So, you’ve read my core-dump on the basics of bar-b-que, right? Or maybe you got here after reading about my Bradley Digital Smoker. Maybe you’ve even decided the type of pit you’re going to use. Now it’s time to really get started.

One of the questions I get asked a lot is what other stuff do you need to create bar-b-que? Mostly, I get this question around Father’s Day or at the beginning of Summer, when people are looking for gifts. So I thought I’d take a look in my grilling and bar-b-que toolbox. (Yes, I’m including grilling in this.) And for what it’s worth, mine really is a toolbox. I keep everything I commonly use in a Stanley Fat Max toolbox which lives during the summer in a storage cart on my patio.

The good news is that you don’t need much. Like everything else in the bar-b-que world, things can be done well with little expense.

So here’s my list, in rough order of importance:

1. Instant-read meat thermometer. I currently use a splash-proof Thermapen by ThermoWorks, which I must admit is a fantastic thermometer. It’s faster than any other I’ve used, and the thin tip really allows an accurate temperature in cuts of meat that are thin (like spare ribs). But at $96 list price, you have to really like cool gadgets to want it. Don’t get me wrong, the NIST traceable calibration certificate you get with the thermometer really appeals to the chemist in me, but you can get more than satisfactory results with a less expensive thermometer. Prior to the Thermapen, I used a cheap Polder instant-read, which they don’t make anymore. But the next generation replacement is only $19.95.
2. Remote thermometer. You don’t really need both kinds of thermometers, but a remote thermometer is nice to have, especially for shoulder. I use a RediCheck Remote when I want to monitor the pit from a distance. With this kind of thermometer you can monitor the temperature of your food without disturbing the temperature of the pit by constantly opening and closing the door.
3. Silicone Gloves. Bar-b-que involves holding a lot of hot greasy stuff. For my money, nothing beats a nice pair of silicone gloves. Not only do they protect you from heat, but they clean up in the dishwasher so all that grease and sauce isn’t a problem. I use a set of two like these for ~$20.
4. Basting brush. Most people are going to want to mop their meat at some point. And I find that a silicone basting brush works best for this. It can handle the heat of a grill  and is easy to clean in the dishwasher. I’m currently using a couple of different ones I picked up at the hardware store or supermarket.
5. Towels. Speaking of messy … there will be a lot of mess to clean no matter what you’re making. So rather than using roll after roll of paper towels, I simply bought a bag of utility towels at BJs (I think I paid $45 for a bag of 50 towels 5 years ago) and I’ve been using them ever since. I still have 35 of them. They clean up in the washer and are way more useful than paper towels. Not only do they absorb more, but they can also be used to grab hot things. Absolutely indispensable.
6. Cooking spray oil (like PAM). Useful mostly for keeping things from sticking on the grill or smoker. I buy the bulk size at BJ’s.
7. Spatulas & Tongs. Not much to say here. There are millions of different brands. Buy something strong and cheap.
8. Radio. I keep a Sirius satellite radio receiver in the box because bar-b-que is a slow process. And there is always a need for tunes while waiting 14 hours for a shoulder to cook.

Bonus tool: an infrared thermometer. I have a cheap Harbor Freight infrared thermometer that I keep around. It’s useful for judging whether there are hotspots on the grill or in the pit.

So there you go … you really don’t need any of this stuff, but it’s all helpful and relatively inexpensive and it can make your life easier.

I’ve brought my new smoker home and smoked my first ribs. And I’ve learned a few things about the smoker. Here’s the quick summary for anyone looking for just some basic thoughts.

1. The smoker needs handles! I didn’t notice this until I was cleaning up, but handles would be welcome since most people will be moving this cabinet around a lot.
2. Speaking of cleaning, everything cleans up in the dishwasher. This is a first for me … with the drip pan in place, there’s no more scraping congealed pig jelly out of the bottom of the smoker. Excellent!
3. The shelves in the smoker will each fit one full rack of St. Louis cut ribs.
4. The temperature controller held the temperature I set +/- 15° F.
5. I used hickory bisquettes and the smoke generator worked great. It takes between five and ten minutes for the first bisquette to start smoking. The all seem to burn completely with no waste.

