A Side That Won't Turn Into Charcoal
Straight talk on sides: green beans, corn, anything vegetable-ish that rides along with your chicken and potatoes needs to go in later than you think, or on fewer coals than you think, or both.
This is where the driveway dinner trips people up. Chicken's going, potatoes are doing fine underneath, and you figure the beans can ride the whole cook in the same pot. They can't. Not really. Chicken and potatoes want a full hour or more of steady heat. Green beans want maybe 20 minutes before they go from bright to gray to sad.
The problem is your coal count is already committed
You set 16 on top and 8 on bottom for the chicken. Correct for chicken. Too much for a handful of green beans that only need to steam through. Dump them in at minute zero and by the time the chicken's done, your vegetable side has surrendered its color, most of its texture, and started flirting with actual char wherever it touches the bottom of the pot.
I ate the burnt version of this more than once before I sorted out what was happening. Not proud of it. It happened.
Two ways to fix it, pick one
Option one: add them late. Nest the beans, or whatever you've got, in foil right on top of the chicken, and don't drop the packet in until you're 20 to 25 minutes from done. Same coal count — they just don't sit in the heat as long as everything else. This is the easier call for a first try because you never touch your coal setup.
Option two: give them a cooler spot. If your oven's big enough, push the vegetables toward the outer edge of the pot, away from the direct middle, and tent them loosely with foil so they catch steam off the chicken without sitting in the most intense part of the heat. Works, but it's fussier, and for a first-timer I'd just do option one.
Either way: check them once, near the end, by lifting a corner of the foil with tongs, not your hand. Steam coming off a foil packet that's sat on coals for twenty minutes will absolutely burn you, and it's the kind of burn people don't brace for because it doesn't look dramatic.
A note on soap, since this is sort of the cleanup lesson too
Whatever pot or foil packet touches those beans, you're going to want to actually wash it after. I know the old rule is never use soap on cast iron. I don't follow that rule and I don't think you need to either. A little dish soap, a good scrub, dry it fully and hit it with a thin coat of oil while it's still warm, and your seasoning is fine. That old advice is a holdover from when dish soap carried lye strong enough to actually strip a pan. Modern soap isn't that. Scrubbing bean juice off with just water and a hopeful attitude is worse for the pan than soap ever is.
Sizing this to what you've got
Doing this in a smaller oven alongside the chicken, you might genuinely not have room for a foil packet without crowding everything — and crowding is its own problem, it slows down your cook time and puts you right back to guessing. Same lesson as buying the right size oven in the first place. I picked up a 10-inch camp oven on a DI run years back, six bucks, barely used, lid still sat dead flat. Spent a whole Saturday re-seasoning it in the backyard even though it honestly didn't need much. That oven's been my go-to for smaller sides and single-family meals ever since, because it's the right scale. A 12-inch does a family meal fine, but a side dish rattling around in all that extra space cooks unevenly and you end up with parts that are done and parts that aren't.
Shopping for a second oven specifically for sides? Smaller is usually more useful than you'd guess. You don't need matching capacity to your main pot. You need something that fits what you're actually making.
Before next time
Try the foil-packet method with something you already have on hand, even indoors on a regular oven rack just to get the timing feel, so when you're standing over actual coals it's not the first time you've thought about when a vegetable goes in.