BBQ Chicken Wings and Corn on the Grill

I've been wanting to share some of our favorite recipes for some time.  Tonight, after a day doing the Rockridge kitchen tour, we BBQ'd chicken wings and corn on the cob.

Yum!!

First of all, this morning, I marinated the chicken wings for two hours with the following marinade:

one 6 oz. of pineapple juice (you could also use lemon juice, but it is more citrusy)
1/4 cup of olive or canola oil
3 tbs. of agave nectar
1/4 cup of organic tamari or soy sauce
1/2 tsp. of garlic powder or fresh minced garlic
1/4 tsp. black pepper

To save time, we sometimes use OrganicVille brand marinades (but we made our own today).

Then, when we got home from the tour we grilled the wings.  We got 18 wings from Marin Sun Farms, which has a butcher shop at Market Hall in Oakland (also at the Ferry Building in San Francisco).  Excellent meats (and we had toured the farm itself, which is up in Point Reyes, which was very educational; we'll blog on that another time).

We preheat the grill.  Then my husband dunks the chicken one last time in the marinade and puts it on with the dials set to medium.  He fit all 18 wings onto the grill.  Every 3 minutes or so he flips the wings.  After the first flip, he bastes each wing with fresh marinade (don't want to re-use the marinade that the raw chicken sat in for 2 hours, right?).  Total cooking time is around 22 minutes (we like our wings crispy but not burnt).  About 1/2 way through the 22 minutes we turn the grill down to just slightly lower than medium.

Corn on the cob -- It takes 15 minute to cook the corn on the grill.  Some recipes suggest basting the corn with butter before cooking, but we didn't and it was delicious!  That saves calories for dessert!  The advantage of grilling the corn is that it adds a smoky flavor to the corn.  We grill the corn with the husk on which prevents it from drying out.  The following are the directions we use to prepare the corn:

1)  Preheat grill to medium heat (300-ish).

2)  To prepare corn, grasp husks and pull back.  Pull off all the silk and then replace the husk to cover the corn.  Do NOT just throw it in the sink; you will regret it later if you don't have a garbage disposal.

3)  Place corn on hot grill, close the lid, and grill it for 15 minutes (longer if you keep opening up the lid to turn the chicken wings...)

One other fun thing to wrap up a BBQ -- roasting marshmallows over a backyard camp fire.  We use Java logs, which are better for the environment and aren't as bad for folks with allergies as burning Duraflame logs or wood (they also smell a lot better than Duraflame logs).

We like the enormous almost-home-made "Very Vanilla Bean" marshmallows that you can find at Whole Foods.  Add some Dagoba chocolate and graham crackers and you've got a heck of a s'more.