Smokin for Christmas

      About four years ago I joined a neighbor to do some smoking on his specially built grill smoker.  I made the mistake of smoking salmon, which was so delicious and well received, that Pop Pop can no longer attend Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners without providing a huge salmon slab.  So today, rain or shine, was to be smoking day for Christmas dinner.

      On the right is a 3 lb, 8 oz hunk of salmon smoked to perfection.  Grand son Wesley could easily eat half of it and would given the chance.  A pork loin is on the left, that will be for lunch on Christmas.  The little piece of meat in the middle is a small London Broil that had spent too long in the freezer.  Me and Mrs. Claus will take care of that tonight.
      Smokin buddy Rick had a log from a pecan tree that just happened to be in his garage.  We cut the log into one inch circles, and used those plus some oak for the fire.  For whatever reason, the pecan was great, giving us a long burning, slow smoking fire.
       Oh, the back splash in the photo above is the subway tile from our kitchen redo.  My wife used some stencils with "Glass Wax and food coloring" to decorate with totally removable seasonal touches.  Maybe pumpkins next fall and fireworks for the Fourth of July.  Makes a nice change of pace.
        Wishing you Happy Holidays.  The GPS for Christmas dinner is  "mx12ktsp"   Sorry, I am no good with that tech stuff.  I will stick to the smokin.

Smoked Goodies

      A neighbor called two days ago to ask if we had anything we wanted to put on his grill/smoker.  We had a nice big pork roast in the freezer that would do just fine.

Rick's Smoker,  September 13,  2012

      Our pork roast was at the top next to the roasting chicken, with a huge slab of beef filling out the meat candidates.  I wanted to try a total experiment of smoking vegetables, so I made a trip to both gardens.  There was a small harvest of parsnips, as the voles took way more than their allowable portion.  Peppers picked were poblanos, sweet bananas, jalapenos, and cayennes.  Some peppers were halved and seeded, others were roasted whole.  A patty pan squash was cut into two inch chunks, as was a butternut squash. All the veggies were covered with some olive oil.
      The beef cooked in a couple of hours, as did the veggies.  The pork and chicken took about six hours.  Although this picture looks like a standard grill, the charcoal fire and wood pieces are actually in the drum at the right side of the photo.  That fire exhausts its smoke into the section you see here, so the food is cooked or smoked from the hot gases, rather than a fire directly under the food.  That is nice because you don't get flames lapping at the meats.
      The veggies turned out to taste good, but not exceptional.  Some of the peppers had a nice crispness, almost akin to bacon.  The patty pan was good, but the butternut was better.  My conclusion though was that the long smoking process was probably no better than grilling vegetables with olive oil over an open flame grill.  The pork was DELICIOUS, and some is left over for lunch.  Makes my stomach rumble just thinking about it.