A little meat on the bones is good for the soul: Barbecue for the weekends.

Here in the South we do a lot of grilling on weekends. At almost all football pregame cookouts, backyard get-togethers, and pool parties, the preferred cooking method is the grill!

There’s nothing quite like the smell of smoking hardwood mixed with the natural juices of the meat and the marinade. It demands the attention of your guests and nearly every neighbor within 200 yards. So, down South, be prepared to cook up a bunch of barbecue. Remember; nothing’s worse than cooking just enough for the party and unexpected guests, leaving yourself without any leftovers to enjoy over the next couple of days!

Here at the Fish House and Atlas, our chefs are grill experts. For this blog entry, we asked them to lend a little bit of their expertise to you and yours to enjoy.

This is a favorite recipe our chefs created for our “Sweet Tea, Southern Cooking” series. It features plump, juicy chicken thighs – but really, any meat can be used. The first part of the recipe features a Southern version of water and Coca-Cola, the marinade’s main ingredient. What goes better with barbecue then ice-cold Coca-Cola?

Well, ice-cold beer, probably. But just so you don’t have to make the hard choice of what to drink, we threw the Coke into the marinade so you can say you had both! To really jazz things up, we have paired the Coke-marinated chicken with a Jack Daniel’s barbecue sauce to slap on it. We think you will agree that the aromas of the white-oak barrels that Jack Daniel’s uses in its maturation process really bring out fantastic flavors for the barbecue sauce. So try it and let us know if we are right-on. It’s OK if you tweak the recipes a bit; we want to know about that, too. Either way, eat a bunch and have fun.

Hope the right team wins for you, the pool stays clean and cold, and the relatives live close enough not to have to sleep over when the party’s done.

Good grits to you and yours!

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