Basically, the smoker worked just as advertised. I can’t wait to try something cold smoked — bacon, here I come!

Yesterday I brought home my new Bradley Digital Smoker. Today I smoked two racks of pork ribs and a few chicken breasts as a test to start figuring out just how this works and compares to my dedicated New Braunfels Black Diamond pit.

And I’m surprised I’m even able to write this, rather than lying somewhere passed out in a food coma after eating nearly an entire rack of ribs by myself.

So the initial verdict is positive. The smoker did a very good job, providing good smoke flavor, decent temperature control, and most of all: convenience. In fact, I did something unheard of while cooking this batch. After setting up the smoker, I left home. For 4 hours. I took my daughter into Boston while I picked up something from my office. We rode the subway, had lunch, and did a little shopping. After the first three hours on the smoker, my wife wrapped the ribs in foil, and I was home before the end of the “2″ period in the 3-2-1 method. I’m positively ecstatic about this … I was able to spend four hours doing something else while making great bar-b-que. And that’s really what I was looking for.

The Technique

I used used my normal rub and the 3-2-1 technique. I really wanted to start simple, and test the smoker rather than new variations of how to cook ribs. So I purposely kept the variables to a minimum. That means I didn’t rotate the racks in the smoker, I didn’t open the door all the time to look at the cooking, and I stuck to a tried and true recipe.

The Meat

I used two full racks of pork spare ribs from BJ’s Wholesale club. I prepped them by removing the membrane and cutting them St. Louis style. These techniques, along with videos, are detailed in my beginner’s guide to bar-b-que post.

The Rub

I used a two-part rub on my ribs. It’s also described in more detail in my beginners guide post, but it’s essentially table salt and spices in the first layer, followed by a brown sugar and kosher salt top layer. I applied the rub and then wrapped the racks in plastic and set them in my refrigerator over night.

The Smoke

Smoker Setup

I set the Bradley to 250° F and let it warm up. I wanted the pit hotter than I would smoke at to help compensate for the temperature drop when I put in the meat. After letting the ribs warm up a bit (though I didn’t have enough time to let them get to room temperature). I spread the racks out on three shelves, with the rib tips up top and two racks below. I added some chicken breasts wrapped in bacon on the bottom shelf, started the smoke (setting the time to three hours) and dropped the pit temperature to 220° F. I set the timer for 6 hours and 20 minutes. And then I walked away.

(I did set a thermometer into the chicken I had put in the smoker … I wasn’t sure how long that would take and I wanted to make sure it was the right temperature.)

After three hours, My wife took the ribs out and put them in the foil along with a splash of cider vinegar. I came home when there was 1.5 hours left. Two hours after going into the foil, I removed the foil and basted the racks with a 50/50 mix of bar-b-que sauce and cider vinegar. I also added a couple more bisquettes and cranked up the smoke for another 40 minutes.

The Results

Overall I say the results were good. I got a decently smoked product with a minimum of effort. As I said, there was a decent smoke flavor, and, as usual, the 3-2-1 method all but guaranteed tender ribs. But I did notice a few differences versus smoking with hardwood.

Ribs Fresh From the Bradley

First, there was a noticeable lack of a pronounced smoke ring. There was good smoke flavor, but no ring. I assume this has to do with the electric heat versus a traditional charcoal or wood fire. With a traditional wood heat source, there is a constant low level of smoke at all times. With the electric smoker, when the smoke is off, it’s off. This is something I will have to experiment with.

Second, there was less “bark” formation than I am used to. Again I attribute this to differences in the smoke chamber conditions. I wonder if it has mainly to do with the water pan creating a higher humidity environment in the Bradley chamber, or if there is actually less moisture than over a wood fire since wood does gove off quite a bit of water when it burns. Either way, the crust on the ribs wasn’t as thick or crunchy as I am used to. Because of the difference in crust formation, I ended up with a saltier bark than I normally get when using my standard rub mix.

