Chicken

This festive main offers something for everyone—baby back ribs, chicken breasts, and smoked sausages. Be sure to start the dish a few hours ahead. The ribs are slow-cooked for an hour and a half, then are finished on the grill with the chicken and the sausages.

Forget about chicken pieces. You can grill these two chickens— flavored (Sicilian-style) with lemon, parsley, and garlic—whole.

Juicy chicken with a crunchy nut coating and a sauce that's both fruity and savory: a terrific dinner-party dish.

Because it's cooked only briefly, the tomato sauce is incredibly fresh-tasting and not too heavy. Serve with thick slices of garlic bread.

Chicken's dark meat is great for grilling because it stays very moist and really soaks up the flavors of a marinade—in this case, an Asian-inspired blend that balances sweet and savory. The addition of meaty mushrooms and bright green baby bok choy makes this a one-dish dinner you can take straight from grill to picnic table.

This pasta is loaded with appealing flavors: sweet onions and tomatoes, tangy goat cheese, earthy spinach.

How can you possibly improve chicken Parm? By coating the chicken breasts in grated Parmesan instead of breadcrumbs.

A clever, deconstructed BLT: Bread coats chicken in the form of breadcrumbs,bacon is cooked with lettuce and tomato for a simple side, and a dollop of seasoned mayonnaise acts as a sauce.

Even lovelier atop coarsely torn escarole.

Be sure to use a dry skillet when browning quesadillas.

Cooking time may vary, depending on the thickness of the chicken. Check for doneness.

Editor's note: The recipe below is from Perfect Parties, by Linnea Johansson.

These wings are great to gnaw on while you're diligently grilling the main course and sipping a cold one, as my Basque friend Juan Riesco often demonstrated to me. The level of heat is up to you—the Tabasco is your fuel. Serving Suggestions:
These are excellent "tapas"-style appetizers. Serve them at a large cocktail party along with some other Mediterranean-inspired appetizers.

While the Buffalo salmon<\a> is busy hogging all the sauce, what's the chicken left to do all by its lonesome self? Here, it cozies up with ever-so-sweet scallions for some much-needed TLC that manages to be both new and familiar.

This soup from Tien Dinh at Pho, in Las Vegas, delivers vitamin A.

Xiao Fan's spicy sauce will transform not only this steamed chicken but also plain rice, noodles, tofu, even grilled steak. The sauce can be doubled and leftovers chilled for a week. To reheat, add a bit of broth or water and simmer for about a minute.

All sorts of English terms have made it into the Indian culinary lexicon. This is what's called a chicken "roast."

Travel editor William Sertl took a weeklong boot-camp course at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. For this classic French dish, students were taught how to sauté the chicken on one side—without touching it—until it's golden, before turning it only once. The pan-sauce lesson that followed yielded a simple, elegant cloak for the very juicy chicken.

Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are adapted from Elizabeth Karmel's Web site, girlsatthegrill.com . This is the basic recipe for beer-can chicken. The origin of this recipe has as many stories as there are grill cooks. The one I like best goes something like this: A barbecue pit master had been drinking beer—the officially sanctioned barbecue-circuit beverage—all day when he realized that he was going to need to eat something if he was going to last all night and into the next morning tending his slow-cooked barbecue. So, he opened his rig (a smoker-grill that is large enough for several whole hogs) and set his beer down on the cooking grate to get something small to cook from his cooler. He picked up a chicken and put it on top of his half-full can of beer without noticing what he was doing. He looked for his beer, couldn't find it, and popped open another one without a second thought. That is, until he opened the grill an hour later and, lo and behold, perched on the grates of his rig was the first beer-can chicken! Regardless of the story, it is truly the best chicken you have ever tasted!