Last Outdoor Meal Of The Year

It has been a long six months with many challenges although we did have somewhat of a break during our European adventure.  But the weather was beginning to change and I knew that this was going to be our last meal outside with our new furniture that we had purchased earlier in the year.  There was such a cloud cover and the chance of rain that we didn't even need our beautiful umbrellas.

I decided to try out our smoker that we had purchased earlier and use it to smoke some ribs, salmon, chicken and grill some corn on the cob.

there is always a problem when you have two people in the same "kitchen" with different ideas of how the SAME meal should be prepared.  Needless to say, things went south pretty quickly in regard to the new smoker and how to actually smoke something in it.   I'm looking at the temp saying...ok...cool.  Let's do this....:-).

Usually, I would slow cook something in the oven and then "finish" it on the grill.  This was different in that the whole thing was supposed to be "smoked" until it was cooked at a low temp in the smoker being basted every thirty minutes.  I used grapeseed oil to season the inside of the smoker because it can handle high heat temps.  I decided to use unfiltered apple juice to baste the meat with.  

I had two types of wood that had been soaking all night in water.  One was Mesquite and the other hickory. This little smoker box contains the Mesquite chips.

We had some huge chucks of hickory that I asked hubby to split down a bit smaller for me.  This is a hughe stock pot full of it.  I had no idea how much food I thought I was going to be cooking, but I certainly didn't want to run out since this was to take several hours.

The meat had been prepared the night before with a "rub" that I put together with some lemon juice.  But the meat seemed to me to be cooking awfully fast for it to be a 'smoker"; key word being "smoker" and not grill.
At this point, they should have been pulled off and finished in the oven since adjusting the vents and smoke stack didn't keep the temps from rising as high as 450 degrees!  Good thing I had a pitcher of water near by!

You can see the flames shooting out of the thing.  Well, needless to say... they DIDN'T come off the "grill" and they were not nearly as tender as what I have made in the past.  The smoker was so hot that I even had trouble grilling the chicken, but the salmon which only took about 4 minutes came out just fine.  If you like salmon that is....:-(.  I don't......

Our guest seemed to be ok with all of it.  We had a huge selection of salads that they brought with them as well as a rice and broccoli casserole.  Fresh made ice tea is always a good thing.  We talked and ate; ate some more and talked some more when the rain began to fall.  

We scurried to get everything back into the house and settled in for a warmer, dryer environment...

Thus ended a very interesting day of using a new "smoker/grill/ inferno" thingee.  Everything will go into our storage area for the winter and the garden will be stripped to the bones bare until our return from Canada some time next year.

See you on the road back to the great "North Wet".......