Finally, there was a discernible difference between the lower and upper shelf locations. The lower shelf ended up creating a rack which was far more tender than the upper shelf. So I will definitely need to rotate the rack positions during cooking.

But overall I am pleased. I got 99% of what I was seeking, which is convenience. And the rest of the issues I am sure I can work through. I’ll just have to eat a lot of bar-b-que to figure it out. Damn …

Bradley 4-Rack Digital Smoker (from bradleysmoker.com)

Santa Claus was good to me this year. Several family members contributed some cash to my gift (or maybe to their future free dinners here) to help me get the next tool in my bar-b-que arsenal: a Bradley Digital Smoker (BDS). Over the years, I’ve smoked ribs and things on all sorts of equipment, from Weber Kettles to Weber Smokey Mountain and Brinkmann Smoke-N-Pit bullet smokers, to my New Braunfels Black Diamond horizontal smoker, and even my CharBroil RED gas grill. The one thing I’ve never used was an electric smoker like the Bradley or the Masterbuilt.

This is why I wanted to add one to my stable of cookers this Christmas. So, one trip to Bass Pro Shops later, I walked out with the last Digital Smoker they had (the floor model) for 10% off the sticker price.

This was not a rash decision either. Weeks of research went into this … And here is how I finally ended up with a Bradley Digital Smoker in my breezeway, waiting for the first rack of ribs which are absorbing their rub in my refrigerator right now.

Convenience

I am writing this right up front. My buying decision was not driven by economy. If you’re looking for an explanation of how to get great bar-b-que on the cheap, this isn’t it. Startup costs to bring the Bradley home are going to be greater than $500 in most cases. I could buy two full size CharBroil Silver Smokers for that price and still have money left over to buy enough pork to feed 50 people. No, this purchase is more akin to a mid-life crisis purchase: it’s about convenience. I’ve tended fires all night long and hand-cranked a whole pig on a spit over an open pit more than once. Every year I throw a summertime party where I bar-b-que shoulder for 18 hours tending the fire every 45 minutes, then catch a few hours sleep so I can wake up and start the fire again for spare ribs. I understand what it takes to make “real” bar-b-que. And I decided that I would like to enjoy the flavor of smoked food once in a while without the hassle of dragging my pit out and tending the charcoal fire for hours. The main driver of the decision to buy an electric smoker was the desire for “set it and forget it™” convenience ¹. I want to put some meat in the box, set timers and temperatures, then go in the house and watch TV for a few hours while something else worries about the bar-b-que pit temperature for me.

The Options

If you want convenience, electric or propane are your main options. Some companies like Traeger make wood pellet grills that have a pellet feed mechanism, but they can be really expensive, and they haven’t really perfected the digital controls which offer the highest level of convenience. Besides, they are all much larger than the Bradley, and I didn’t want to have to roll out the grill from the shed every time. I like something I can carry out, use, then carry back in the basement.

Within the reasonably priced electric smoker world, there are two main manufacturers: Masterbuilt and Bradley. After that decision, there is the manual or automatic (digital) control to decide. How did I decide between them? Here are some factors which put the Bradley Digital on top.

