Poultry

There are a couple of secrets to producing a juicy charcoal barbecue turkey. The first is to use a great bird. We use locally produced Plainville Farms fresh turkey, which is raised without the routine use of antibiotics (see Resources, page 175). The other secret is to get the spice rub up under the skin and then cook the bird over indirect heat.

As far as Dinosaur patrons are concerned, anything with goat cheese is kinda suspicious. Add some asparagus and you’re tippin’ the highbrow scale—hence the name of this dish. Many have discovered the tangy difference goat cheese makes when matched up with our Mutha Sauce.

The bite of chiles combined with the sweet crunchiness of toasted pecans give this saucy chicken dish lots of flavor and textural dimension. In other words, you’re gonna love it!

Because we smoke most everything at the Dinosaur, when I get home I really enjoy the flavor that cooking over plain old charcoal brings out. It’s that delicate chicken flavor touched with spice and caramelized barbecue sweetness that I’m after. It’s easy to achieve, but you’ve got to follow some simple rules, so take a look at the Chicken Pit Boss Tips before getting started.

Because we’re a barbecue joint, we’ve always got pulled pork on hand, so it was just natural for us to turn it into a delicious appetizer. Don’t let our habits limit you. Make these quesadillas with some cooked turkey or chicken thigh meat or any chopped or shredded leftover meat you have lurkin’ in the fridge.

Central and Western New York is “wing country,” so you’ve gotta have some good wings on your menu. Most places fry their wings according to the original Buffalo recipe, but we smoke ours. You can make them hot or mild on your grill just by changing the rub and the sauce you slather on at the end. We serve them with the traditional fixin’s—Blue Cheese Dressing and celery sticks.

For some people, it just isn’t Thanksgiving without giblet gravy for the turkey and potatoes. Mom has included directions for a giblet-free version for those of us who have seen a giblet and never want to eat one!

Every Thanksgiving, I hear cooks groaning about having been up all night basting the big turkey, and I just smile. I’ve found a foolproof, easy way to make a great turkey and get your sleep too! It also makes the most tender, moist turkey I’ve ever tasted. The first time I cooked Thanksgiving dinner for my family, Garth couldn’t believe this method would actually work, so he politely asked me to cook a “stunt” turkey so he could taste it for himself before the big day. Most of my friends have been just as hesitant, but once they have tried it my way, they never go back to the old way. To make sure the oven temperature doesn’t drop too quickly, I put a sign on it threatening bodily harm to anyone who even thinks about opening the oven door during this process!

This casserole is hearty and contains everything you could want on the table in one dish. It’s a favorite of our whole family. It makes ten servings, but my husband likes it cold for breakfast the next day, so in my house you’d better take your serving at dinner the night before, ’cause that’s all you’re gonna get!

Comfort food. That’s all I’ve got to say!

As a young man, my dad worked with the State of Georgia Extension Service, where he learned to barbecue chickens by the hundreds. Over the years, he cooked thousands of chickens that were sold on the town square, at football games, or horse shows. He and his friends would build a huge pit with cement blocks and top them with specially made racks that could hold about 50 chicken halves each. To turn the chickens, another rack was placed on top, and two men, one on each end of the racks, would flip the entire rack at once! My mom has adapted Dad’s recipe to serve a family, not the whole town.

This is a nice recipe for southern girls like me who love fried chicken but realize they can’t eat it everyday. The cornflakes give you that crispy crust like fried chicken without all of the added fat of deep-frying—not that I’m saying there’s a thing wrong with deep-frying! My motto is “Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

My biggest complaint about fried chicken is that all of the flavor ends up on the outside, and the meat is usually bland. Not my mama’s! The secret is in the prep. When you soak the chicken overnight in salt brine, the salt infuses into the meat and makes it so tasty! When I asked my mom how long to fry the chicken, she said, “Just cook it ’til it sounds right.” I have since fried enough chicken to completely understand this sentence, but at the time—you can imagine! As chicken begins to fry, it’s loud because of all the water cooking out into the fat. It gets quieter as it gets done. Who knew? Now you do!

I keep this chicken salad in the refrigerator pretty much year round. It’s easy to make, and it keeps in the fridge for a week. Of course, at my house, it only lasts a few days! I serve this on toasted bread, or with wheat crackers as an appetizer.

This unusual take on chicken salad is a meal in itself, with the rice, fruit, and almonds as well as cooked chicken. Just add bread or crackers.

Chicken tortilla soup became really popular in restaurants a few years ago, but it was never something I made at home. Garth loves this soup and orders it almost every time he sees it on a menu, so I started studying the different versions at each restaurant and questioning Garth about what he liked and didn’t like about each one. This recipe I finally came up with doesn’t actually taste like any of those we tasted in restaurants, but we love it—and now we can enjoy it whenever we want!

My daddy was a great cook, and many of the recipes in this cookbook are his. If there was a fund-raiser in Monticello, people would always ask, “Is Jack making the Brunswick Stew?” or “Is Jack cooking the chickens?” before they bought their tickets. The food was usually prepared outside in very large quantities with the help of members of the sponsoring organization. Brunswick Stew is one of those classic southern dishes that varies from region to region, but I’ve never had Brunswick Stew that tasted like my dad’s. In his version, everything is ground through a food grinder, so it’s more like a wonderfully rich soup than a stew. His version also fed 160 people, so we’ve reduced our recipe to serve a cozy 16!

I love living in Oklahoma. I do miss my family in Georgia, but luckily I get to travel back and forth a lot for visits. My Georgia family has also made the trek to Oklahoma several times, so now both places feel like home. Only once have I gotten so homesick I thought I wouldn’t make it, and that was because I was really sick with the flu and Mama wasn’t there to take care of me. Sometimes nobody will do except Mama! She made this soup for me, froze it in quart containers, packed it in dry ice (who knew you could get dry ice in Monticello?), and shipped it overnight to me in a Styrofoam cooler. When I got it the next morning, I cried, ate some soup, cried, ate some more soup, and thanked God for the most awesome mom on the planet!

My grandmother, Lizzie Paulk, was an amazing woman. She worked the fields in South Georgia with my grandfather Winnes, raised three children, and somehow still found time to put three home-cooked meals on the table every single day. She passed away when I was in junior high, but I have wonderful memories of her laughter and her love for her family. Mama had always complained she could never get her dumplings to come out as thin as her mom’s, but the first time she made them after Grandma died, she said it was as if Lizzie were guiding her. Maybe she finally decided it was okay for Mama to be able to make her dumplings! They’ve come out perfectly every time since.

Our region’s most important restaurant chefs cultivate relationships with local growers and express their creativity through daily special menus. Paul Andrews’s confit method leaves the duck meltingly tender and moist, while locally grown blue potatoes add a subtle, nutty flavor to the hash.