Day 408 – Still Here

“Hey Jeremy, how ya doin’?”

“Oh, walkin’ and talkin’.”

I’m quoting Captain Mal Reynolds more and more of late.

I’ve been working at Southern Oregon University for a year and one month. In that time i’ve accomplished only a handful of the changes my position was meant to address. However the few things i’ve done are significant and have contributed to the bottom line of increased enrollment. Wheee!

Perhaps more importantly i’ve made contacts in and around Ashland in have cultivated a persona of a guy with a semblance of a brain and no overt agenda.

I’ve purchased half a pig along with a chest freezer to keep it.

I’ve purchased, and become comfortable with, a charcoal-fired water smoker.

The upshot of those two events is that Annette and i are eating better than ever… and for the first time, we’re eating less. Food and the preparation of meals has always been a huge thing for the two of us, and we’ve always eaten extremely well. The only problem is we also ate too much. Now we’re smoking chickens on Sunday and eating them over the course of a full week. Back in Boise we’d cook a chicken on the Weber rotisserie and finish the whole thing that evening.

No, we’re not dropping weight like two fitness gurus, but we’re eating less, feeling better, and spending less money.

And i’m having much more fun preparing food. Here’s my latest project:

Beef short ribs, pork long ribs
Tools of the smoker
Six hours later….

I added no wood chips during this cook session, but i did add shovels of oak charcoal at several points to keep the fire stoked and the cold charcoal smokes a bit when tossed on the existing fire bed. That small amount of smoke was exactly right.

The beef ribs aren’t quite as photogenic. For those i removed the meat from the bones and diced it trying to remove as much of the fat as i could. I then put it all in the sauce pot to simmer lightly for another hour or so.

The sauce is my own concoction of tomato paste, molasses, several vinegars (mostly rice vinegar), and a potpourri of spices (mostly garlic) simmered for at least an hour and then left to rest overnight.

Three of these half-slabs and about half the sauced up beef ribs are becoming a gift to the person who brought me the 40 pound bag of Lazzari hardwood charcoal all the way from San Francisco.

I don’t know if i’m spinning my wheels spending all this much time on food prep. I should probably be improving my skills with WordPress and PHP in general, but i’m finding it harder and harder to care about more and more of the myriad time-sucks vying for my attention. At least the ribs taste good…

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