1. Stability. I read that some people felt the Masterbuilt was “tippy.” When the door was opened, a few people in message boards reported that the cabinet had tipped forward dumping their food. I got to see the Bradley and the Masterbuilt next to each other on display and after opening the doors and giving them a little tug, I can understand the difference. The Bradley feels more stable to me.
2. Heft & Build Quality. The bradley also feels heavier and more solid to me. I equate this to better insulation and therefore better heat retention.
3. External Smoke Generator. The Bradley has an external smoke generator. The Masterbuilt smoke generator is inside the cabinet. I have always wanted to cold smoke things like salmon and bacon, and this just isn’t possible when the smoke generator is built into the cabinet. Several mods can be found online for separating the Bradley smoke generator from the main cabinet to that truly cold smoking is possible.
4. Auto Wood Feed. As I said at the beginning, I wanted convenience. And the auto-feed mechanism on the Bradley promised to deliver it. In the Masterbuilt, I would still need to go and add wood chips to the smoker periodically. On the Bradley I can stack 8 hours worth of “bisquettes” (little hockey puck shaped wood discs) and walk away.
5. Digital Controls. At this time, Masterbuilt doesn’t make a grill with digital controls in a small four or six rack size. You need to move up to the 40 inch Masterbuilt smokers to get digital control. Yes, I know I could add a digital temperature control or “PID” (see sidebar) to a non-digital smoker and get even better digital control than the built-in Bradley control, but I wanted a convenient solution, not another do-it-yourself project.
6. Usable Space. Again, based on a side-by-side comparison, for nearly equal-sized cabinets, the Bradley had more space for food inside. This is mainly due to the configuration of the drip tray and smoker unit in the bottom of the cabinet.

Downsides

The one thing that stands out in the Bradley design is the use of wood “bisquettes” rather than a traditional chunk or sawdust fuel (Bradley is a Canadian company, and the spelling is a nod to the Francophone population). This is really a concession to the auto-feed mechanism. The problem of course is that one must keep a supply of the special bisquettes around, and if you run out, you’re not smoking. But these things can be mail ordered for an OK price, and the convenience of the auto-feeder overcame the objection for me. To get a sense of how this works, watch the following video. Although the smoker is the “original” version rather than the digital version, the auto-feeder is essentially the same.

I have two full racks of pork ribs in the refrigerator absorbing their rub right now, and I’ll write about my first cooking experience once I get them done tomorrow.

Notes

¹ Yes, the Ronco Acquisition Corporation has a trademark on the “set it and forget it” phrase. Search the USTPO for serial number 77476587. I’m not particularly worried about Ron Popeil or whoever bought the assets of Ronco after the latest bankruptcy suing me, rather, I hope you agree with me about the utter absurdity of someone trademarking that phrase.

I normally hate re-posting other blog content, but this is directly related to some of my previous e-reader posts.

TechCrunch reports today that a hacker may have solved one of my major gripes about the Amazon Kindle. He’s apparently come up with a way to strip the DRM from Kindle books so they can be turned into a PDF and read on other readers.

I can only hope that Amazon and the publishing industry doesn’t go all RIAA on this and lose their mind. If Amazon has any ability to think out of the box, they might realize that they could leverage their position as the dominant bookstore and actually sell to Sony and other e-reader customers. Because the Sony bookstore certainly doesn’t have the depth that Amazon has. And it’s not nearly as easy to shop, ever after the latest 3.1 update to the software.

So bravo Labba …

Mother Nature whipped out her big ten inch … snowstorm. That’s not really a big one for this area, but it was enough to get the family outside to play in it.

Happy Holidays …

The East Coast is bracing for a winter storm — hopefully a good old-fashioned Nor’easter. My family is on the way to a Christmas Party in New Hampshire this afternoon, but we should be able to time our return to make it back before the weather gets bad. Here’s the map we’re looking at as of 9:45 AM:

This Morning's Weather Map. Created with Weather Defender (http://www.weatherdefender.com)

Looks like it will be a fun day! The National Weather Service forecast for today predicts between 7 and 13 inches of snow. Hopefully I’ll get some good pictures.

Here’s the NWS forecast:

Tonight: Snow, mainly after 10pm. The snow could be heavy at times. Low around 20. Blustery, with a north wind between 11 and 20 mph, with gusts as high as 38 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of 5 to 9 inches possible.

Sunday: Snow, mainly before noon. The snow could be heavy at times. High near 23. Blustery, with a north wind between 15 and 21 mph, with gusts as high as 32 mph. Chance of precipitation is 100%. New snow accumulation of 2 to 4 inches possible.

