Labor Day Weekend 2011

Saturday I smoked some butts for a little get together at my mom's place on Sunday.

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The Most Epic Day Ever III

This past Friday was supposed to be spent eating and bar hopping our way through NYC, but due to some excessive celebrating the previous night, one member of our party (Chris) was ridiculously hungover the next morning so we ended up cancelling the trip.  After getting a couple more hours sleep, we decided to make the most of the day by getting breakfast and then smoking some ribs.  It ended up being a damn fine day all things considered.

Aside from the horribly slow service, our breakfast at Open Door Cafe was quite good.  We chose to dine al fresco and after our hostess seated us, she mentioned she was the barista and that they had a fully functioning espresso bar so I ordered my usual decaf soy latte.

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Sucsexful Boobecue Recipenis Testes

I'd say that's the most profound and intellectual post title I've come up with yet. The purpose of my most recent barbecue was to test some new recipes I've been wanting to try out. Overall, they came out very well. This was also the second meeting of our beer club the Maryland Beer Appreciation Society, which also went well.

My favorite items of the day were my fried pickles with a nice remoulade for dipping, the chipotle brown sugar sweet potatoes, and the coffee cocoa stout barbecue sauce I whipped up. Honorable mention goes to Deana's crab stuffed jalapeno poppers, and Jen's oreo-stuffed cookies (yes, I've decided to use people's full names, that abbreviating shit was getting on my nerves.) And, of course, Karen's amazing apple pie, my favorite. Join me on this epic quest of smoking meats and quaffing brews.

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Summer Sundays Done Right

I hope your Sunday was as good as mine. Enjoy the (somewhat shitty) photos of our day spent on the water and then cooking and eating our catch.

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The Most Epic Day Ever II

While maybe not quite as epic as our first dude day, this day was still pretty amazing. Boys, let's get to it.

I had a haircut at 9am. As usual I arrived a few minutes early to partake in the goodness next door at the Cockeysville PA Dutch Market. MMmmm, doughnuts.

I also nabbed two sexy NY Strips for dinner later that night.

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Happy 10 Days before My 30th Birthday

Nah, I'm not trying to sell it. If you can comprehend basic math, then you can deduce my exact birthday from the title of this post. Are you up to the challenge?

This is just a pic post. These were probably the best ribs I've smoked to date. 7 hours total, six hours naked, one hour foiled. Temps held strong at 250 degrees. Four fist-sized chunks of hickory provided the perfect level of smoky goodness. Transported to my dad's place and sauced on the grill at around 300 degrees to caramelize and serve. Also tried a new baked bean recipe, which, after some serious tweaking, turned out pretty damn good. To drink? Lagunitas Lil Sumpin Sumpin, Flying Dog Raging Bitch (pictured below) and Table for Two.

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Various Foodsings

I wanted to take a little break from the NOLA love to catch you up on what I've been up to lately.

A week before our NOLA trip Daddy Micro and I saw Rush at the 1st Mariner Arena. Beforehand we got some gyros at Samos in Highlandtown right off of Eastern Avenue. I was jonesing for a gyro and this more than satiated my craving. The Greek salad was pretty damn good too.

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Pork Hangover

Yes, that's what I woke up with on Sunday morning, well at least that's what I tell myself (the hangover was more likely due to the copious amounts of Resurrection, Raging Bitch, and Old Dominion Oak Barrel Stout, and Pipeline Porter that I consumed.) Nonetheless this is not a post about words and artful descriptions, it's more about a happy little shindig that I had the pleasure of hosting Saturday night.

I was uber-excited, it being my first barbecue of the season and all. Of course the date I chose for it had to be right smack in the middle of a horribly chill bout of weather, along with below freezing temperatures overnight. Fortunately, in the end I defeated the vile and corrupt Lord Jack Frost with my Kingston Charcoal Claymore enchanted with all things Fire and Brimstonish... What the hell am I talking about? I think what I'm trying to say is that I was able to successfully smoke my meat despite temperatures in the upper-20s. Yeah, that was it.

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My Bloody Valentine

I know for most of you ladies Valentine's Day is about flowers or chocolate, but in the Micro family household is all about a big hunk of bloody meat. Since I'll be away for work in Raleigh this upcoming week (my flight actually leaves in a few hours) we celebrated V-Day last night. A nice bottle of Cab from Napa, two thick cut NY Strips with a Cabernet peppercorn reduction (holy shit that was good), some sauteed asparagus, and a big old hunk of chocolate peanut butter cake from the PA Dutch Market (Sorry I don't have a better picture of it, we were too busy stuffing it into our gullet.) This is how we do it up right:

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Birfday Shenanigans Pt. 3

For the third and final chapter of the epic saga that is my birthday celebration I threw one hell of a barbecue. The food was all fantastic, the highlight of which was when my sister-in-law said my potato salad was the best she'd ever had in her life.

