The Turkey part 1

Obviously Thanksgiving is tomorrow so the Turkey prep started a little over 24 hours ago. This is my first post from the iPad so it may not be as pretty as my other posts.

Currently there is a 20# tom turkey in my fridge enjoying a nice brine bath, recipe down below. I like  to let my turkey's brine for at least 24 hours before cooking, since this bird is so big I opted for longer rather than shorter, I'm not getting up at 6am to make a brine and then again to cook. 

Bone-In spiral sliced ham

I love country ham, end of story. If I didn't think the amount of salt would kill me I would eat country ham for every meal. Since it takes at least 6 months to salt cure a ham I decided to settle for smoking a ham.

A little deli I frequent in Maryland gave me the idea of smoking a precooking spiral sliced ham so I thought we'd give it a try.

Spare Ribs - 3 - 2- 1 method

We had some family in town the other night and made up some spare ribs with loin meat attached. The ribs came from the local grocery store, nothing special today, except that the ribs were over 2 inches thick...yum!

Bourbon brine smoked turkey

I think turkey is my favorite thing to smoke, I love turkey though I'm the person that never gets tired of Thanksgiving left overs. I've even been shackled as the official Thanksgiving turkey cooker since last year.

Smoking a turkey is kind of misleading because you aren't really smoking it like you do ribs or brisket. You really are roasting it at 350, the same as you would in your oven, only with smoke. Oh well call it what you will its dericious!

Baby back ribs - 2-2-1 method

Ribs are a tricky thing and the way you make them can ruin them completely or make them heaven in your mouth. Luckily mine were heaven in my mouth. First, I wasn't really feeling up to cooking so this was kept really simple. Second, the kid had been sick all week so we were incredibly tired and Sandy and I were recovering just as much, only slower, than she was.

Standard BGE setup

For my 29th birthday my beautiful wife Sandy let me buy my first BGE. I got it at one of the Eggfests and it was one of the best purchases I've ever made. I'm still working on outfitting it with all the fun toys but so far this is what I have; 

1 - Large Big Green Egg

1 - BGE Plate setter

1 - BGE Large Pizza stone

Smoked pork butt

This time I tried something a little different from my standard setup. Instead of filling the firebox with charcoal I decided to use all wood chunks will a small helping of charcoal to get the initial burn going. I didn't like it. The temperature was harder to control and after about 5 hours it seemed to drop off quicker than charcoal does. Oh well live and learn right?

Smoked Pizza - Successful failure...

I'm an avid fan of having people work on my house and cooking dinner for them, its cheap and I like cooking! So I had my dad and father in law working around my house for 4 days starting around the 4th. We decided to finally try using the Big Green Egg to make a pizza since I had picked up the pizza stone on sale.

First, what I learned. Do not, under any circumstances use a Papa Murphy's pizza for this. The crust is too thin and you can't get it off the paper tray without considerable effort. By the time we did get it transferred to a pizza pan the pizza was misshapen, we didn't attempt to move it from the pan to the stone. A frozen pizza would have been better than what I attempted.