I’m going on a solid month now integrating a MacBook in to a real enterprise network where real work needs to get done and where, like it or not, Windows is the dominant operating environment. As I’ve discussed previously, I found the overall experience of the switch to be relatively easy, with a few hiccups along the way. But as I get deeper and deeper into trying to get my daily work done I am finding more and more quirks about the Mac that just make things difficult.

To disagree, a bit at least, with Mark Crump, the Land of Apple isn’t all “rainbow-farting unicorns frolicking in meadows.” As both he and I discovered, there are some issues which appear when you are a minority Mac user within a great sea of Microsoft products. And I will preface my further discussion by admitting that I work in a very Mac-friendly environment. Sure the official builds and the underlying infrastructure is all Windows-based, but in a largely academic/research environment like the one in which I work, ignoring other operating systems just isn’t possible. So unlike most enterprise users, I have an official “Research Computing” arm of IT to which I can turn for all kinds of help with my Mac. Need instructions on setting up Apple Mail to work with Exchange — it’s on the Research Computing website. Ditto for Entourage. Want Entourage to connect to the LDAP server so you have some semblance of address checking like in Outlook — that configuration is posted too. Samba shares? Yup — every corporate server has one. So all-in-all I have it easy as far as Mac users in the enterprise go.

But there are still some quirks.

Printer Support

Even with all the underlying support at work, connecting to printers is still a pain. The most infuriating part (for most of my Mac colleagues at least) is that one needs an IP address to connect to any of the enterprise printers. Trying to find their share names via their print servers just doesn’t work for some reason. Many of the Mac users give up printing at this point, thinking that finding an IP address is too hard. But here’s a little secret to make it easy with no calls to the Helpdesk: ask a windows-using colleague to print a test page on the printer to which you wish to connect. The printer’s IP address is usually right there in the middle of the information printed on a standard Windows test page, somewhere by the port information. In fact, you can often identify Mac users around my office by the Windows printer test page we all have hanging in our cubes in case we need to re-map a printer.

As far as home printer support goes, I am having an even harder time. I have a Lexmark X7675 all-in-one at home and no matter what software I download from Lexmark or what I try, I cannot print to this machine with my MacBook. I can see it on the network, but I just can’t print.

Overall, printer support in Leopard has proven frustrating for me, though I am able to get my work done thanks to the Windows XP desktop I also have in my cube and the printer test page trick.

Entourage is not Outlook (reprise)

I said this before and I’ll say it again. Entourage is a pale facsimile of Outlook. I finally couldn’t take it anymore — I have now ditched Entourage except for quick offline e-mails, and am running Outlook in Parallels cohesion mode (on Vista Professional) as my day-to-day e-mail client. What a relief. My rules work again, my calendar updates free/busy information quickly, my messages are colored & highlighted, and I have my beloved Sperry Attachment Save add-in and Auto-archiving working again so I don’t clog up my mailbox with junk. It’s like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. Add to this my corporate configuration for secure access without being attached via VPN and I am a happy e-mailer again. Perhaps I’l come back to the Mac for e-mail when Microsoft releases Outlook for the Mac in late 2010, but until then, good-riddance Entourage and Mac corporate e-mail.

What really broke the camel’s back for the e-mail thing was Entourage’s lack of support for tables. Seriously … there are a lot of tables in corporate e-mail, and yet Entourage can’t create tables. Unbelievable.

Oh, and a special message to all the Mac grumps who constantly lament Microsoft’s implementation of HTML e-mail formatting in Outlook and insist on berating anyone who uses it: f’ you! War’s over and you lost; HTML won, so get over it. If you’re that insistent go back to using Elm, Mutt, or Pine and leave the rest of us alone.

