Pigdog Jr. recently completed his course of study and received a degree from one of the Portland area culinary academies. Combine that with Christmas, and I had a rare opportunity to provide this youngster with his own (reconditioned) Weber One-Touch Gold kettle as a combined graduation and Christmas gift.

Over the years I’ve collected more grills than any one person really needs, and since the kegs came along I use the Weber kettles less and less. What better way to put one back into circulation than by passing it along to a new generation of outdoor chef?

Judging from his reaction, he is a very happy camper tonight. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to see what he learned at the culinary academy in the very near future…

As far as I’m concerned, the great frozen-meat-from-the-back-of-a-truck experiment is a bust. Although tonight’s meal was declared a success by the family, I was not impressed with the ribeye steaks. They were cut too thin, and were a bit on the tough side. Once again, the quality of the meat from the experiment was all over the map.

I have to admit they weren’t the worst steaks I’ve had by a long shot, but they were just average as far as ribeyes go. I’ve had much better success recently by purchasing a full ribeye roast and carving my own steaks. At least the taters were up to par…

I also got bonus points for cooking SWMBO’s steak the way she likes it. I figured that well done wasn’t going to be a crime with these steaks, so I might was well rack up some goodwill with the wife.

So far it looks like that was a good plan…

Last Thursday Pigdog and I snuck into Northern California when the authorities weren’t looking in an attempt to relieve the natives of some of their excess food. We were following up on rumors that there was to be a gathering of the BBQ Brethren in backyards and parking lots, complete with all the normal excess of cooked meat that generally accompanies gatherings of this clan. Along the way we scouted out potential sites for future gatherings. This one had some nice grounds, but the bathrooms were a bit small and difficult to get to…

This one was another possibility, but we didn’t like that there was still a pumpkin on the porch several days after Halloween and the possibility of being mistaken for the former residents and being egged by ex-employees. Or current ones, for that matter…

So we wandered into the hills of Pleasanton and followed the smell of suckling pig stuffed with fruit. This turned out to be a good plan as we ended up in the backyard of Brethren Marty with a bunch of other hungry folks and a spread that included not only the pitted pig but also some heavenly pastrami, BBQ paella, outrageous cole slaw, to-die-for cheesecake, spinach balls (who knew?), and a bunch of other stuff that was trotted out over the course of a very entertaining evening. Oh, and beer. Really good beer. Fortunately, Marty invited his neighbors, and a good time was had by all (although there appeared to be a few folks suffering the next morning). I’d love to show pictures, but my hands were greasy from pulling the pig and no cameras were harmed during the course of the evening. Besides, what goes on in Pleasanton stays in Pleasanton.

Saturday found us in the parking lot of Greenleaf BBQ in downtown Livermore. Somehow Tim from Greenleaf BBQ had convinced his fellow merchants to let us take over the parking lot again this year for purposes of charring meat, drinking beer, and telling tall tales. Apparently they have short memories. According to Sir Porkalot the the day went something like this:

• 1:30am – Unloaded 1200lb smoker (with a little help from a winch, wench?, no…winch)
• Cheese & Ale soup with crusty bread
• Beer
• Ribs – Style A
• Stuffed pork tenderloin
• Beer
• Ribs – Style B
• Spam Sliders – simple but amazing
• Beer
• Ribs – Style C
• Sliced open my index finger
• Beer
• Beer
• Chicken with Habanero Death Dust
• Beer
• Tri-tip stuffed with sausage (I can’t make this stuff up)
• Beer
• Ribs Style D
• Beef Ribs
• Beer
• Brisket empanada (I think)
• Mac & Cheese
• Pulled Pork
• Beer
• More soup
• Breakfast type Fatty
• Fatty with Habanero Death Dust
• Beer
• Beer
• Another Spam Slider (oh yes I did)
• Brisket
• More Habanero Chicken
• Beer
• Ribs Style E
• Sausage Bread (wow)
• Whole beef tenderloin (filet mignon) with a Lobster/Scallop magically inserted in the middle and topped with Bearnaise sauce, and of course…wrapped in bacon
• Beer
• More fatties being passed around
• Another tri-tip shows up
• Water
• Oh what the hell…beer
• Mixed berry Cobbler

I wasn’t there at 1:30 in the morning for the smoker unloading, and I didn’t match him on the beer drinking, but as near as I can remember the rundown of the menu looks pretty accurate. And as near as we can determine, none of his finger ended up on anyones plate.

