I had a hiatus in posting for nearly a month. The first writer’s block was I was so angry with the turn of politics in our Nation that I couldn’t cogently write anything about what was going on because that turn was what was laying heaviest on my mind. Some of the other folks that I read have got the subject pretty well in hand. Somehow they have a mental wall that I just can’t build right now.

The second writer’s block was that I didn’t want this just to be a blog about cooking. I got away from that but am bringing back what I was going to post just after the American Holiday of Thanksgiving. That is why this is titled “The Ghost of Turkey Past”. The title too reflects on the fact that we had turkey for Christmas. This latter one though was just roasted in the oven.

We elected to have Texas Pit BBQ smoked turkey for Thanksgiving. My Christmas present for last year (2019) was an Old Country Pecos model offset horizontal smoker from Academy Sports and Outdoors. Apparently this model is exclusive to Academy as it is not listed on the Old Country BBQ Pit website but information with it indicates that is who makes them. It is better than an Oklahoma Joe’s but certainly not one of those $1,000+ units. I did do some modifications to it such as sealing the cooking chamber lid with red silicon, putting a spring tensioner on the firebox air inlet, and sealing the firebox lid.

There the smoker is loaded with some of the pecan wood my son-in-law gave me for this particular cook. I laid a fire in the firebox and then used my “Lighter” to get it started. I was a Boy Scout however I was not about to try to light this with one paper match with is a feat that I have accomplished in the field.

Lighting the fire is sort of fun. That “Lighter” sounds like a jet engine running. And actually it is rather like a little ram jet engine. After getting the fire lit I filled the water pan and closed the doors on this machine to let it get up to temperature. The target temperature for this effort was 250 to 275 F. Once I got there I needed to let the cooking chamber soak at temperature to stabilize. After about 30 minutes with “Blue Smoke” coming from the chimney I put the prepared bird in the cooking chamber. This is what I believe “Blue Smoke” looks like:

I had prepared the turkey earlier with a simple rub of salt, restaurant grind black pepper and garlic powder after washing and drying it. The goal is to give the meat you are smoking some basic seasoning from the pantry but the real seasoning is the smoke. Because Mrs. BillB does not like heavily smoked meats, the smoke time for the turkey was to be limited to about 2 to 2 1/2 hours to get the smoke flavor but not too strong of a flavor. An hour or so into cooking I took a peek to check on the turkey; it was looking good. From that peek, I determined that I would have to go the full 2 1/2 hours before “pulling” the bird and putting it in the kitchen oven to finish cooking. Here it was at “pull” time:

I put the bird into a 275 F oven on convection for about another 2 hours. I had a thermometer in the breast and was looking for 165 F internal temperature. When it got there, the bird was removed from the oven and this is what we had:

We accompanied it with cornbread dressing, mashed potatoes, roasted brussel sprouts, cranberry jelly, cranberry salsa and some nice wine. The smoke flavor was just right and we had a great Thanksgiving Dinner.

Bon Appetit

BillB

I was thinking of posting about SpaceX today after what they were supposed to do over the weekend. I am a fan of SpaceX and their efforts to lower the cost to get to outer space, the Moon and Mars. But to my disappointment Space X cancelled their Falcon 9 Starlink launch yesterday evening so I decided not to post on that subject. The Silicon Graybeard has an excellent article on the current state of things SpaceX.

So what to post about? Ah, ha! We have an over abundance of fresh fall tomatoes from our 2 (yes just 2) vines we planted last spring. We almost pulled them up in August but there were a few late summer tomato scraglers. We (Mrs. BillB and I) decided to turn them into tomato sauce for pasta. So here goes the first (or maybe last) “Cooking with the BillBs” (hat tip to LSP).

I forgot to get a picture of the 24 plus tomatoes we had prior to today but here is a picture of today’s haul with one addition:

There isn’t going to be any peel in this sauce so we had to set about peeling these things. We used boiling water and an ice bath to loosen the skins and then stop any cooking with the additional outcome of making them easy to handle. Quite a pile of tomatoes, if I dare say; I weighed them and there are about 5 1/2 pounds.

We used our basic pasta sauce recipe that we created probably 15 years ago to take care of a bunch of fresh tomatoes and fresh basil using what was on hand in our kitchen at our little ranch of the time. In addition to the tomatoes we use olive oil, onion, garlic, sweet basil, oregano, dry vermouth, salt and black pepper.

We sauteed the onions, garlic, sweet basil, oregano, salt and black pepper in the olive oil. Next the pot was deglazed with a 1/2 cup of that cheap vermouth. Then we tossed in the tomatoes. Brought the whole mess to a boil and took it down to a simmer.

So after a little while we moved over to the electric burner for simmering as, hey, our propane cooktop just burns a bit hot even on the smallest burner. It had to cook down for a while before being emulsified by the hand blender. Didn’t even have to adjust the seasonings (salt, sweet basil, etcl). Then into containers to cool before going to the freezer.

I do enjoy cooking. I had considered becoming a chef while in high school but events drove me to an engineering degree and the U.S. Air Force. Then again there were some events while on Active Duty that might have forced me out that caused me to consider again a career in fine food service. But things didn’t go that way. So I sit here in the Texas Hill Country enjoying retirement and cooking some of time. My wife is a good cook too though not maybe as experimental as I am. I hope for future installments of “Cooking with the BillBs”.

Another lane I may go down is “Food from Opa Willie” or something similar. Since this is the second marriage for both my Beautiful Bride and I, and my only children are my stepson and stepdaughter whom have me call them son and daughter, we (all of us) adopted the German familiar term for grandfather for me “Opa” since my surname family came from Germany around 280 years ago. To differentiate me from the sausage and smoked meats company in Fredericksburg, Texas I added one nickname from my given name of William.

A point of this post was to experiment with putting pictures in-line in a post. I think I figured it out.

BillB with guest star Mrs. BillB