That Infernal ‘delete’ Key

I’ve mentioned this before: the ‘delete’ key on a MacBook is really a BACKSPACE key. And this becomes more apparent in Windows, like when trying to delete e-mail in Outlook via the reading pane. The secret in Windows is that ‘fn-delete’ makes the ‘delete’ key work like a ‘delete’ key should. Please, Apple, label the key correctly and call it a backspace key. Pretty please?

How Do You Survive Without VBA?

Seriously? How does anyone get any serious analysis done in Excel without at least occasionally having to program a custom function. If only to simplify the syntax that other users may have to deal with when entering complex formulas. Just the other week I helped someone who was building a large spreadsheet that needed to parse a string in some cells. He had a formula that looked like: =IF(ISERR(FIND(” “,H2)),H2,LEFT(H2,FIND(” “,H2)-1)). He was hoping to get other people to use the sheet. I was able to turn that into =FirstTextBlock(H2,”") using simple code like this, which I wrote in 60 seconds while eating a pastrami sandwich:

Public Function FirstTextBlock(strSearchIn As String, strDelimiter As String) As String

FirstTextBlock = Left(strSearchIn, InStr(strSearchIn, strDelimiter) – 1)

End Function

Isn’t that much cleaner? Over the years I have written some very useful and complex functions in VBA, including a whole automated Sales forecast linked to Salesforce.com that laid out a dashboard of custom graphs and included deferred revenue calculations for contract maintenance functions. All with the push of a single button (don’t ask why Sales didn’t just do this inside Salesforce.com — that’s a whole different story.) All of this just isn’t possible on a Mac. Shameful.

OmniGraffle Isn’t Visio

OK, this isn’t really fair. From what I’ve seen playing with the demo version OmniGraffle could be a better Visio than Visio. But, I’m just not used to it and I really don’t feel like putting in the hours to learn the program. So, for 99% of what I need to do lately, which is mocking up web page designs to discuss with developers, I use Balsamiq Mockups. People can argue all they want about what the right method is for mocking up page ideas, but for me Mockups works. And as for tools like Axure, well, let’s see: Axure = $589, Mockups = $75. Done and done … Mockups it is.

So there you go … 1 month under my belt with the Mac. We’ll see if it continues to be unicorns and rainbows.

It's Winter Here in Massachusetts

The other day I watched a show on Food Network about the 2009 World Chili Championships, in Reno, Nevada. Over the course of the hour I learned a lot about what sacrifices people make for “competition chili” versus regular chili. Like having only three hours to get everything cooked and insisting that the finished chili be smooth and absent any chunky tomatoes, onions, or peppers.

Kind of like bar-b-que, there are probably as many chili recipes as there are chili cooks. The International Chili Society, which conducts the World Championships, has an interesting rule: each year’s winner must publish their recipe so the rest of the world’s chili cooks can see what won. No secrets! That’s pretty cool.

I looked over some of the winners and realized that my own personal chili style kind of fit the general championship theme: rich chili pepper base; minimal green peppers and onions; and real beef cut into small cubes rather than ground beef.

But I also realized that many of the winners worked through various rituals and additions of ingredients that simply made no sense to me — they must be based on superstition rather than actual experimentation. So using some of the recipes I found on the Chili Society’s website as inspiration, I decided to adapt my own chili recipe to see if I could come up with something good.

My basic thinking:

• Chili peppers should form a rich base. Chili powder should be home made as much as possible.
• The tomato base should be strong and not watery.
• Meat should have “tooth,” that is, be bite-able and chewable, not mushy like over cooked ground beef.
• There should be a complex heat, but not mouth-burning.

So here’s the recipe I came up with.

