Chicken Barbecued in Foil

Nothing says "I love you" like good home cooking.  I have been in need of spoken and unspoken I love you's lately... and because I am blessed with an abundance of loving people in my life, I have come out like a bandit in recent weeks!

Hubs and I have been going through some tough times. To be honest, all I really want is to make this dish for him but when life gives you lemons, make this dish. :) I know he would love it.

Recently my father's lovely girlfriend and life partner made this for me to patch the holes in my heart and feed my hungry soul.

What a beautiful and well balanced dish this turned out to be. Don't forget the mashed potatoes, because that was the perfect side dish for soaking up the gorgeous, savory sauce.

The following recipe serves 2-4 but we made a doubled the recipe for 4 gigantic Texas chicken breasts that weighed about 1 lb each:

Ingredients:
3 tbsp of butter
1 tbsp brown sugar
3/4 c. chopped onion
1 tsp vinegar
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp prepared mustard
1/4 c. lemon juice or juice of 4-5 small lemons
1/2 c. ketchup
1 (2 1/2 to 3 lb) broiler-fryer, cut in half or (2) 1 lb chicken breasts

Prep:
Combine all ingredients except the chicken. Bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, 15 minutes.

Meanwhile, rub chicken with salt and pepper. Place each broiler half or chicken breast on a piece of heavy aluminum foil, large enough to tent-wrap each piece securely.  Put half of the sauce on each piece of chicken. Tent and fold tightly.

Bake:
Bake in moderate oven (350 degrees F) 1 hour, or on a very slow oven (200 degrees F) for 2 hours. Carefully open packages to avoid burns from escaping steam; turning back the foil slowly.

Broil chicken until browned. Serve the foil package as is or you can serve the chicken and sauce separately. We didn't bother removing the foil, we just put the foil packages on plates, opened and served them as is with awesome mashed potatoes.

**Of course, you can grill these for about 45 minutes but everyone's grilling experience is different so I won't cover any grilling instructions here except to say that heavy foil works best and a meat thermometer is always a good idea if you have a hard time controlling your grill temperature.  But baking is easiest when trying this recipe for the first time, so do give that a whirl.

4th of July Lemon Meringue Cupcakes

Oh my GOOD-NESS.  I first made these cupcakes for my nieces and nephews because they have an amazing lemon tree in their front yard.   Every Thanksgiving, we do the key lime pies for Dad, of course, but because we had such a bountiful harvest of these perfect Rio Grande lemons last year, we decided to get creative.

What if, in addition to pies, we did a lemon meringue something or other?  Because we were inspired by the idea of owning a family bakery some day, we came up with the idea of a cupcake version of one of our family favorites. 

Just to give you an idea, we made 48 mini cupcakes but there was not a single crumb left 10 minutes after the last tray came out of the oven. No lie! DESTROYED.  So, I would say this is a great bet for parties or heck, just a bunch of hungry kids no matter how young or old they are.

But now that I live in the tropics, I also had an abundance of lemons from my own Meyer's lemon tree so we decided to make these again for our 4th of July celebration picnic by the beach! Once again, they went in the blink of an eye and only a trail of crumbs were left to tell the tale.

Cupcakes:
1 1/2 cups all purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
2/3 cup sugar
1/3 cup butter, room temperature
1 large egg, room temperature
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2/3 cup buttermilk
zest of a lemon

Bake at 350 for 25 minutes in a greased muffin pan.  We used mini muffin pans but any size muffin should work fine.

Icing Options:

You can use either a classic meringue or do what we did, we made our own TexMex Valley lemon curd because we had an abundance of lemons.  Bake the cupcakes first and either let cool or pipe lemon curd to the warm cupcakes. 

We never got that far... I put a spoon in a bowl of lemon curd on the table and turned my back for a minute. One of the kids dumped the cupcakes out right on the cabinet and another had a spoon of lemon curd in their mouth before I turned back around! So, forget about making them pretty when kids are around. None of that fanciness is required, just make sure there are plenty of spoons for the curd or there will be squeals and words exchanged over whoever has the lemon curd while the others are trying to wait for it to hit the table again.

Meringue:
3 large egg whites
1/4 teaspoon Bakewell Cream or cream of tartar
1/8 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons sugar

Beat egg whites and dry ingredients to stiff peaks.  Use a piping bag to pipe the meringue onto unbaked cupcakes. **Tent a piece of tin foil over the top if they appear to be getting too brown before the cupcakes are done.