As expected, there were a variety of grills in attendance again this year. That’s Pigdog standing behind the Easy-Up looking fondly at JB’s grill. That grill was by far and away the most prolific of the day; I think JB cooked enough for all of us all by himself.

The UDS on the handicap parking emblem was presented to Landarc BBQ (Bob, of Bob’s Brew and Que fame for all the assistance he has given to other Brethren over time. This was a real work of art, all the way from the extra-large welded air nipples right down to the custom wood-carved handles.

The CrockaQue also made the trip again this year, and although nowhere near as impressive as Bob’s custom UDS and JB’s monster meat machine still managed to hold its own. After all, where do you think those Spam Sliders came from?

Now how does one follow up a couple of days like that? Well, in our case we joined our good friends Rob (Into the Flames, currently distracted by his Red Boat Fish Sauce venture, more on that in a later post), Bob (Landarc BBQ, mentioned above), Tom (aka Big Butz BBQ), and Matt and Charlotte (from Phat Matt’s BBQ in Oakland) for lunch on Sunday at Mission Chinese in San Francisco. We’ve heard a lot about this place, and I have to say it more than lived up to expectations. If you ever find yourself in San Francisco with a hankering for Chinese BBQ that is not run-of-the-mill, get yourself down there and have some Thrice Cooked Bacon. And some Kung Pao Pastrami. While you’re at it, add some Sizzling Cumin Lamb and Spicy Buckwheat Noodles. For those of you that like hot food, don’t miss the Mongolian Long Beans. And although we didn’t try it, the Smoked Beef Brisket is also supposed to be very good. All I can say is that this is not your ordinary Chinese food, and it’ll put a look on your face like this:

The rest of Sunday was a bit of a blur; bakeries, driving over the Golden Gate bridge, a bizarre Applebee’s experience that I won’t recount in detail. We’ll leave that one by saying that dessert was free after all the other festivities. Who ever heard of bruschetta anything without tomatoes?

Yesterday was all about driving home via the coastal route. Highlight of the day (food-wise) was lunch at the Samoa Cookhouse. If you ever find yourself in Eureka, make time to have a meal here. Don’t worry about what you are going to order, they’ll tell you what you are having to eat, and there will be plenty of it. Plan on sharing, but don’t worry about running out of food.

The low point from a food perspective was the McDonald’s we ate at in Reedsport, OR. All I can say is that their bathroom is fairly clean, or at least it was before I got finished with it. And no, I didn’t order a McRib.

I’ll finish with proof that although I likely gained a pound or two on the trip, I still have a way to go before I catch up with this guy…

Another night, another batch of take-and-bake pizzas. Might as well get caught up with an overdue post from the weekend…

On Saturday, a group of bloggers, Tweeters, and other social media misfits got together in Oakland (CA) for a meat-up at Phat Matt’s BBQ. And what kind of a meat-up would it be without, well… MEAT! Pulled pork, brisket, and smoked tri-tip for starters…

And for the record, there were homemade side dishes besides the sweet potatoes in the above picture.

Not shown in the picture above was the mac and cheese. That particular photo wasn’t decent enough to make the cut and appear in the blog. But it was more than worthy of being consumed. And in case anyone is concerned that the first plate of meat looked a little skimpy for several folks, there were Pig Nuggets as well.

In order to give a scale comparison for the next few pictures, here is what my first serving looked like on a platter that was at least a foot wide.

Those Pig Nuggets were served on a platter of a similar size. And if you are wondering about Phat Matt’s ability to cook them to perfection, perhaps this picture will help.

But wait, there’s more. The clear star of this meal was the plate of not-so-short beef ribs.