Ingredients

• 6 dried ancho chili peppers¹
• 2 dried cascabel chili peppers¹
• 2 dried arbol chili peppers¹
• 2 special dried hot Hungarian peppers²
• 1 T cumin seed
• Kosher salt
• 2 lbs. sirloin, cut into 1/4 to 3/8 in cubes²
• 4 slices smoked bacon
  
• 1 – 2 T Worchestershire sauce
• 2 cans Ro-Tel tomato & chili pepper mix
• 1 can tomato paste
• 1 15 oz. can beef broth/stock⁴
• 1 15 oz. can chicken broth/stock⁴
• 4 cloves garlic, minced fine
• 1/2 C green bell pepper, chopped fine
• 1/2 C white or yellow onion, chopped fine
• 1 – 4 T light brown sugar
• 1 -2 T masa harina (fine ground corn meal) or corn starch (to thicken if necessary)

Preperation

Build the Chili Powder Base

1. Heat your oven to 325° F. (Or optionally heat a cast iron skillet on the stove top on medium-high heat.)
2. Spread the chili peppers on a baking sheet.
3. Toast in the oven for 10 minutes, or until dry and fragrant.
4. Remove peppers and let cool. Turn off oven.
5. Spread cumin seed on hot tray, and return to  hot oven for 5 min. (oven is off — residual heat will roast seeds).
6. Remove stems and seeds from peppers.
7. Crumble peppers into spice grinder in two separate batches:
8. In one batch, grind cascabel, arbol, and hot hungarian peppers (this will be HOT chili powder)
9. In other batch, grind ancho chilis
10. Grind toasted cumin seed

Brown the Beef

1. Chop the bacon into small pieces and place in a pot over low heat. Cook until crispy and the fat has rendered.
2. Add the beef, being careful not to crowd the pot. Add a pinch or two of kosher salt and let brown.
3. Remove to a separate bowl.

Sweat the Base

1. Add more oil/bacon fat to the pan if necessary, and dump in the onions and peppers. Add a pinch of salt.
2. Cook until translucent, stirring occasionally (~10 min).
3. Add the garlic and stir for another minute.

Bloom the Chili Powder

1. Add most of the ancho chili powder to the pot and stir (I reserve about 1 T in case I need to adjust the seasoning later).
2. Add the ground cumin (again, reserving some to adjust seasoning later).
3. Add between 1/2 and all of the arbol/cascabel chili powder (to taste — the more the hotter the final chili will be).
4. Keep stirring for a minute or two until the whole mixture is fragrant.

Begin the Simmer

1. Deglaze the pan by adding one can of beef stock and turning the heat up to high.
2. Stir to release all the fond from the bottom of the pan.
3. Return the meat to the pot.
4. Add the Worcestershire sauce, 1 can of Ro-Tel, and tomato paste. Stir.
5. Bring the pot to a simmer, and let cook for 2 hours, stirring occasionally, and adding chicken stock as necessary to keep everything covered and loose in the pot.

Bring it Home

1. After 2 hours, add the second can of Ro-Tel.
2. Adjust the salt as necessary.
3. Simmer for an additional 30 minutes.
4. After 30 minutes, add the brown sugar, one Tablespoon at a time, until the desired sweetness is reached. (I usually use 1 – 2 T total).
5. Let cook for another 30 minutes.
6. After 30 minutes, thicken with either cornstarch dissolved in chicken stock  or straight masa harina.

Notes

¹ I usually get my peppers from Penzey’s Spices, at http://www.penzeys.com.

² I don’t know the actual name of the peppers I use. Many years ago my father and his friends brought seeds for these peppers to the US from Hungary on one of their trips home. My family (I’m actually the only one left) has been growing them ourselves for at least 40 years. They do very well in northern climates. They are about 4″ long maybe as thick as your pinky finger when fully grown, and turn from a dark green to a rich red. When green they are very hot. When red they are nearly unbearable. When dried they put other peppers to shame. The closest thing I can commonly find is a Thai chili. These peppers are legendary among my friends who appreciate hot food.

³ You can use many cuts for this. Competitive chili cooks appear to have nearly universally standardized on tri-tip as the meat of choice, but I tend to go with whatever my butcher or supermarket has on special. I’ve used general sirloin roasts, top sirloin, or whatever. I stay away from any stew meats or chuck roasts for this.

