Peace, Love & Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales, and Outright Lies from the Legends of Barbecue: A Cookbook

This is my favorite BBQ book, though maybe for different reasons than other reviewers like it. I've been BBQing and grilling for many years, since I was a teen ager, and my main reason for preferring this method of cooking is because I'm no gourmet, and if you take BBQing at its basic level, it's a very easy method of cooking. By this I mean you don't need culinary school/professional skills to pull of good BBQ--just a lot of care and patience, plus the experience you will pick up as you go along. I'm not planning to enter BBQ championships or competition. I just like simple recipes that taste good, with easy-to-get ingredients. And though this book can be taken as a championship BBQ manual, it is also easy enough, its ingredients basic enough, that even the back yard duffer like me can make the most of them. The recipes are just about fool-proof, if you take the care and time to follow them properly. F'rinstance, the famous Magic Dust rub recipe is about as easy as mixing Nestles Quik, and you don't have to go to exotic asian markets to find the ingredients. I hate shopping and I like a recipe where you can get everything you need at the local supermarket. You also don't need thousands of dollars of fancy BBQ equipment to get the job done here. Sure, you can do it all in a big fancy smoker, but I only have a regular 26" Weber charcoal kettle grill, plus the pint-sized Weber Smoky Joe for side jobs, and every thing comes out dandy. A food processor would certainly come in handy, though I don't even have that. It would make the job easier, but its not necessary. On the other hand, if you are very ambitious, there's enough meat here for the most competitive cook. I don't imagine there is anyone BBQing out there who can't learn something, and a great deal, from this book. One of my favorites is the grilled stuff peppers, which even the most incompetent [...] can throw together without straining yet which, in the hands of a BBQ master, can probably come out like ambrosia for the grilling gods. The guy who wrote the introduction to this said it's the last cookbook you'll ever need, and though you should certainly get some others (I like Steve Raichlen's BBQ USA and Paul Kirk's Championship BBQing), this is the one to start with, even if you're brand new to the BBQ. It used to be a custom to give a newlywed bride a cookbook as a wedding present. That custom seems to have passed away in these days when wives don't cook. However if it still existed, this is the book I'd give them. And there's one other benefit to BBQing, which they don't mention here--you don't have to clean the kitchen when you're done. For an old bachelor like me, who is a first rate lazy slob, this last thing can't be overemphasized. Just keep the grill cleaned & oiled, make sure you scrub all surfaces when going from chicken to anything else, let the charcoal cool down before you throw it in the garbage pail, uses paper plates, and dump everything right in the trash

I really enjoyed this book...I own a smoker and have used the Apple City Ribs recipe and the Chile recipe (non-healthy version) and both were tasty...my only question is whether the author listed the true ingredients for his "magic dust"...after all, his mother didn't want him to give away the family secret...hmmmm.... ***UPDATE!! (6/11/06): Ok, on a discussion board someone said they actually got an answer to my question from the author...he DID give us the dust recipe his mother said to protect BUT his feeling is that it will be hard to duplicate his quality because of the unique QUALITIES of each dust ingredient he uses. A great book for any barbecue (not grilling) fan!

Peace, Love and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales and Outright Lies From The Legends of Barbecue Mike Mills & Amy Mills Tunicliffe A Book Report by Gerry Dawes (Appeared in Food Arts magazine.) This is a book report, not a review. I wrote the June 2004 Food Arts Silver Spoon Award piece about Mike Mills, the Southern Illinois Barbecue Legend Mike Mills, who, with his Apple City Barbecue Team won the Memphis in May World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest more times (three, four in ribs) than any team in history. Mills has long been a friend of mine and still is, despite the outright lies he told about me and a lot of other people to his daughter, Amy Mills Tunicliffe, who wrote her father's story's in the remarkable, but veracity-challenged Peace, Love and Barbecue: Recipes, Secrets, Tall Tales and Outright Lies From The Legends of Barbecue. At least I am in good company. Bill Clinton, Calvin Trillin, Tom Viertel (producer of The Producers, Smokey Joe's Café, Driving Miss Daisy), the New York super-restaurateur Danny Meyer, Chef Michael Romano and star Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten, along with most of the `cue superstars world are all in this book on down-home and championship circuit barbecue. In the foreword, Meyer, Mills's partner in New York's Blue Smoke Barbecue joint, wrote a pean to pig and to Mills. The exalted Vogue food writer, Jeffrey Steingarten, who wrote the saucy introduction calling Mills "one of the greatest barbecue cooks of all time," once wrote an article claiming that Mills's Memphis Championship Barbecue restaurants in Las Vegas are his favorites, only after Nobu. While this indispensable guide to American barbecue could have been just that, a guide, it is much more. It is a loving (the "Love" in the title is no tall tale or outright lie) look at the Who's Who of American Barbecue as seen through the eyes of this country's greatest barbecue hero, who, like some starry-eyed youngster (Mills is in his 60s), often refers to these barbecue legends, his peers, as "awesome." Mills takes us on visits to all the great barbecue legends of the south (and a few in the north as well), eating their barbecue,"visiting" with them, letting them tell their stories, and then trying to pry cooking and recipe "secrets" out of them, which is no easy task since they will sometimes tell him the ingredients (usually minus the "secret"), but they often won't give him the recipe quantities. (Mills plays this game himself; he told Steingarten that he would give him the recipe for Mills's celebrated 17th St. Bar & Grill `Magic Dust' Dry Rub, but then he said, "I would have to kill you.") Besides picking pork, Mills picks the brains of such American Barbecue superstars as Don McLemore and Chris Lilly at Big Bob Gibson Bar-B-Q (Decatur, Alabama); Desiree Robinson at Cozy Corner (Memphis); Billy Bones Wall (Midland, Michigan); Vencil Mares, The Taylor Café (Taylor, Texas); Paul Kirk, The Baron of Barbecue (

I've spent several hours reviewing PEACE, LOVE and BARBECUE by Mike Mills and Amy Mills Tunnicliffe. Just the chapter on the "Secrets" would be worth the price of the book. Additionally, the "Magic Dust" recipe will leave you wanting to run to the store and make up a batch just to shake directly on your tongue! The book just isn't a "recipe" or "cook book", it's all about what people think and do for the love of food and not limited to barbecue either. This book will set you straight on many "urban legends" and point your smoker the right direction in how to smoke a lip smacking brisket. Loaded with nostalgic photos and neatly put together, I just can't say enough about the whole book. Probably one of the first books I've read and associated the titles three words!

Mike Mills, known to barbecue afficionados as The Legend, has fashioned a wonderful book about the world of barbecue. His often humorous tour of the barbecue world is also chock full of recipes that people would gladly have given their eye teeth for over the years. Some of the greatest names in traditional american cooking are represented; the book is a treasure trove of information and the stories Mills relates are the type one usually only gets to hear late at might after more than a few beers while the hog is slowly roasting away. This book is an absolute delight; along with Smokestack Lightning one of the two best books ever written about barbecue.