cops - I make a honey mustard/pretzel-coated chicken breast (like Great Lakes Brewery!) but I also would like to know how to make just a mustard-coated chicken breast without breading.

Get OUT, Fofanna - you know the secret to the pretzel-coated chicken like GLB? Please meander over to the recipes thread and share. I don't suppose you have the recipe to the Lobster Mashed Potatoes from Blue Point...oh, and can your boy reveal any of the secret Michael Symon recipes?

When we do the mustard grilled chicken, it's usually just a matter of using a mustard-heavy marinade, then when we're almost done with the grilling we brush on a sauce made with dijon, brown sugar, tarragon, apple cider vinegar. But really it's kind of a to taste/whatever is around the house kind of thing rather than a set recipe. I've used honey mustard instead of dijon and honey instead of brown sugar.

As for the lamb, I'm kind of clueless, he brings it home from work (he's a chef). I know he uses frenched lamb racks. He cuts each into a "lamb lollipop". Then he uses a yummy spice rub, and sometimes a cherry barbecue sauce.

I'll try to get recipes into the recipe threads. Sometimes it's hard to nail him down on a recipe, much less a normal sized one.

Y'all spend $70 on a pan? All my pots and pans have either been passed down or picked up at a yard sale.

Square ones on sale for $40. I don't know what the difference is between the two varieties, they both look like the one we have.

The only down side to these things is they're not real easy to clean and non-stick is not a word I would use to describe them.

Well, pinruT I ordered it. I have been wanting a grill pan and I'll try this one out. Thanks for the link.

I'm not sure how much mine cost. It's the square one, but probably came from Target or Kohl's or something. I asked for it for Christmas and my husband's Aunt gave it to me.

Seriously, I would kill to have a wedding shower again. I have much better taste in things now than I did 8 years ago. And all the towels/sheets/other stuff I got is all worn out and has either been replaced or needs to be. Okay, I'm ending my materialistic moping now.

We have this one that I really like. It has a nice heft to it, is non-stick and cleans up well. I used to do our burgers and chicken breasts in the Foreman but like this much better.

Having realized that I was turning into a complete slacker at home in the food department, I offered to grill something for dinner over the weekend. The deep freeze yielded a six-pound boneless leg of lamb, which was soon defrosting via Alton Brown's convection method (we just dumped it in a bowl of water and let a trickle of water flow from the sink faucet) while I went looking for inspiration.

My bible in such matters is, fittingly enough, Steve Raichlen's Barbecue! Bible, a gift from my wife from a while back that in my experience has racked up a near-perfect track record. This particular book, by the way, features recipes from around the world that involve barbecuing everything from meats to seafoods to vegetables, so there's something for everyone, and a lot of room for exploration even if you already know a lot about outdoor cooking. Anyway, we're wild about it.

And it doesn't let us down. After I've successfully procrastinated the preparation until noon on Sunday, most of the lamb recipes look too time-consuming, as they require up to 24 hours of marination or two to six hours of indirect slow-cooking. But one jumps out -- a Moroccan recipe that calls only for slathering a butterflied leg with a whipped butter-garlic-paprika-cumin-coriander mixture and then throwing it on a direct fire for 15-20 minutes a side. Score! The same medium-high charcoal fire served double duty and roasted two enormous eggplants down to pulp for the baba ganouj, and then seemed to "activate" the butter-paprika mixture -- which initially struck us both as kind of bland -- by blending it into the lamb. Per Raichlen, we sliced the lamb and served it with a lemon-based sauce and little dishes of ground cumin and salt for dipping, which added a range of new flavors to the meat.

Weirdly, the leftover lamb has only gotten better after sitting in the fridge for a few days. It's fascinating how flavors can continue to evolve, even from such relatively simple preparations.

I'm not a big fan of lamb in general, but that sounds delicious.

It really did turn out much better than I had any reason to expect, given that I'm a haphazard cook at best. Didn't we used to have a recipe thread? I could probably post what I did if I knew exactly where to put it.

I've been dropping my recipes in Cooking 101. I love grilled lamb chops with rosemary - is leg of lamb similar to chops?

