Ith pretty.

Which one of those words don’t belong? Which one of those words don’t quite fit? You guessed it Sherlock, the word Beach is what I was looking for.
Have you ever been sitting at your desk and said to yourself, “Okay, I’ve had enough of this. I need a breather.” Today was that day.
Creepy E mentioned on Thursday that low tide would be at 9:45 this morning, Friday. So, with buckets and gloves in tow, we made our way (it took 6 minutes to get there) to Point Isabel. Or more commonly known as Tepco Beach.
Wachu talkin’ ’bout Willis? I’m talking about Tepco Beach. The place where a local China Ware company over 50 years ago would dump all their imperfect or damaged plates, platters, mugs, bowls and whatever else needed to go. Tepco’s deal was they made heavy duty restaurant ware and put fancy patterns on it. They even made china for our armed forces. So, the variantions are immense and fun and very collectible. Well, at least their collectible when they aren’t in a million little pieces.
Wanna come play at the beach?

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How is this Saturday treatin’ ya’ll? Doing really well here, for sure. We’ve got a nice tri-tip beef roast with a curry based dry rub with a tad of dried herbies and a little hot cajun sprinkled over. The grass fed organic beef chuck roast is more of a cajun rub and both are topped with bacon rosettes.

And where we have a nice chicky all trussed up with a lemon herb action going and I sprinkled a little hot spicy cajun on this one as well. This would be the Tony Chachere’s action.
All said meats are on the low level, low heat track to goodness in a handful of hours. I expect the skin of the chicken to be crispy, yet juice will run when sliced. The beefs will be smoked to maybe 135 and pulled to rest.
Cheers to you all on a wonderful day!
Biggles

Here we see a nice little beef ball-tip roast with extra virgin, Survival Spice, two lumps of butter and of course, as you can see a killer sprig of rosemary. And if you look closely on the bottom, you’ll notice a cast iron trivet. See the round holes?

That’s right, this very day Meathenge is 3 years old, that’s this many. The only time it seems like such a long time ago, is when I go back through my archives of the first few months, hooboy. I suppose for the first month I was really learning the software and how things went together. I remember though, in about 6 to 8 months I’d run out of schtick and wallowed for a bit. Questioned blogging, questioned my mad skills and considered going off half-cocked and doing something else. Obviously I decided to wait until I was full-cocked & refreshed for another try. I’m so glad I did. The people I’ve met over the last few years have turned in to permanent relationships that I talk with on a regular basis. Some of which we go out to dinner with and exchange gifts on a regular basis (Thank you CB for all those early morning bacon deliveries). It’s been GREAT.
Thank you everyone and Happy Birthday MEATHENGE !!!

It wasn’t too long ago Sandra of Khoolsville and I crossed paths in our comment sections. Days passed and I’d left a comment about one of her drawings, a cat I believe. It went something like this, “If I were to draw a cat, it’d be clutching its meaty prey.” Or something along those lines. Time quickly flew by and I mentioned something about a Meat Fairy and Sandra said she’d love to draw this Meat Fairy . Neat!
Well, sooner showed up rather than later and above you see our Meat Fairy! Dang, she sports some good action on her pen, eh?
And here we have her cat clutching its meaty prey.

I’m glad she drew the cat and not me. I know what mines would have looked like and this most certainly would totally kick my cat’s ASS.
Thank you Sandra for a nice finish for today.
Biggles

Ha! Meathead gifted me this quite some time ago. More than a few months, but the product still looks good, I suppose. I don’t have what it takes to open it and sample and I’m sorry. Have you opened and had a little treat?
Do you have one in your fridge? Let me know what it’s like!

Featured is Madamoiselle Crepinette gifted to me by my sister Kallisti.
Hah! Just got an email from David Lynch of Torchbearer Sauces. Turns out they finally got their online store up and going. So, to test to see how their new system works, they’re offering 50% off!
What? You don’t remember the few reveiws I did on Torchbearer? Here’s the Torchbearer’s #23 Fever Sauce review I did last year. They range from a very mild every day sauce to one that’ll give any hot sauce a run for the money. I’m going to go order a few more, my favorite is the Fever Sauce. It seems to be right in the middle, enough burn to let you know it’s hot, yet something I can actually eat.
Here’s how you get your deal, enter the code word: onions
Please feel free to pass this information along. It’s only on for 10 days, Feb 1- Feb 10. This is too good of a deal to pass up, I’m off to get more, right now.
xo xo

