, corn on the cob and prunes.  Bacon wrapped around the sausages and prunes, and all of it was stuck on skewers to be grilled.  Likewise the stick bread was easy, Angel said.  It took beer, flour and like two other ingredients for the dough, and then strips of it were wrapped around sticks for the fire.

So, I cooked the skewers over charcoal first.  I have to say, the drawback to this one is that the corn is browned and the sausages are blackened before the bacon is even a little bit cooked.  Consequently, there were several bites of raw, squidgy bacon that I tossed over my shoulder. (we ate outside at the picnic table)  Except for that, though, I loved this one.  The corn was fresh and smoky; the bacon-wrapped sausages are like a dream-come-true, and the prune's sweetness meshed really well with the pork products.

The kids?  Humph.  I have the only children in the country who steadfastly will not eat food from a stick.  When I was a kid, I wished my parents would make food-on-a-stick, because of the awesomeness.  My kids?  I might as well sling a turd in front of them.  If it were on a stick, they wouldn't eat that, either.

We had problems with the stick bread.  After it was wrapped onto the sticks, I realized I had to slide the bread dough down a bit in order to lay the sticks across the grill, so I unwrapped it and slid it down...but it had already dried enough that I couldn't get it to re-adhere to the sticks.

I took my oldest girl to her T-Ball game while the bread was cooking, but Angel said that it tasted fine, though there were more black and more raw parts .

Saturday was supposed to be a boiled kind of dinner, but we had a crazy hectic day, and it was hot outside, and we decided to grill steaks instead -- cop out on the project?  Sure, you can think of it that way, but we choose not to.  So there.

Actually, ELTW is going to take a hiatus for most of the month of July.  For one reason, I have this residency.  For another, we are going on vacation in two weeks and don't want to try sourcing ethnic foods while in a condo on the beach.  Evelyn did draw our next destination, though.  When we get back from vacation, we go to England.