That One Time My Dad and I Grilled All Night Long

My dad recently acquired a Big Green Egg grill, which up until recently, I sort of laughed at - for the following reasons: 1) It's a green grill, 2) it's a green grill SHAPED LIKE AN EGG, 3) I laugh because I've never tried using one, and 4) I laugh because a Green Egg Grill is way out of my budget. BUT, alas, he wanted to break it in last night, by cooking as many things as possible on it, and I happily and hungrily obliged.

On the roster or should I say menu for the evening was grilled pizza, beer can chicken, flap steak, and banana nut muffins. Don't worry, we also had a salad. I brought my a-game when it came to the pizza dough, opting for Mark Bittman's classic pizza dough. It takes 2 minutes to make in a food processor, and I through in some garlic powder, oregano and basil in addition to the standard ingredients. The dough takes between an hour to two hours to rise. I watched Sex and the City while I waited, finished like three episodes, and it still wasn't done rising! As for pizza toppings, dad picked up a serious package of goodies from the Whole Foods olive bar. We had Castelvetrano olives, sweet red peppers, caramelized onions, marinated raw garlic, goat cheese, and mozzarella on our pizza.

While we prepped the pizza, we let our beer can chicken dry out and come down to room temperature. When it was ready to hit the grill, dad rubbed it with a mixture of salt and pepper, a rotisserie rub, and put a lemon in one end and the beer in the other.
It smoked for an hour at 450 degrees, and came out like a work of art. The drying out of the chicken created a gorgeous bronzed skin that sealed in all of the juicy goodness of the chicken while infusing it with the most amazing smoky flavor. We dug in, and both admitted that this was the best grilled chicken we had ever had. While the chicken roasted, I made us two delightful little salads with anything I could get my hands on in the fridge. Mixed greens, micro-greens, cherry tomatoes, goat cheese, and kalamata olives, topped with a ponzu vinaigrette concocted by my father. Then, dad adjusted the temperature of the grill, switched the rack, and put down the flap steak he'd picked up. Apparently a flap steak is different from a flank steak, and my dad's new favorite cut. It's a little chewy, so he cut against the grain which made it more manageable to chew! He marinated it in a garlic and soy sauce, which I reduced on the stove as an au jus to drizzle on the final cut. And for dessert, we had reheated some homemade banana chocolate chip muffins... you guessed it, on the grill. Dad sent me home with an awesome array of leftovers. I'm having a curried chicken salad sandwich for lunch today made with some of that delicious smokey chicken!