To do justice to these, here’s a picture of Sir Porkalot branching out and working over one of these monster dino bones. And in case you were wondering, that’s BBQ Grail and your’s truly in the mirror. I’m the one that was too lazy to stand up…

Since I have a reputation to uphold, I finished off one of these myself. I offer up the following as proof. And again, for scale purposes, notice the spare rib bones in the upper right of the plate.

Now if these pictures don’t convince you to stop by Phat Matt’s BBQ for a meal next time you are in the Bay Area, don’t forget that Charlotte makes desserts from scratch. We dined on two different types of pig candy, and naturally there was cobbler (both strawberry and peach). I would have included pictures of the desserts, but they all disappeared too fast…

A great time was had by all that showed. I won’t mention those that chose to be elsewhere for whatever reason; I figure it was their loss, not mine.

I was going to title this post “The Evolution of Grilling and Yet Another Use for Leftover Pulled Pork”, but ultimately decided to go with Odds and Ends, a title I might use again in the future when I have stuff I want to talk about that doesn’t necessarily warrant a post by itself.

First up is an infographic from Become.com called The Evolution of Grilling that was brought to my attention by one of their contributors. She said nice things about my blog, so I’m not sure how closely she follows it, but the infographic was interesting enough to reproduce here. Click on it if you want to see the bigger version at its original location…

It’s been an interesting few days. The family is back with me now at the lake while the remodeling of our home continues. I didn’t think it warranted a post of its own, but we did have pulled pork salad rolls on their first day back. It seems they were tired of seeing pictures like the one that follows when they are hundreds of miles away from home…

And finally, today we found yet another use for leftover pulled pork, although it isn’t a happy topic. Cocoa, the resident No Excuses BBQ mascot and wonder dog with wacky ears had to make an emergency visit to the vet this morning. The initial diagnosis is that she will be seeing more vets later in the week as she has been diagnosed with what they think is Cervical Stenosis, also known as “Wobbler Syndrome”. Essentially this is a spinal cord compression that makes it very difficult for her to walk and (if this is truly what she has) will likely require surgery to correct. She’s home today and is taking steroids until she can see a specialist (who knew they had dog neurologists?).
At any rate, hiding the pills in the pulled pork made for one of the easiest pill-giving sessions I’ve ever experienced in all the time I’ve owned pets. Works better than peanut butter, and isn’t near as messy.

But I’ll be darned if I’m going to cook up a couple of butts just for the dog…

I read. A lot. And, not surprisingly, a lot about grilling, barbecuing, and cooking in general. I subscribe to over 75 bloggers’ RSS feeds for outdoor cooking alone, belong to several barbecue and grilling forums (where I spend a lot of time lurking, and less time commenting these days) and click on links daily from the thousands of folks I follow on Twitter and have “friended” on Facebook. On top of that, folks I don’t know will forward things to me now that I made it a bit easier to contact us. So now that I have a bit more time on my hands, I figured I’d start passing some of the more interesting (at least to me) things that I find along to the rest of you.

Today I was pointed at an interview with Steven Raichlen by Julia at TheBrowser.com. Each day in their FiveBooks feature they interview an expert – a scholar, artist, politician, journalist, or other eminent figure – who recommends and discusses the five best books in his or her field.

Their interview with master griller Steven Raichlen was quite informative and very interesting. He discusses why brown tastes better, and how our primal urge to play with fire helped us evolve, as well as points out five more books that sound like they are worth the read.

So jump on over and check out the interview when you get a few minutes. And while you’re there, browse around the site a bit and see if there is anything else that interests you.

I know that’s what I’m going to be doing later this morning…

No, don’t queue the Monty Python music, this isn’t that sort of quest. No killer rabbits (but perhaps some killer Welsh rarebit, if we’re lucky), no Spam (except what shows up everyday in my Akismet queue), and (unfortunately) no juicy food porn pictures tonight. Tonight is about waxing philosophic about things BBQ (and helping out a friend).

Larry over at The BBQ Grail is on a quest for The 25 Undeniable BBQ Truths (no, he isn’t missing, so we don’t need to look for him). Things like “BBQ doesn’t come from a crockpot. Ever.” Or perhaps “the only gas associated with BBQ is what you get after eating.” Or for our friends from a certain region in the South, “BBQ is pork, only pork, and will never be anything but pork.”

