ROUSES_Summer2024_Magazine Pages Web

Chillin’ & Grillin’ By Ali Rouse Royster, 3 rd Generation I love summertime, especially the slower pace it brings for my very active 7-, 8- and 9-year-old children. One thing I do not love about summertime is having to figure out not just breakfast and dinner every day, but also lunch for all five of us. If you’re anything like me and my husband, Billy, the question of “What’s for dinner?” is usually met with an eye roll and a sigh. Luckily for me, every now and again Billy will see some kind of recipe on YouTube or Instagram and just have to try it. And you can bet it’s going to be BBQ about 90% of the time (100% of the time in summer!). Sometimes we’re going on a culinary adventure that only the adults will try; other times it’s a slightly different take or method on an old classic; a lot of the time, it’s somewhere in the middle. Sometimes we have a hit on our hands that we’ll add to our regular rotation; many times the result is good but not good enough to make again; sometimes we just have a big ol’ flop…. Summer 2024 is shaping up to be full of such exciting BBQ experiments. So far, Billy has made ribs with a method that promised to be “better than 3-2-1” but unfortunately did not live up to the hype — we will stay true to Uncle Tim’s method over here! Billy also woke me up one Saturday morning with an ingredient list he’d scribbled down, telling me he was headed to Rouses — then for lunch we had our very first Flying Dutchman burgers (think: smashburger with special sauce on grilled onion slices instead of buns), which was very good but very messy. Billy made fun of me using a knife and fork to eat the burger, but I am fairly certain he wished he had followed suit with the mess he made trying to free-hand his!

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