Hey ho, All! Just found this site! Ive been grilling/hot smoking the birds for Thanksgiving, Christmas and other festivities for about 20 years. I learned from my Dad. He started when he got his first Weber back in 1965. He always used to say that the best use of the Weber instructions were to light your first fire! HereÂs what he taught me: Soak a 5 pound bag of hardwood chips (hickory, cherry, apple, alder) in water overnight. On the day of the cooking, start with a CLEAN BBQ. No ash residue. Clean grill. Load the grill with a 10 pound bag of good charcoal. Get it lit and wait until the coals are grayed out around the perimeters and the smell of any starter is long gone. Push the coals to two sides, leaving a space in the middle. Put a heavy duty aluminum foil drip pan in the middle under where the bird will sit. This will catch the drips. TheyÂll be way too burned for dripping gravy. The object of the pan is to reduce the clean up and flare up potential. Put two decent handfuls of drained chips on the coals; one handful on each side. Brush the grill with peanut oil and pop it on the BBQ. Put the bird breast DOWN on the grill. Yes, breast down. You wonÂt touch the bird again until you take it off the grill. The higher fat content in the thighs and back will help baste the breast and make it much juicier. Tip: if you use one of those metal turkey lifting racks, itÂll be WAY easier to remove the bird later! Stick a meat thermometer in the thigh toward the bird. Make sure you donÂt touch any bone. I use two thermometers; one on each side. YouÂre going to be looking for an internal temp of about 180ºF. Put the lid on and LEAVE IT ALONE!!!! Open all the vents wide to allow for good air circulation and maximum heat. Do NOT open the lid for at least one hour. YouÂll drop the heat level in the ÂQ, lengthen the cooking time and dry out the air around the bird making for a drier bird. After one hour, load more chips on the coals. YouÂll notice that the skin looks really black. DonÂt worry, itÂs not burned, itÂs really heavily smoked. Put the lid back on and walk away. Resist the temptation to look! You may need to put more coals on each side if the fire has burned really hot and the coals are turning to ash piles. About every 15 minutes after the first hour, put on more chips. The bird should take about 9 minutes for each pound of bird. A 12 pound bird should take about an hour and three quarters to cook while a twenty pounder should run about 3 hours or less. Take the bird off the ÂQ and left it sit quietly for at last 15 minutes, preferably about half an hour. This will allow the juices to stabilize and give them some chance of remaining in the meat instead of pouring out on the carving plate. The meat will be juicer and pinker than birds done in the oven. The meat will have a delicate smoked flavor. The stuffing recipe that my mother passed down to my wife is a sausage and sage recipe that is cooked before it goes in the bird. I have heard from a number of sources that you should never stuff a bird being BBQÂd. My family has been doing just this for over 40 years with no ill effects. I think that there are two reasons for this: 1) the stuffing is cooked before going into the bird; and. 2) the temperatures at which the bird is cooked far exceeds anything your oven could muster. Dad passed away fifteen years ago, by his "Bird ÂQing Lore" lives on. Cheers, all! Have a great Thanksgiving! Ian Wilson

This posting is well after the fact, but an FYI on top of the hours worth of testimonials above to confirm the Perfect Flame GSC 3318 (side by side lids)was a complete waste of money. Contrary to that implied by the Lowes salesman, I did not purchase this unit because of price, I was furnishing a new house and simply liked the arrangement and size of the unit. Having had punted Home Depot years earlier to become a loyal Lowes customer based on their merchandise quality and customer service, it did not seem necessary to do a whole bunch of research. My mistake. I purchased this grill in July of 2006 as a floor model. From the first use forward, the left hand side would light, then flash and whistle; kind of like the backflash sound of an acetylene torch. Due to my work load at the time, I had not time to pursue a fix and figured it was probably a simple adjustment. As winter approached, it was clear the heat output on the working side was not sufficient to offset the northern Michigan winter temperatures, and eventually I abandoned the grill on my front porch until now, fall of 2012. Oh, yes, as our Lowes friend suggested, I purchased a cover with the grill so it would be protected even though it was stainless steel and its home was a covered porch. Even so, the rusting "stainless" steel reared its ugly head about two years after this "grill" attained decoration status as a result of the high-quality cover I purchased dry rotting and blowing into the front yard. So, six and one half years after the fact, my wive and I wheeled it into the garage and I was about to attempt to fix this engineering wonder and tribute to global trade, but after searching for a manual and reading an hours worth of negative postings,I am considering otherwise. Has anybody out there come to a similar juncture and successfully reconditioned or should I say rebuilt a similar unit with aftermarket parts? Anybody have a link to an owners manual? Mine is probably at the same location as my receipt, which is currently MIA along with all of my other paperwork from 2006. Anyways, that is my experience to date. Congrats to those who did not get taken and have similar grills that work correctly. Shame on Lowes for joining or at least repeating Home Depot's race to the bottom with this product.

Sharon, Elery says to be sure you brine it, it'll be delicious! He still uses the smoker, but he's been playing with the new grill. My little $59 gas grill that I bought a couple of years ago finally gave up the ghost, although I think I got my money's worth out of it. Since Elery's house was for sale, he didn't replace his old gas grill either, somehow it seems that a gas grill, no matter the price, lasts about 5 years before it rusts, the burners need replacement, whatever. So, Elery had to decide whether he wanted a gas grill or a charcoal grill. He looked at the Big Green Egg but it's heavy, can't be easily moved around, costs nearly a grand. The imitators are a few hundred less, but still costly. On one of the BBQ forums, he found this: They were first made in Arkansas in the early 1950s and some posters still had the original models, they say they'll last a lifetime. Elery loves it. He uses a hardwood charcoal that we get locally and a chimney starter so no lighter fluid is necessary. It's light enough to move into the garage with the door open if it rains and we can keep it out of the weather. Elery really thinks we should have let the turkey go another hour, it would have been more tender, but it's the first time we've done a whole turkey and it was too cumbersome for the smoker. I thought it was perfect. Lars, that garlic bread looks delicious, what a great idea, I'll definitely do that next time. Elery says we need a cookoff, you can come and visit us when we get the farmhouse done, you can bring Kevin along and finally get to visit Michigan! It was nicely smokey, not overpowering but still a very definite smoke. Elery says you could easily do it partially in the smoker too. Anyone leaning toward doing it (you listening, c?) should definitely give it a try, it was fairly simple and delicious, and gives you lots of leftover turkey. Islay, I don't think it travels THAT well, LOL, you may have to come along too. dcarch, gotta do something with all those garlic scapes, they're really good flavored with smoked turkey. Yeah, I'm a lucky girl.... Annie

The problem I have when making fried potatoes from raw potatoes inside, on the stove, is they stick to the pan, and burn on the outside before cooking through, which I have always atributed to the sugar/starch content of the potato. I don't want potatoes swimming in oil so I usually fry up already baked or boiled potatoes from last night's dinner when I make homefries. I'm thinking I need to parboil at least, since if I slice the sweet potatoes really thin, which is what you need to do with homefries, they won't be easy to do on the grill. Actually, I'm thinking of microwaving them, even less heat in the kitchen from that! Slowlane, I wouldn't use OJ to cook them in, although I could be completely wrong. All I know is with beans, acid solutions render their skins impervious and they never cook. I made black bean soup once by dumping all the ingredients in a pot to cook, including the vinegar, and I cooked it for maybe six hours or more adding tons of water, and the beans were still hard. I'm not sure the effects of acid on cooking potatoes. You might try adding grated orange rind though. Oddly enough, I have a ton of that!