Leg of lamb is an odd cut, because you've got all sorts of muscles going every which way and grain boundaries all over the place. The one I used was a deboned cut from Costco that looked a lot like a pork butt. It may or may not be similar to chops, which -- according to our copy of Alton Brown's I'm Just Here for the Food -- can be cut from a variety of places, including the sirloin (upper part of the leg), loin, rib, blade or shoulder. I'm not enough of a lamb aficionado to know which ones are most commonly sold, although they all sound pretty good to me.

I'll post the recipe in Cooking 101.

For a last-minute Fourth of July barbecue, I got wildly overambitious and planned five separate dishes for grilling and/or smoking. On the gas grill, I wanted to direct-grill sea scallops wrapped in prosciutto and speared with rosemary sprigs, then skewered tofu slices that had been marinated in a teriyaki sauce. The Weber was slated for a slow-grilled cabbage, which is much better than it sounds; it was hollowed and filled with a bacon-butter-BBQ sauce mixture.

The flowerpot smoker, meanwhile, was reserved for one of those great ideas that sound so obvious once you hear them: Smoked hamburgers and hot dogs. Both are incredibly easy -- you pretty much just slap 'em into a 200-220 degree smoker for about an hour and they're done. The idea came courtesy of a Q book my wife gave me as a gift a while back, Smoke & Spice. I'm still exploring it, but it looks pretty impressive so far.

In general, things went surprisingly well, even if the electric coil in the smoker did fail partway through smoking -- the second time this has happened in our jury-rigged system -- forcing an emergency transfer to the indirect charcoal fire. The scallops turned out great, although some friends turned up unexpectedly with more -- theirs were wrapped in sage and bacon, which in the crowd's opinion was even better than the prosciutto and rosemary -- and the double dose of oceany goodness ended up blunting appetites by the time the burgers and dogs were done. The cabbage went very quickly, and when folks eventually got around to eating some of the burgers, general opinion seemed to be that they'd picked up a lot of really good smoke flavor. I do need to use larger hot dogs next time, as ours were a little overdone and seemed kind of lost in the bun.

I never made the tofu, as it seemed likely no one was going to eat it, so we have that to look forward to over the weekend at some point.

I need to know what a flowerpot smoker is. Damn, smoked burgers and dogs sounds fabulous!
Ess Pee forced me to Google flowerpot smokers which led me to Cook's Illustrated which led me to these, which Cook's Illustrated raved about - Savu Smoker Bag
Has anyone tried these?

Sorry, fo. Basically, this is an Alton Brown idea for building an insulated smoker out of the most inexpensive materials possible -- namely, two terracotta flower pots and an electric burner. I haven't been able to find a decent reference on the Food Network site, but this blogger gives about the best (and most detailed) description of building one I've yet seen. (His account carries on for five posts; see the index here. Also, this guy's hacking of the hot-plate controls is ingenious; that might actually prevent the coil failures I've been plagued with, not to mention enabling much better temperature control than I've ever managed.)

I'm not familiar with the Savu smoker bags, and in fact I'm kind of bewildered by them. The idea is that they contain wood chips for smoking in a bottom layer, and you just put your food in the top layer and let it all cook on the grill? Sounds very odd. Of course, if Cooks Illustrated likes them, I'm not one to complain, but outside of camping or tailgating, where it could be pretty tough to make actual smoke from wood chunks or chips, I'm not sure why you'd ever want to use these. Unless, of course, they're for smoking on a gas grill, which now that I think about it would make perfect sense. Sorry, I've got a natural tendency to think of charcoal when the subject of smoke comes up, because my own attempts to smoke with gas have been dismal failures.

Wow! Where can I get a recipe for this??

You could hollow out pretty much anything and fill it with bacon, butter, and BBQ, and I would enjoy it. I bet coconuts are delicious that way.

I think you can also use them inside, in the oven (or maybe broiler) and, yeah, I do have a gas grill although I think I can turn the burner upside down and fill it with wood chips. I have never done that however.
I could also make a joke about how I quit smoking 4 and 1/2 years ago but I won't.

Well, I'm no expert like EssPee, but we are firing up the grill today (it's a once a year occurence, really). I asked for tri-tip at my local lame Kroger, but of course the butcher was all..."eh, no, don't have any" so I went with a 2 lb. London Broil instead. I cut some slits in it and stuffed it with garlic, then marinaded it overnight in some olive oil, red wine vinegar, more garlic, and sliced jalapenos. We are also having homemade potato salad and grilled corn! Oh, and beer, of course!

Man, I really wish you were cooking MY dinner tonight.