Greg

barbeque adventures: home smoked pulled pork

Last Sunday while Clodagh was off doing well at a pool tournament (funny how pool tournament stories involving Clodagh have "doing well" in them and the ones about me don't, eh?), I was occupied with using the new smoker to make pulled pork.  I have a few things that I've been trying to make or wanting to make in the past and I thought I'd provide some learnings and pictures here as I go along this summer...

Prep time and cooking hassle:  Unlike smoked meat I've made in the past where you marinate the meat overnight, etc., the recipe I used (from Way To Grill - a grilling cookbook I'd recommend :)) had the pork have rub applied just before putting it in the smoker and that was it.  I won't give the full recipe since it's not mine, but it's pretty straightforward and has a bit of chili and other spices in addition to the salt and pepper you'd expect...  The nice part of this recipe is that there's very little prep time and the main time sink is in keeping things going.  Fortunately with 7 or 8 hours of smoking time, you've got plenty of time to make the BBQ sauce while other things are going on.  Cooking hassle was pretty low - keep the temp between 225-250 ish and let 'er go for a 7 or 8 hours and you're fine.

Verdict: the pork came out really well, but I realized that I'm not big on heavy vinegar sauces, meaning that while the sandwich I made looked like it'd be nice, I thought it was fairly rancid :(.  Even though a lot of BBQ sauces have vinegar in them and aren't overpowering, this one doesn't fall into that category - skip the sauce from the book/reciepe if you don't like vinegar.  Try #2 of eating the pork using a more tomato and less vinegar based sauce tipped it over to a meal I'd make again.  And yes, I realize that I just lost the confidence of anyone from the Carolina school of BBQ...

On to the photos :)

Before:

 Ready for rest:

The end result:

Resuming the look back - July's visit to Pike Place Market

I haven't decided if I'm going to slack on this until next year and do a batch retrospective again, keep it closer to real-time (around the end of the month that's ending), or stop doing this :), but in the meanwhile, I'm trying to finish up the "my favorite photos from 2009" series :). 

Clodagh and I swung through Pike Place Market in the middle of July and I got this on the visit.  It always makes me wonder where the corn really comes from :).  As usual, clicking on the image takes you to a larger version.

June's selection

Looking at my pictures from June, it seems like they were mostly 'people centric' photo opportunities - a visit to the beach with family, wedding, etc.  Since I'm mostly skipping "people" photos with this series of posts :), I'll skip those and instead chose my June favorite as a shot from when I was wandering around the train depot / train museum in Snoqualmie.  It wouldn't be the top of my attractions list but if you were in the area seeing the falls or had already seen the major attractions, then it's worth a bit of your time :).  Down the road a couple hundred yards as you approach are some rusting engines and cars.  I was playing around a bit with post-processing and I think the "old" feel of this fits pretty well with the state of the tanker and the flaking logo...  No, this wasn't a commentary on the state of the oil and gas industry and where it's headed :).

Picks of pics from May

I'm back from visiting Oklahoma for Christmas, and so I continue on the survey of my favorite shots from the year.  At the end of April and through the beginning of May, we were at the APA Nationals singles tournament.  Clodagh qualified through local and regional tournaments along with a few other folks from our local league, and I went along to cheer her on.  And play a few mini-tournaments :).  I didn't really get any good shots of her in the competition, but I got some good ones of other folks - this shot of Kirk is one of my favorites:

The next shot is one from later in the month while we were on a walk through the Marymoor bird sanctuary area - I really like how the yellows and greens came together in the background.

favorite photos from April

So far it's been a bit tough to pick out my favorite shots from the previous months - either because I just didn't take any, like in Feb, or nothing I took really struck me, like in Jan and March.  April presented the opposite challenge so I've expanded beyond "my favorite picture" to "pictureS" :).  I'll still try to limit myself to just a few shots though!  I got some great shots of Shay and Rascal throughout the month, but I think two of the best are from our trip to Whidbey Island:

Rascal:

and Shay:

