9 Easy BBQ Recipes to Celebrate the Summertime!

Summertime is coming up, and summertime means grilling season! Every year we have a little tradition with the Kate’s Kitchen family where we try out new BBQ recipes and new ways to improve our old favorite recipes. What we’re looking for is really kind of basic: we just want to have a collection of quick, easy recipes that will nourish and delight our families and friends—oh, and the food needs to taste good, too. 

These are the best of the best of the easy BBQ recipes we’ve been testing out to prepare for the summer grilling season, and we’d like to invite you also to try them out and celebrate summertime with Kate’s Kitchen.

Main Dishes

Perfect Grilled Steak

Don’t want to start by overcomplicating things? Neither did we! This grilled steak recipe from Framed Cooks is a masterclass in making the perfect steak—and the trick is in the prep work. 

To get a caramelized, crusty exterior and a tender, juicy interior, you’ll want to make sure the surface of your steak is as dry as it can get, and you’ll want to chill it in the freezer for about half an hour before grilling. We were skeptical at first, but after tasting the results, it’s going to be hard to convince us to try another method!

Beer Can Chicken

If you’ve somehow managed to get this far in life and haven’t tried this ingenious lifehack for getting more beer into your grilled chicken, you need to stop whatever you’re doing right now and fix that. Go to the store. Yes, right now. 

Get one whole chicken, vegetable oil, and some beer (in a can for the chicken and however you want it for yourself). You’ll also need a spice rub—the one in this recipe from Insanely Good Recipes is what we went with—and then go ahead and just follow that recipe to make the best beer can chicken you’ve ever had in your life.

Portobello Mushroom Burger

Looking for a meatless Monday recipe you can make on the grill? Look no further than this portobello mushroom burger recipe from Skinny Taste—but don’t let the name of the blog fool you!

These juicy, meaty mushroom burgers include an added flavor boost from the balsamic vinegar in the marinade, and it’s recommended you add melted Swiss cheese and avocado to your patty to get the full effect. We echo this recommendation: avocado and Swiss is the way to go here, but feta and sun-dried tomatoes was a close second!

Side Dishes

Southern BBQ Baked Beans

Is it even a barbecue if there are no baked beans? Everyone has their favorite, whether it’s a family recipe that needs to cook for more than two hours or a can of store-bought beans cracked open and heated up in the microwave.

This recipe from Insanely Good Recipes splits the difference with a version that’s rich, meaty, smoky, savory, slightly sweet (because of the brown sugar)—and ready to hit the table in only 30 minutes to an hour! We loved how these turned out, and not just because they came together so quickly.

Marinated Grilled Vegetables

We’re always looking for ways to add delicious and healthy vegetables to our dinner spreads. Not only for the health benefits but also because vegetables legitimately taste great when they’re cooked and seasoned in the right ways!

If you haven’t found your own favorite “right way” yet, try this recipe for marinated grilled vegetables from Recipe Tin Eats and see if it works for you as well as it worked for us: the veggies are tossed in olive oil, then grilled until charred, then they’re tossed in a lemon juice, herb, and garlic marinade, and then everyone burns their mouths eating too-hot vegetables because they tasted too good! (Just us?)

Grilled Corn on the Cob

Speaking of delicious and healthful vegetable recipes, have you tried grilling corn on the cob? While the grilled corn is sweet and tender, we unanimously agreed that the compound butters were the real star of the dish. We tried several of the flavoring options suggested with the grilled corn on the cob recipe from Spend with Pennies, and the favorite by far was the Mexican Elote-style blend.

Grilled Fruit Skewers with Passionfruit Sauce

If you need another way to add more healthy fruits to your diet, we recommend grilling them! We tried this recipe from Eat Smarter, and everyone involved said they’d be putting this one into their regular dinner recipe rotation during grilling season. The best thing about it—besides the dipping sauce made from passion fruit, Greek yogurt and coconut cream that goes wonderfully with the grilled pineapple—is that it’s a convenient, on-the-go treat full of healthy vitamins!

Desserts

Grilled Bananas a la Mode

Not only is this dessert from A Couple Cooks incredibly easy, but the ingredients are basic enough that most people will probably have everything they need in their kitchen already: bananas and ice cream!

This means you can whip this up in no time and with no planning—maybe even during someone else’s barbecue! The best part is since this is pretty much just Banana’s Foster on the grill, if it catches on fire you can act like that was totally on purpose (it won’t ruin the flavor, and that’s something we can say from experience).

Grilled S’mores Pizza

Want a way to make s’mores on the grill that doesn’t involve supervising a crowd of kids (or adults!) anxiously trying to nudge and/or flaming-marshmallow-duel their way into getting a marshmallow toasted over a frankly inefficient way to get marshmallows toasted? Try this grilled s’mores recipe from Honestly and Truly—we got our smoky s’mores flavor fix, and no one got an on-fire marshmallow stuck to their shirt, so that’s a win for us! 

Kate’s Kitchen wants to help you celebrate the summertime! Start your morning right with a quality breakfast from Kate’s, and you’ll be ready to take on a full day of making and sampling delicious BBQ recipes like the ones featured in this article.

Take a look at our breakfast menu!

Give us a call if you would like to place a to-go order!

Kate’s Kitchen… (816) 436-7200

Ronnie’s Restaurant… (913) 831-8600