Regardless of who you are, I’m sure you have your own “BBQ Truth”, so stop on by and leave Larry a comment. Who knows, maybe he will decide that Welsh rarebit should show up on a 4-Ingredient Challenge…

I’m going to ramble a bit while you gaze upon the chicken I had for dinner. This wasn’t NSFW chicken, but a variant that used Simply Marvelous Pecan rub and Big Butz Original sauce. This was as good as the NSFW chicken, but I couldn’t come up with a catchy name for it. It was served with a fresh rosemary version of trashbag potatoes that didn’t turn out quite as I expected. This was likely due to using the bottom of a bag of lump charcoal; the pieces were pretty small which restricted the airflow in the BS Keg and created a lot more smoke than desired from chicken fat drippings. And for those that like pictures, here’s another.

I suppose I could also blame things on the distraction that occurred when some guy with a freezer in the back of his van pulled up in the driveway and wanted to sell me some meat. He distracted me from tending the fire. And I bought some beef from him as it looked pretty good and was a great deal. If it doesn’t kill us and tastes good, I might even write a review about it.

Speaking of reviews, I was originally intending to write a review on an iPhone/iPod/iPad app called GrillStar for tonight’s post, but got distracted by some other happenings that I feel the need to speak about. I’ll save the GrillStar review for a future date; for those that can’t wait for a review, go check out the one Larry from The BBQ Grail wrote a couple of weeks ago.

My biggest distraction tonight was following up on an issue I stumbled across quite by accident last night. A site that shall remain nameless (I don’t want you going there even by accident) was copying my blog posts in their entirety on their site and calling it “news”. They didn’t properly attribute the posts and were in clear violation of my CC license in that their site exists for no other purpose than to get advertising click-throughs. I say that as further examination revealed that there were no original posts on the site that I could find other than the first “Hello World” post. Which isn’t very original, if you think about it. Every post was a blatant copy of some other blogger’s post with what little attribution there was hidden in the small print at the very bottom of the page.

Long story short, I alerted Larry from The BBQ Grail about this (actually I asked him for his opinion on what he would do, and it turned out some of his content was there without his permission as well) and together we sent cease and desist letters to the site owner. The content has since been removed from the site and their Facebook page (which pointed to their site, not ours for our content). Well, all but one on Facebook. Looks like I still have some work to do…

Now some of you might be thinking that this would be good publicity for the site since there was a link to my site at the bottom of each post. Au contraire; an examination of Google Analytics showed that I got exactly one referral from the site in question in the past year. Before that, their site wasn’t active. On top of that, people were commenting on their fan page in Facebook about my posts. Of course, there were no responses because I had no idea that the comments were there, and the site owner had no way to respond as they appear to be pretty clueless about what we actually do.

I suppose I could go into a long rant about theft of intellectual property, question the ethics and thought processes of someone that takes content that isn’t theirs and tries to make a few bucks off of it without providing any additional value whatsoever, and doesn’t even have the decency to ask first if it is ok to use my content. But I won’t.

However I will issue a warning for any others out there like him that I will take the steps necessary to protect my content. I don’t mind others linking to it, writing reviews of it, commenting on the blog (although the comment spammers are a story all by themselves for another day), or even taking excerpts of it to put on a BBQ news/blog/articles reference page. I don’t ask for much, but at least have the decency to have the click through to the full article show up here where the content originated. Or at least ask me if you aren’t sure what you are doing is allowed by my CC license.

And you should know if it is you I am directing this at. Here’s a clue: if a link to your website doesn’t appear somewhere in our links or on our site, then this may be directed at you. If you go to our site, select all, copy, then paste into your own site and we haven’t spoken first, then I am definitely talking to you. If you use a bot to do a similar activity to the one just described, then you fall into that same category.

I do this for the fun of it, but that doesn’t mean someone else is free to profit from it just because I have chosen not to do so at this point. I may change my mind in the future, and that is my prerogative. Until then you might want to consider asking nicely first if you aren’t sure what you are doing might piss me off.