The other shot is a shot of what I now (again) think is Rainier taken on a flight to Las Vegas.  Greg's photography and travel tip is that if you're flying when there's light, particularly if you'll see a sunrise or sunset, you should try to get a window seat and keep your camera with you.  I have a bunch of really nice shots of mountains or sunsets from the plane, and they make fantastic desktop backgrounds...

skipping Feb, and on to March - the photo retrospective continues

Resuming the quasi-random cadence of looking back across pictures from the year...  It turns out that while I have pictures from Feb, I'm pretty sure that I didn't take any of them.  So we'll just skip that month :).  March also looks like a bit of a dry spell (probably not literally since I live in the Puget Sound region :)) - this shot of a ferry leaving downtown is the best of the lot.  I took this as we were on our way over to Bainbridge to adopt Rascal - it's written in almost every guide about Seattle, but I'll still repeat it.  The ferry ride to/from Bainbridge Island should be on every visitor's to-do list, particularly if we have good weather at the time.

My favorite photo from January

I was looking back through pictures taken during 2009 and am posting a bit of a retrospective.  This is my favorite picture from January and conveniently is a picture that I previously posted about back in January, though the links are now broken on that post after some recent server work.  I took this shortly after the flooding Western Washington had back in January.  The falls were running very high and a lot of people had come out to see it for themselves.  The mist coming off of the falls was soaking the observation deck / look-out point.

A local parks weekend

One of the great things about the Seattle / King County area is the number of local parks.  This weekend we visited two cool parks.  St. Edwards State Park, which it turns out is open for more than just the annual MicroBrew festival, and Juanita Bay park.  Basically the park has a few sections - the main part is an old Seminary and has ball fields and whatnot and is where the beer festival is most Father's Day weekends.  There are a bunch of trails through the surrounding woods area, some of which lead down to Lake Washington.  On the plus side, the trails are better marked and much harder to get lost than Dash Point State Park :).  Overall it was a pretty gray day, but as we hit the water the sun broke through the clouds and backlit a few remaining fall colored leaves - I like how the leaf here stands out vs. the gray water of Lake Washington.

I also got a shot that I like while we were walking through the trails - you can see how the moss was taking over pretty much everywhere.  The light wasn't great so I ended up with ratcheting up the ISO on the camera which left it with a pretty grainy result...

Juanita Bay had lots of ducks and turtles in the water and what Aaron and I speculated was a heron too.  Unfortunately I didn't realize how cool it was going to be and didn't bring a camera.  I guess it's just a reason to go back :).

Administrivia: locally stored photos removed

Administrivia post - I've removed most of the photos stored on the site.  Lately we've started using another site to store photos and slowly but surely I'll move some photos there.  Photos linked / embedded in some older posts are going to be broken unless / until I go back and fix them up, which probably won't happen :).

Aren't my dogs cute?

I've started reading (is that right term for what's basically a picture-a-day with no real text?) a few more photo blogs lately and so am feeling a bit inspired to post a random photo today...  It's not great artistically or technically, but wow, aren't my dogs cute? :) 

 This was about a month after we adopted Rascal and they had really started to get to know each other.  It's also one of the first that I was touching up red-eye in Lightroom: I ended up having to use the flash when taking the shot because it was fairly dark in the room and I didn't do a great job cloning out the red-eye, which left Rascal with a bit of alien-looking eyes...  The good news is that I recently got the Kelby book on Lightroom and with the rainy season having arrived, in theory I'll be practicing and won't be quite as bad at post-processing anymore.  In theory.

[11/2/09: edit: fixed the link to the picture.  not sure why it broke...]

Photos from Australia

A very delayed posting since we’ve been back for a few weeks and facebook saw them long ago, but photos from our trip to Sydney have been posted here.  It’s pretty much the fastest that I’ve posted pictures after a trip as far as I can remember.  Don’t worry - even though I took a bunch of pictures of the Opera House I only posted a couple of them :)

Yes Virginia, there are good things that come from this heat...

The heat wave is back and is the topic of discussion here in the Seattle area.  I wasn't going to post about it but then I realized that I skipped writing about last year's heat wave and 2007 was my last go at the topic :).

So, what's my take? 