⁴ Lately I seem to be using Swanson “Stock for Cooking,” but any quality broth will do.

It’s been about a week now since I traded in my trusty Dell / Windows Vista PC at work for a new MacBook. I have accumulated a few additional thoughts on this transition.

Entourage is not Outlook. This is an understatement. Entourage is a poor substitute for Outlook and Microsoft should be utterly ashamed of themselves for allowing the Mac Office suite to ship without a proper corporate e-mail client for this long. I have finally read that Microsoft will be releasing Outlook for the Mac in late 2010, but come on … to go without a real corporate e-mail client this long is a traveshamockery! What’s missing in Entourage? For me, primarily the ability to effectively manage my e-mail via Auto Archiving, using the setup I wrote about here. Entourage has no real archiving capabilities, and it can’t even read .pst files, so my old Outlook archives are worthless. Holy crap, Microsoft … if you’re going to use a non-standard format (PST archives) for one of your flagship products, at least have the decency to support the format in the rest of your stuff. (And I know I can use programs like EEAX to archive messages in Entourage, but it’s still a pale imitation of Outlook’s built-in capability.)

The other thing I miss from Outlook is the ability to color-code messages based on parameters. In my case, having message where I was in the “To” address come in colored vs. messages where I was only CC’d.

I miss my HDD activity light. I never thought it would be that important, but I really miss seeing the blinking drive light telling me the system is at least doing something. I can’t tell you how often I think the Mac has frozen. Maybe I’m just conditioned to Windows and Mac people don’t ever think that the system has locked because it rarely does … but I still need some reassurance. The HDD light is like my Windows security blanket; as long as it’s blinking, I know my little machine is working.

One Note & Visio, I miss you too. I’m sure there are Mac equivalents for these programs — maybe even better ones. But right now I miss both of these programs enough to be extra thankful for Parallels so I can have them running. Especially One Note. And I know many people say that OmniGraffle is better than Visio, and they may be right. But I am much more a technical drawer than a creative drawer, so Visio works great for me.

Ability to Run Internet Explorer. I know, I know. Firefox is my default browser for all things personal. But in my work life I am a Product Manager of a web-based tool that is used by a large community held hostage to Internet Explorer for various reasons. So I need to run IE to test this site frequently. Currently, Parallels allows me to do this, but going through the trouble of installing a virtual machine and a whole second OS is something that even most moderately advanced users aren’t going to do.

Parallels Desktop kicks ass! This is one well designed piece of hardware and running Parallels on it is truly a pleasurable experience. If one is willing to go through the very minimal hassle necessary to install Parallels and a second OS, the payoff is well worth it. Hell, this MacBpok runs Vista Ultimate as fast (if not faster) than my Dell while running OS X and Mac applications. I am truly impressed.

What the f*&k is a ‘COMMAND’ key? I know it’s been around since the dawn of the Apple personal computer, but let’s face facts … the ‘CONTROL’ (‘CTRL’) key won the war. Like VHS vs. Beta, one is victorious and the other deserves to be thrown to the dustbin of history. ‘COMMAND’ and the little clover symbol had a good run but it’s time to pack it in. Hell, even Homer Simpson figured out what the ‘CTRL’ key did.

The backlit keyboard and auto-dimming screen are great. As someone who types on dark trains a lot, I am very appreciative of the auto-dimming screen. On dark sections between train stations the screen doesn’t singe my retinas, but when we pull in under the lights, it brightens so I can still see it. Brilliant! It took a bit of time to get used to it, but now I think it’s an awesome feature.

That’s my take after a week … I admire the Mac very much as a piece of well designed hardware. But I’m not sure I’d spend my own money on one. Honestly, though most things work well enough, there isn’t really that much less tweaking required for the Mac versus a PC. I’ve had a great time configuring virtual machines and other features over the last week, so the idea that a Mac will just come out of the box perfectly equipped for anything you might want to do is complete rubbish. In a real corporate world, you’d better be prepared to tweak it.