Becky and I truly enjoy smoked foods. During the spring and summer months, I can be found on weekend mornings smoking a pork shoulder, a beef brisket, or a few racks of baby back ribs. My 9 hour smoked Thanksgiving turkey is always a winner. There are some rules when smoking that, through trial and error, I’ve learned: do not smoke with too much wood, do not over smoke, and last but not least, be patient.

Well, we are in the winter months and even though I am in the South, the lower temperatures are not always conducive to firing up my Brinkman on the deck. So I turn to my stove-top smoker.

After watching Emeril Lagasse use the Cameron stove top smoker on his show, I bought one.



This one is actually my second smoker. I found them, ahem, Becky told me, that they are ridiculous to clean. And I mean she really, really, complained. I couldn’t blame her. The soot would “glue” itself to the bottom of the drip pan and I found that the smoker would warp. After it warped, the top would not completely seal and, for all my efforts, I got a smoked filled kitchen. I bought a second one after Becky decided to circular file the first. I kept the rack and drip pan and I now use them to cook bacon in the oven. It is perfection when it comes to separating the bacon from the grease. No paper towels needed.

One day, I’m sitting in my “easy chair” and my wife walks in and asks me to help her remove a package from the car. She tells me how sick-up-and-fed she had gotten with the Cameron smokers and the cleaning of them. She had purchased a new one. Okay. I am skeptical. Emeril can’t be wrong, can he? She can just use more elbow grease, right? No, she decided that there was another solution and it even had Emeril’s name on it, so she trusted it. So began the saga of the new cast iron stove-top smoker. It is a multitasker, so Alton would be proud, and it allowed me to whip up this weekday dish of smoked rainbow trout. Follow the link to check out the recipe and the smoker.

Read more »

Chicken is an extremely versatile protein. I like to smoke whole birds and breasts. I like to smoke the breast meat and create chicken salad from it.

When it comes to the dark meat, in pieces, I like roasting as the best method for cooking. There are no worries concerning the meat drying out as the dark meat is very forgiving and chicken seems to really absorb whatever flavors I impart either from a rub or a marinade.

With this dish, I simply combine fresh garlic, lemon, and rosemary to develop a truly simple and tasty dish.

Read more »

To me, anything with cheese is good.

The inspiration for this dish came from me having to eat the last bit of orange cauliflower and broccoli. I always like a nice cheese sauce on those veggies, but this time I decided to get, what I considered, more creative. So I toasted up some croutons, then layered the veggies in a dish, topped with cheese sauce and Panko bread crumbs, fired it and devoured it.

Read more »

One of the nice things about living in the south and being from the north is that, to me, it really never gets all that cold here. Well I can neither say that for the last couple of weeks in December this year nor for the first couple of weeks in January. It has gotten to be bone-chilling cold, well, at least for this demographic.

We eat a lot of soup during the cold months. Actually we eat in during the warm ones too, but more so in the winter. I always look for the BOGO (buy one get one) specials at the local supermarket on Campbell’s Chunky soups or the Progresso soups. So despite having a well stocked pantry with a variety of Chunky soups among others, I decided to try my hand at making a pot of soup each weekend.

This was indeed an experiment that actually turned out pretty well. It was labor intensive, but the payoff was fantastic.

For this soup, I decided to use the cheaper, but extremely flavorful cuts of beef. I chose to use three short rips and a beef shank; a really big shank. I braised them, then I let them sit overnight, and then braised them again. Yes, this isn’t a dish to prepare on a Tuesday night. I started it on Saturday and we were eating it on Sunday, just in time for kickoff.

Read more »

We all are familiar with the beef standing rib roast or prime rib. I really don’t know why they call it “prime” rib because it isn’t always prime. I’ve had several “choice” beef standing rib roasts. I wouldn’t even attempt a “select” rib roast. This, friends, was a pork standing rib roast.

This roast was part of my recent Lobels purchase and it was scrumptious. I mean, the in the pic, you can see just how juicy it was and the texture was completly different than any other pork roast that I have ever had. Actually, I have never even seen a pork standing rib roast. I suppose they all get cut down to chops in my local stores or something.

This was my first experience with Kurobuta pork. Kurobuta is to pork, what Kobe, or Wagyu, is to beef. From the Wiki:

Kurobuta (black pig) is the Japanese term for a breed of Berkshire pig given to Japan by English diplomats in the 1800s. Like the kurobuta’s beef analogues (Wagyu beef) the pork is renown for its superb meat marbling.

When I opened the package I was amazed at the marbling. I am sure that Becky has heard enough of my amazement with the marbling as I was going on about it quite a lot, but I have never seen that kind of marbling in pork before.

I prepared this quite simply with a little herb rub, carved it into about 1 1/2 inch chops, and served it as a part of New Year’s day dinner with Hoppin’ John and collards. It was the sweetest, most tender, piece of pork that I have ever had. I am so glad that I bought two of these roasts.

Read more »