There are downsides to having accurate information in this heat - such as knowing that when I came home the temperature registered a cool 92 degress in our bedroom.  I didn't really need to know that - "it's hot" was good enough.  It might be miserably hot for those of us who appear to have been designed for the grey overcast and 60s weather we see for much of the year here.  Never fear, there are also some nice side benefits to the heat.  Seriously.  There are.  I think.  Wait for it..  ...ok, got it.  It's much, much easier to air dry your clothes in the house.  I'm pretty sure the room we hang clothes in is actually as warm as a tumble-dryer gets, meaning that we have our clothes ready for next use about ten minutes after they're removed from the washer.

I'm sure there's a second one out there somewhere.  Check back in case I come up with it ;-).

my summer book report

A few weeks ago we took a jaunt down to Florida for some family time at the beach.  If you've seen my family at the beach you know that means a decent amount of time reading books.  Add on the flights to and from Florida and that means a lot  tack on another chunk of reading time as well, which means lots of book time :).

I don't quite mean this to be "What I read on Summer Vacation" but let me give a quick run-down of one of the books I read on the trip, Scarecrow by Matthew Reilly.  Basically there's this dude, "Scarecrow", who is a total badass.  He's a special forces guy who is pretty much unkillable.  He uses a magnetic clamp to regularly to kill people or stop himself from falling from ridiculous situations.  Like when the bad guy was throwing him out of the cockpit of a moving airplane - he clamps onto the bottom of the plane.  Really.  The bottom of the plane.  From while falling from cruising altitude.  Really.  Later on he manages to use a WRX to flip along the wall between a cliff road and the ocean, sliding like a skate-boarder on a railing.  Yep, a precision move in the midst of a battle.  Battle?  Yep, a battleship at sea was shelling the area whilst he was also being chased by some baddies in a lamborghini.

Pretty quickly you realize that the situations are going to go from ridiculous to more ridiculous and there's no suspense except to see what kind of crazy crap the author managed to put down, and picturing him writing this all with a straight face.  I get why movies in the same vein do well, it's cool to see the special effects they can do these days, but in book form it just loses something.  Why are people reading this book?  Is it like passing a car accident?  You just can't look away?

on language and culture

In a lot of ways Microsoft is a great place to work, but one of the weirdest things about the culture is how people use language.  There's the nounification of verbs, the verbification of nouns and the wordification of acronyms.  Oh acronyms, how we love thee even and especially when you don't make sense.  No one goes on vacation, they go OOF.  OOF?  "Out Of oFfice".  Yes, it would make a lot more sense if we went OOO but say that outloud to yourself.  "I'm going ooooo next week."  People don't send meeting requests, they send you a S+.  One presumes it's left over from when calendaring was done through Schedule+.  Abbreviations are almost as bad - a few months ago I was having a conversation with someone as they were talking about handing files to Eugene.  Well, it turns out they weren't giving files to a dude named Eugene, they were putting files through a tool called "EUGen".  Raymond Chen has a series of blog posts about Microspeak which is an entertaining read if you're looking to waste some time.

Where am I going with all of this?  I've realized that I'll have been at Microsoft for eight years as of this week and it occurs to me that I might have some parts of the culture a bit too ingrained.  I was out walking the dogs this evening when a loud late model* Corvette turned the corner and drove by - the license plate included some w's m's p's.  Reading the license plate I immediately thought his plate called him "wimpy" which I suspect is not quite what he was going for :) 

*When I was growing up and watching cop shows the phrase"late model" referring to newer cars always confused the crap out of me.  Shouldn't "late" mean they're old? 

Dog adoption take 2

Another day, another dog.  Wait.  Yep, another dog. 

We've been talking about adopting a second dog for a while, and after seeing some good potential fits, we went through with adopting a young adult dog named Rascal...

So far things seem to be going fairly well between Shay and Rascal.  They're even sharing her favorite place to wait for us :):

Clodagh pointed it out to me, but this experience and the investigation we did on petfinder made us realize how unusual the adoption was - we basically showed up and and then came home with her straightaway very little checking or background documentation on either side.  It looks like most places actually do background checks, ensure that there's proper medical history of the dog, a lot do home visits to ensure that it looks appropriate, etc.  Who knew? :)