Wabbit season

Duck season! Football season! Yay!

About damn time. College kicked off last night and continues through the weekend, the NFL begins next week, and soon we will be awash in games. I watched – or, rather, listened while helping paint one of the bedrooms – to South Carolina stomp all over Southern Miss, and then USC make it past Hawaii. As for Towson and Indiana? Yeah, right.

Anyway, the painting. Someone who shall not be named decided one of the bedrooms needed to be painted a different color: radiant sun, to be exact, although to me it looks like an off-white sort of color, but who am I to say? It will take a couple of coats, since it’s lighter than the current color, but it’s good exercise for me, even though by the end of the taping around the baseboards and the subsequent painting in that area, I was getting a bit sore. Still, with that part done, the rest is fairly easy, just rolling away, and we should finish today. Just in time for some Georgia person to arrive and stay for a few days.

And it’s time to go back to cooking a bit, too: this afternoon, stir fry, with chicken and lots of veggies, and scallion noodles. Since we will have people in the house this weekend even though we are not doing a big gathering as in years past, I’ll be brining a butt today so it can go on the smoker in the wee hours and be ready for Saturday afternoon’s more traditional kickoff of a slate of college games. We also need more bbq sauce. And I think, just for fun, we’ll do a bit of chicken as well, as it’s been forever since I’ve done any smoked poultry. Chicken breasts alone are tricky, as they’ll go from tender, moist, and delicious to rubbery dried out nastiness in no time, so perhaps a whole chicken is in order (but I’ll have to rig something so the chicken doesn’t drip on the porkalicious goodness that will be in the smoker before it). Applewood smoked chicken quesadillas for leftovers, anyone?

2 thoughts on “Wabbit season”

  1. What kind of smoker do you use? I really want one. I tried using my husband’s enormous gas grill but doesn’t keep the smoke in. It’s also far too roomy. Actually, it’s too roomy for most things, since we usually only utilize about 10% of the real estate available when grilling.

    Sign me up for quesadillas!

  2. I have two smokers, as it happens. One is a traditional kind – a Char-Griller, with a side smoker box, that we break out for the really huge gatherings. The very first thing I smoked on that (at the time, it was the only one I had) was a 22 pound turkey. For one of our family get togethers, I did 16 slabs of ribs at once, and at another, eight slabs of ribs and two pork butts totaling about 16 pounds. That one takes a lot of tending, from the charcoal to the wood in order to maintain a constant temperature to changing the positions of whatever is on, because it’s hotter near the smoker box and cooler away from it, so ensuring everything cooks and smokes properly and is done at the same time, rotation is key.

    The second smoker I picked up is a Bradley. I know purists deride this sort of thing, but a lot of times, I don’t have the time to babysit the big smoker, or it’s simply too large for whatever I am preparing. The tending for the Bradley is making sure my water bowl at the bottom stays filled and that the pucks are in place for however many hours of smoke I want to run. Other than that, beyond resetting the timer for a full load that takes longer than nine hours, I can leave it pretty much unattended for long periods of time, during which I can get other things done.

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