Recovery Underway

Just in time for us to leave town again for another week, the grapes are recovering.

I lost about half of the Foch clusters and more of the Traminette, but the Chardonel and Frontenac still look pretty good. In fact, starting to see some early color on the Frontenac.

Irrigation is required as we have no more than a 20% chance of rain any day for the next 2 weeks.

Some trouble with shingles this week. Not the shingles I usually encounter - I'm talking about shingles that belong on the roof.

There was also one pesky shingle that has been out of place for several years. The need to repair this section prompted me to go ahead and fix everything. Adam says OSHA would not approve.

We are on garcinia watch. The G. uniflora set some fruit last year but dropped them early. This year, I got flowers from G. intermedia as well, and I went to work with my paintbrush. Still holding so far. The G. intermedia did not set any fruit.

Finally, just had to post a pic of the best ribs I think I've every made. Fourth of July ribs on the BGE. Recipe here, but we used Mango Coconut and Blackberry instead of the salted caramel preserves.

End of Winter

The winter of 2017-2018 felt as if it would never end. Plants are 2-3 weeks behind this year, and we finally just got some warm temps last week. Naturally the one year spring is late, the pool opening is early.

Never has the pool been this clean yet this cold.

We have struggled for months with water loss from the pool. After filling it up last week, we came back yesterday to find it several inches down again. I suspected this to be the cause of a persistent wet spot behind the poolhouse. The cattle have absolutely wrecked this ground on the other side of the fence, eventually requiring some fencing reinforcement. Yesterday I found the cause. The fitting on the filter was cracked and dripping water down the side of the filter and right into the drain. It went unnoticed because there really wasn't much of a wet spot on the floor until now. I used a clamp and piece of old hose as a temporary fix, and now a day later, the poolhouse is dry again.

Tom lent us a skid loader and we spread two truckloads of mulch a couple of weeks ago. The late spring allowed us to get much of the mulch down before the perennials came up.

Lisa got the deck cleaned up. My Big Green Egg operation has been pushed to the end of the deck to help keep smoke out of the kitchen.

Big day today - we'll bring some greenhouse plants out. I'm battling some serious issues with thrips, courtesy of a well-intentioned friend who will go unnamed. These plants badly need to get outside and get cleaned up.

Dave's Smoked Salmon

My brother, upon learning I now have a BGE, sent me his favorite smoked salmon recipe. We gave it a go.

The fish is soaked in a brine with bay leaves and maple syrup overnight. Then the next morning you form a "pellicle" on the fish by drying it in front of a fan for 4 hours.

The fish becomes tacky. The thinner parts looked as if they had been smoked already by the time this step was complete - they were translucent and firm. The fish then went onto the grill. The BGE was easy to dial in at 200F.

The recipe says to baste hourly with maple syrup. It took only three hours to get to the desired internal temp of 145F.

Delicious! We'll do this again when Jake gets home. Thanks Dave!

Notorious BGE

For Father's Day I got a Big Green Egg. I practiced a couple of times, then went whole hog on 13# of pork butt. Here's how it went down.

Started with two pieces of bone-in pork butt. They were dried, coated with mustard, then liberal application of butt rub. Then they went into the fridge overnight.

I loaded the Egg with charcoal and fired it up. My one mistake with the Egg was allowing the temp to get too high at the start. My thermometer did a 360 it got so hot, probably 800F. So it took some time to cool it off. I put them on at about 325F and did 1 hour/pound (about 6 pounds each) at 300F. It is crazy easy to lock in the temp on the Egg. My temp didn't vary more than about 15 degrees for the entire 6 hour smoke.

After about 4 hours I wrapped the pork in foil and let it finish to 200F. I didn't add any charcoal the whole time and when I went back out to cook steaks last night, there was still about half of the charcoal left.

The meat pulled off easily. It had a little less smokiness than I would like, so next time maybe more chips or even a few chunks of wood. But these butts made for a great Saturday supper with Shawn and Suzanne.

Tomato mozzarella salad, apple cole slaw, and pulled pork