Personally, I was responsible for pulled pork, spareribs, potato salad, and blueberry mojitos (I octupled my recipe to accommodate my guests). Friends and family provided the rest. A co-worker of mine brought an exceptionally good bok choy salad and my sister-in-law's raspberry pie nailed the spot between tart and sweet. Another co-worker bought me a pie from Dangerously Delicious Pies. During lunch one day at work after much deliberation I decided on a strawberry-rhubarb pie with crumb topping, which wasn't on their menu, but they happily said they could make. Strawberry-rhubarb is one of my favorite pies because of the play on sweet-tart. Unfortunately, it was just too sweet. I guess all pie places have to do to become ultra-popular is make insanely sweet pies. First it was Hoosier Mama and now Dangerously Delicious. Boo.

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Ribs and Skydiving

Here's a more light-hearted post... fo dat ass.  I'm giving the "new" blogger posting format a try.  We'll see how successful it goes. 

A few weeks ago I had a little get together and I smoked my best ribs to date along with a big pitcher of Blueberry Mojitos and some Creole Potato Salad. The ribs and trimmings were on for 8.5 hours over Kingston briqs and apple chunks. I used the Texas Sugarless recipe here on TVWB and sprayed with AJ every 2 hours and basted with Andy Nelson's Bama BBQ Sauce at the end.

Temps held perfectly 215-225 all through the smoke, only rising up to 235 after being hit by direct sunlight.

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Feast your eyes on my meat

Sorry I haven't been updating this like a good blogger, but with the change in weather we've been trying to get things done around the house, plus the warm weather social life is starting to kick in.

I've also been busy planning two food-centric trips to NYC (one of which is a pizza tour with my fellow blogger friend pizzablogger) and one to Chicago as well as our first anniversary road-trip which will include Montreal, Quebec City, Portland, ME, and Boston. Yes, lots of planning and food research is involved. Suggestions welcome. I'm leaving the non-food-related stuff to the Mrs. although I did manage to score front row center tickets to Cirque de Soleil in Quebec. I'm pretty stoked about that.

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Third times a charm: Home-cooked burgers done right.

On New Years day my wife and I finally made found ourselves in the perfect situation to finally try out the much raved about ice cream at Bloom's Broom dairy farm in Bel Air. After a few tastings I finally settled on a delicious rendition of rum raisin I began aimlessly browsing the store as I happily noshed. Lately, I've been on a personal mission to find good quality local ingredients to cook with. Driving 40 minutes to Wegman's in Hunt Valley every time I wanted to cook something exotic was getting old fast. So you can imagine my glee when I happened upon freshly made beef and lamb products in their freezer straight from the Woolsey lamb and beef farm in Churchville, a farm I had no idea existed until I read the label on the dark crimson packages of freshly ground beef. I asked the girl at the counter what the fat content of the ground beef was and she looked at me like I had two heads. Nonetheless I was determined to take another stab at making passable home-made burgers and was thrilled to find good beef to serve as a foundation.

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Cooking for Turkey Day

I just wanted to shoot up a short post about the Pumpkin Cheesecake with Caramel Bourbon Sauce I made for Thanksgiving. It turned out wonderful. During the baking process I neglected to add the 2T of flour (don't drink while baking kids it makes you forget things.) and I added 4 ginger snaps to the crust mixture. Yes, I did put in the extra effort to actually toast the pecans and yes I think it was worth it. I did miss the flour as I think it would've made the consistency more cakey which I think it lacked without the flour. Also I would've baked the crust longer, I put it in for 35 minutes and I still would've liked it to form up a bit more. The sauce was the shining star of this dish. I have no qualms with eating a pile of horse manure were it covered in this heavenly sauce. Here are a few pics of the creation process:

The crust in the food processor:


The crust pressed into the spring pan after baking:


Some of the high quality(hah!) ingredients I used:


The batter:


Right out of the oven:


Making the sauce the next day:


When doing laundry on Thanksgiving morning I cleaned out the lint trap in our dryer only to find that the ball of lint looked disturbingly like a heart!!:


Freaky, eh?

And finally the money shot. The finished product:


Just look at it. Ain't it sexy?

I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I'm working on Day 2-3 of our NYC trip so it will be up soon, don't you worry.

Eating Bambi

We've had this 6 lb. venison roast in the freezer for over a year. My father-in-law gave it to us last year after he felled a deer. So after getting fed up with it taking up so much valuable freezer space I decided to thaw it out and cook it up. I searched the internet extensively and finally settled on this recipe. After reading the user reviews I made the following changes: I used garlic powder instead of garlic salt, I used reduced sodium soy sauce, and I also only used half the packet of onion soup mix. I also added:

1/2 cup water
1/2 cup dry red wine
2 mediums onions sliced
6 red potatoes quartered
two handfuls of baby carrots

I sliced the roast in half and threw it in the cooker with everything else. I set it to low and let it go for just over 8 hours. Nikki got home and we made up some salads and then spooned out our venison in bowls topped with freshly cracked black pepper. I don't know how some reviews claimed this dried out the roast, mine had soooo much gravy. It was damn good. Damn good. The changes I made resulted in a perfect level of salt. Yum. I consider my first attempt at venison most certainly a success. The only thing that could've made the meal better is a nice loaf of crusty bread with butter. But Nikki forgot to pick it up on her way home from work. The story of my life...