And I know how to find you; you aren’t as anonymous as you might think, even if you don’t publish contact information on your site. Rest assured that I will follow up as necessary to protect my content.

Finally, it turns out I have lots of friends that use social media. They all seem to share my viewpoints on this topic, especially as they all have their own original content that they value. Next time I might decide to not be so nice and go ahead and name some names.

I’m sure they will be more than happy to spread the word…

It appears someone actually reads this blog (or at least looks at the pictures) and feels it is good enough to be included on a “Best of” list. In this case, someone at the Guide to Culinary Schools has included us on their “list of 50 of the most tender, finger-licking, good-to-the-bone barbecue blogs out there”.

I have to admit we are in good company on the list. Most of the 4-ingredient challenge bloggers are listed there along with some big names in the business, many of which you will see links to over on the right side of the page (you may have to scroll down a bit to see them, but trust me, they are there). So when you have a minute, drop by and check out their list.

And thanks for stopping by. We probably don’t say it often enough, but it makes it easier to keep doing this when you know someone is actually paying attention…

The BBQ Vacation is over, but there are still stories to be told. I’m not sure how we managed it, but the BBQ Brethren in attendance were all rounded up and posed for the group shot above. As you can see from the big smiles and droopy eyelids, most of us were well into a meat coma when this picture was taken.

And before anyone thinks that the only thing cooked was a Crock Lobster, let me assure you that there were plenty of other grills and a lot of other food. What follows is a representative (but not comprehensive) pictorial essay of a lot of fun that happened last Saturday.

The Bash was held at Blacksmith Square in Livermore, just outside of the Green Leaf BBQ shop. Tim and Carrie were nice enough to host this madness, and we repaid them by doing things like this to the inside of their shop.

Outside the shop were an array of pellet poopers, Big Green Eggs, and pizza ovens. Oh, and a WSM for good measure…

One of these days I should probably invest in a camera with a wide angle lens. I seem to remember mentioning a pizza oven and a WSM…

Phat Matt was nice enough to bring his Klose, and then proceeded to spend most of the day cooking. So much for his day off…

Some of the goodies that came off the Klose included some killer babyback ribs and grilled oysters…

… and a 9-foot sausage cooked during a rainstorm.

There were other cookers there as well. There was a pellet-pooping UDS (Ugly Drum Smoker) with a Rib-o-Lator and some killer pork tenderloins.

There was a “standard” UDS and a Weber kettle in attendance…

The Weber kettle saw a lot of action; I got pictures of tri-tips…

… and some veggies. I saw some grilled pineapple on it as well, and it wouldn’t surprise me if it got used for some other grub as well; it seemed to be in use most of the afternoon.

There were beer-can chickens cooked on a Primo or Kamodo Joe (not sure which, and unfortunately didn’t get a picture of it). Here’s a shot of one of the chickens backed up by some monster grilled-and-filled mushrooms.

There was brisket…

… and pulled pork…

…and duck carnitas with guacamole (a whole story in and of itself)…

… and a fried cheese curd contest (the Wisconsin cheese curds beat the California cheese curds; so much for happy cows).

There were side dishes as well, such as Macaroni and Cheese…

… Burnt End Potatoes…

… and Sticky Pickles and Cherry Bombs. Oh, and those four pans of cobbler. Mustn’t forget the cobbler…

And lest anyone think there was a meat shortage, put those thoughts out of your head. There were short ribs…

… and a wonderful, heart-stopping concoction called a 3BGB.

There were a lot of other goodies that I didn’t get pictures of, such as fatties, tri-tip chili, burgers from GrilliantIdeas, spicy chicken wings, and grilled peppers. But I did manage to get a shot or two of a tender moment between Tom of Big Butz BBQ and Charlotte from Phat Matt’s BBQ.

I’m sure there were flowers and a field there somewhere…

Now I wonder how much I can get to remove these from the post?

As you can see, a good time was had by all. As well as serious food comas. But the story doesn’t end just yet…