Please welcome guest author Hank Shaw who shares the recipe for his favorite BBQ sauce with us. This sauce is, btw, outrageously good. ~Elise

All barbecue cooks have their own "secret sauce," but for the most part, each relies on some sort of sugar, something acidic like vinegar, fat – typically butter – and something else to make it special. This sauce uses molasses, lemon juice, bourbon and Worcestershire sauce as its main flavors. It has that tart, sweet, salty, rich and spicy combination that I think all great barbecue sauces need. Use this with ribs, pulled pork or even tri-tip.

Hank Shaw spent a day this week with my father and me, showing us how to smoke ribs on my kettle grill. As worried as I was that the ribs were going to end up dry, they weren't, and they were the some of the best I've ever had. Here's the process from Hank. ~Elise

Barbecue can be a serious business. Hard-core 'cue mavens buy or build special smokers with custom-made rotisseries and fireboxes in order to precisely control the level of heat and smoke needed for each type of meat or fish. Most of us aren't ready to drop several hundred – even several thousand – dollars on a special smoker. But you can 'cue at home, even with that simplest of grills – the "egg" or kettle grill Weber made famous in the 1950s.

No, you will not get competition-class barbecue every time, because you cannot control your temperature with a kettle grill as well as you can with the expensive smokers. But you can still easily achieve the proper "slow and low" cooking so critical for barbecue.

The world of food blogs and the Internet is indeed a serendipitous one. A while ago I discovered a fellow named Hank Shaw in the comments section on Michael Ruhlman's blog. Hank seemed to know what he was talking about, especially in the area of preparing game. After a few emails back and forth about various ways to cook rabbit, it turns out Hank lives just a few minutes down the road from me. And not only is he one of those rare people who hunts, fishes, or grows almost all his own food, but he's a gourmet cook to boot. Last year Hank started his own food blog, Hunter Angler Gardener Cook in which he writes about charcuterie, wild game, fish, the fruits of his garden, and Greek and Italian cuisine. (BTW if you're into game, check out Hank's girlfriend Holly's hunting site, NorCal Cazadora.)

The purpose of this introduction is to let you know that Hank is joining us as a Simply Recipes guest author and will be writing a post here and there, focusing on meat. Please help me in welcoming him to Simply Recipes. ~Elise

My father should have a t-shirt that reads "I've never met a dessert I didn't like" or in this case, "Have Plums Will Bake". His baking endeavors might not always look their bakery best (please don't ever ask him to frost a cake and sometimes his pies are downright scary-looking) but more often than not the results taste fabulous. This plum upside-down cake is actually quite pretty and is based on a recipe he found in an old issue of Fine Cooking magazine. The taste idea is that of slices of tart plum balanced by a sweet cake base. He used red Santa Rosa plums that are just now coming ripe. My mother thought the cake was just a bit too tart for her, but dad and I love it just the way it is.

Now that I think about it, the t-shirt should simply say "Real Men Bake". Because if you could just see my 6'2", 200 lb, works out 3 times a week at the gym, mows the lawn, splits the wood, 78-year-old father in his striped apron, gently arranging plum slices on top of melted butter and sugar in ramekins, that would be the T that fit the best.

When you have your own fruit trees (or access to someone else's) sometimes you can feel a bit buried in fruit, whatever happens to be dropping off the trees at that time. Summer becomes a mad dash of canning, jamming and freezing, trying to preserve the bounty to enjoy throughout the year. One thing you can do with excess fruit of the season is to make fruit leather, sort of the beef jerky of fruit. I used to love this stuff as a kid, made for a great snack and instant energy, and was easy to pack. Last fall I made fruit leather with the leftover grape mush from making grape juice, and this week it was fruit leather from our neighbor Pat's apricots (Pat's apricots are so ripe that when you go to pick one, two more fall off the branch). What follows is a general guideline to making fruit leather, no set recipe. So much of it depends on the specific fruit you are working with.

This is some of the best chicken I've ever eaten - grilled, roasted, baked, whatever. Juicy, spicy, tender, lipsmackin' good. Here's the deal, there are two ways to make this recipe. One way entails making your own red chile sauce from scratch, using dried ancho and guajillo chiles that you can usually only find at a specialty Mexican market. Even our local Whole Foods doesn't carry these dried chiles. The second method starts with a base of canned red chile sauce, which is a little easier to find in a regular supermarket, and saves quite a few steps. I've made this recipe both ways. As you might expect, if you have access to the dried chiles and can make the time to make your own sauce base, it's totally worth it for the extra intensity and depth of flavor. The good news is that if you can't get a hold of the dried chiles, or you don't have the time, canned red chile sauce works fine as a base for this sauce. Red chile enchilada sauce works too, though you may need to add some chili powder to it to increase the heat. In any case you are going to pump up the sauce a bit with ground cloves, cinnamon, and cumin.

There are, I think, three essential ingredients to this salad - corn, which you can grill or even prepare by toasting frozen kernels on the stovetop, onions, and cumin. The rest is a medley of whatever fresh vegetables you might have on hand. In this case I had zucchini and a serrano chile pepper from my garden and a big red bell pepper. I tossed in some cotija cheese for good measure. Although this is a grilled corn salad the other vegetables benefit from some searing heat as well. A simple seasoning of cumin, salt, pepper, olive oil and vinegar or lime juice pulls everything together. I made this for my parents today and my father insisted that "this one needs to go on the site" while polishing it off. Enjoy.

The first time my friend and fellow food blogger Fernanda mentioned wanting to make a Portuguese salt cod stew, I was skeptical. (Though given how well Fernanda's salmon fish stew had turned out what was I thinking?) Salt cod isn't one of those easily-found-in-the-supermarket items. For hundreds of years codfish preserved in salt may have been a food staple in North America and Europe, but with the advances of modern refrigeration in the last century, it's been sort of hard to come by actually, for decades. Too bad, as the drying process that preserves salt cod greatly concentrates its flavor.