TopThisPlace.com & a status update

I'm writing for TopThisPlace.com now. It's mainly restaurant reviews and it's been a great opportunity so far to make a bit of cash for doing things that I like. That's stuff like traveling, eating, and taking photographs...oh, and getting paid; I like getting paid.

You can check out my reviews over there. Of course, all my requests for reviews don't get approved so if I request an OK to review a place that I think is pretty special and it gets denied, I'll probably review it on my own dime and put it up here.

I haven't been doing a terrible amount of cooking now, but I have started beer production back up. Right now me and friend Wes have a Pumpkin Ale in the secondary and cream air that's on it's sixth day of fermentation. I'm going to pick up another fermentation bucket and hopefully another keg this weekend along with getting a CO2 refill and we should be ready for the kegging part and have enough supplies to make a 3rd batch. I also have a sanke keg I need to pick up to make a brew kettle out of. The only thing missing after that is a mash tun. With all of those supplies, we'll be doing larger batches of all grain. 15 gallons at a time? No problem.

Pork belly, the Momofuku way

So I got some hankerin' for raw bacon and decide the next best thing and most sanitary way I could accomplish this was with pork belly. Now when people hear the words pork and belly together they get this strange almost disgusted look on their face. What they don't realize is that this wonderfully flavored and somewhat cheap cut of meat is pre-bacon. That's bacon before it became bacon. And if you haven't heard enough bacon about bacon I'm going to bacon your bacon and put some bacon on your bacon.

OK, I'm bacon.

I swear.

Southwestern Chipotle Chicken Corn Chowdah

Ingredients:
8 cups chicken stock
2 cups milk
3 tbsp flour
8 pieces of bacon
2 red onions
3 stalks of celery
1 large can of corn
2 regular sized cans of cream of corn
6 red potatoes
2 red peppers
2-3 chicken breast
Pack of chipotle peppers (about 6)
About ½ cup fresh minced cilantro
Salt
Pepper
Cumen
Paprika
4 bay leaves
Cayenne pepper

In large pan, fry bacon until crisp
Remove bacon and set aside for garnish (or eat. It's tasty)
Add 2 chopped red onions to bacon fat and cook until soft
Reconstitute and mince chipotles
Cut up chicken into bit
Add chicken broth, chicken, celery, potatoes, red peppers, chipotles and cook til everything is done
Mince cilantro
Stir flour into milk and the add to the rest of the soup
Add spices and simmer for a little bit then serve

Pork Shoulders

So Chef Butts got us two pork shoulders for this weekend. I picked them up Saturday afternoon at about 5 and started the process of cleaning and firing up the smoker. I figured these would take 12-14 hours so I ended up using the Minion Method for a long burn with steady temps.

The Minion Method consist of filling a chimney starter about 3/4 of the way full and then dumping pretty much the rest of the bag of charcoal, mixed with the variety and amount of whatever type of smoke would you choose, into the ring on a Weber Smokey Mountain smoker. I have the 22", so the 18" might not hold the rest of the entire bag. From there you light the coals in the chimney starter and when they're ready, you dump them on top of the coals in the smoker. The few coals that are lit will get the smoker up to about 250 degrees without getting it too hot and making it hard to bring the temperature down. They'll slowly light the coals underneath allowing for steady temps and a long cook time.

Now, onto the meat.

Steak Roll Up

What you need:
Steak (Flank, hopefully)
Asparagus
Baby portabella mushrooms
BBQ saws (WV slang)
Provolone cheese
Garlic
Salt
Pepper
Popeye's wife

The mix is chopped asparagus, chopped baby portabellas, minced garlic, salt & pepper sauteed in some olive oil to soften it up a bit.

Usually I use flank steak sliced in half to make a long thin piece to roll up, but the local podunk grocery store didn't have any so I ended up with one of there "Flat Iron Grillers". I sliced the top 1/3 almost all the way through leaving just enough to henge open. Then from the top hinge, I sliced another 1/3 back to other way doing the same for a nice long thing sliced piece of steak.

Layered with Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ, provolone, and then the mixture and rolled it, skewered it, then cooked it to a medium rare/medium. I don't have any finished photos, but it didn't survive the onslaught of the 5 people that were in the kitchen when it came out of the oven.

Spare parts from spare ribs

So Sunday night was an easy night. All the left over trimmings from the ribs went into a put with BBQ sauce and a cup of water at a time. It was simmered for about an hour or two, adding water when needed.

After it was cooked long enough, the leftovers were pulled and more BBQ sauce was added for some very tender pulled pork. So I think I lived off of those ribs for a little over a week.

More ribs

So I got to test out my 22.5" WSM on Sunday and smoked 7 racks of ribs. I know I could have at least fixed 12 with the two racks on there. Unfortunately, my camera decide to transform itself from a camera into a paper weight, so I don't have any photos.