Cooking For Joy
Put on Some Grateful Dead and Grill Chicken
It’s the perfect time to adopt this ritual over charcoal
Editor’s Note: Heated has asked contributors to write about a dish they’re cooking that cuts through bleak headlines, forced isolation, and limited ingredients to bring them joy; we’ll be running at least one contribution a day through this stay-at-home stretch.
There are few more pleasurable — not to mention easy — things to cook on a charcoal grill than bone-in, skin-on chicken. Last week, knowing that my fiance was out of town for a night, I got gluttonous and did a whole bird, spatchcocked. This week, I’ll stick to thighs.
This is my ritual: Make a cocktail and put on some Dead, preferably their February 15, 1973, show at the old Dane County Coliseum in Madison, Wisconsin. Arrange my charcoal — ideally natural — and stack them in a circle, filling the middle with whatever paper I have lying around.
Once that paper turns into opaque redness, it’ll light the coals from the inside. Plan for this process to take you until the boys start in on “Tennessee Jed.” Now you can add more coals and get them white-hot for your chicken, which you’ll scar on both sides, sending flames shooting up and burning the hair on your hands and forearms. And that’s the…