Last week I was contact by the producer of Open Source, a public radio show with Christopher Lydon out of University of Massachusetts at Lowell. They had a Thanksgiving 2.0 radio show scheduled for November 18th and I had time to participate. Turns out I was to be 1 of 4 guests for the show. First off was Jim Leff of Chowhound, Derrick from An Obsession with Food, Julie from A Finger in Every Pie and of course, Me.
I really had no idea what to expect, but Chelsea kept tabs on me and got me situated with times and what to expect. Maybe 30 minutes before I ran back out to our detached garage in the back yard and sat at my desk, waiting. I had some reference material handy, just in case. I lifted up the phone every 5 minutes or so, just to make sure we had a connection. The phone rang and it was time. Time to sit and wait. What with station intros and news bits, much of the time you’re listening to dead air. I was only to be on for a portion of the show, that was fine. Being on air for 60 minutes sounded a bit much to me. I was done in 40 minutes and went on my merry way.
If you visit the Thanksgiving 2.0 link and look for the “click to listen so the show” link, it’ll download the mp3 and you can listen to the entire show, too cool.

Yeah! I stopped by Rick’s Meat Market and picked up some hot dogs for our Mummy Wraps and the total came to $6.66! NO kidding. These are our good luck wieners.
Mummy wraps, you ask? Take that premade pilsbury biscuit dough and roll out flat, roll up wiener and install in to hot oven until golden brown.
All is well here and BOO to ya’ll.
Biggles

When Kevin from Bacon Press sends Meathenge Labs a gift of freshly cured olives! That’s when!

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Do you have a 50 year old gas range? O’Keefe & Merrit? Wedgewood? Something similar? If you do, did you know you can adjust your flame height? That’s right with a greasy 9/16 wrench and a little guidance you can turn your weezy old flames in to towers of mighty blue jet streams. It’ll only take maybe 15 minutes to tune them all and it’s next to nearly almost safe. Are you interested?
Editor’s Note – Please read – 01/09/2010: Our local Gas Guy just left, I called because was concerned about my gas furnace and carbon monoxide. He got right to work with this sensor rig and found nothing. Then he set about my 1952 Wedgewood, checking all pilots, oven operation, venting … you name it, he checked it out from head to toe. For nothing. He was very impressed about how low my emissions were from my oven. He said that these older gas ranges do not have to have the oven vented to the outside. When these older gas ranges did have to be vented to the outside was when they had a heater or a wood burning side to the range.
He says he has more trouble with the newer gas ranges because when you turn on the oven, the flame will be high enough to hit the bottom of the oven. This causes the flame to smolder and create more carbon monoxide. The older range’s burner assemblies are mounted lower and the flame is never allowed to touch any metal and smolder. In other words, we rule.
The moral of the story is to call your local gas company. Mine even has a button to press when you call them so they can come light your pilot lights. They care, they don’t want you to die or get blown up and then die.

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The other day I stepped into something over at Seriously Good (look for October 4th 2005’s entry). It seems as though us food bloggers are doing a Show & Tell of our kitchens. I believe it’s a great idea, since what we’re about is food and cooking. Mrs. D over at Belly-Timber started it and I have to say, her kitchen really impressed me. More ways that one, you’ll see what I mean. Go look! If you haven’t already seen my kitchen, come along … (no, I’m not going to say, “walk this way”)

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Wow, it was over a month in the making and August 14th was the day (yesterday). Jen, Sam, Fatemeh, Amy and myself sat down and over email hashed out the details. It wasn’t easy, everyone had their ideas how things were to be and what theme, if any would be ahered to. After about 3 weeks it was clear it was going to be good no matter how it was diced up. I believe one of the tough things was coming up with a list of who was invited. Surely we would leave someone out, but we did the best we could. At this point I believe we forgot to invite Greg and his wife from Life’s a Picnic and maybe a few others. It’s wasn’t intentional and we’ll do better next time, I promise.
Everyone was to bring a dish to share with about 4-5 people and Meathenge Labs was to host and smoke meats all day long. And guess what? We did.

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I was doing just fine, I’d finally completed the Grand Day Out post, took me too darned long. While I was doing that I had a mesquite fire starting up with some Crepinettes and my custom Beer Brats with Cheese waiting. Everything was laid out and it went fine. I tended the fire closely and got the sausages & crepinettes done in fine style. As I was shoving down the first Beer Brat a knock came at the door. I hesitated while chewing, not knowing who it was. As I opened the door is was a Mama, a Papa and a little girl selling fresh Tamals. I don’t know Spanish, maybe some day. But we got it figured out, a dollar a piece and 12 for 11 dollars. I got a dozen, that was an easy one. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them all, maybe share, maybe. Half pork and half chicken they be, easy that way.
I decided to leave my grilled goodies to the side and try one chicken and one pork tamal. Hot sauce in hand I dived in, they okay. I don’t think they used real lard and the stuffin’s is short. Even so, it’s a better tamal than you’d probably find in most places. Not only that? It came to my door.
As a side note, this has happend twice before, but from another family.
Hugs,
Biggles