=Mark

Here's a couple recipes for hot pepper jams and jellies you might want to look into...

My local newspaper restaurant critic has come up with a novel way of dealing with restaurant star ratings; no matter what the review, every restaurant gets 2 stars.

I myself prefer dark meat poultry to the dry as dust, tasteless white meat that I liken more to pasta than meat; it basically tastes like whatever you cook it with. To me, a moist piece of duck cooked until the skin is crisp comes close to bacon on the culinary perfection scale. I will admit I've not had much success cooking duck in my kitchen, so I might have to try Alton Browns method for Mighty Duck.

Inspiration from the "Americans don't eat lamb" thread coupled with this morning's "Good Eats" episode on cooking duck lead to this post. According to AB the American per capita consumption of duck is 5 oz. I know I contribute about ten times this in my favorite Thai restaurant alone. Still, most folks are reluctant to cook duck at home. Why?

Many of the butchers around here will take a leg of lamb and slice it into 3/4 inch thick steaks that are excellent grilled. A local Jamaican place does an excellent curried goat, which is a lot like lamb but even more tender.

I have to add that a couple years fighting with an el cheapo H2O smoker can aid one in a crucial aspect of smoking: fire control. Jmcgrath sold me my first el cheapo Brinkmann (known as the "ECB" on the smoking lists) 5 or 6 years ago when I was first getting interested in smoking. To paraphrase, he said that anyone can get a Weber Smokey Mountain (WSM) and immediately start cranking out good BBQ without much effort, but to struggle with an ECB which lacks any air intake control requires you to be more attuned to the elements and aspects of burning charcoal and wood while maintaining an optimum temperature and degree of smoke. You have to learn to be proactive as there are wide lags between adding fuel and wood and the resulting temps and levels of smoke. You have to learn by trial and error such things as when you go from a thin whisp of bluish smoke to no smoke at all that one of your wood chunks has caught fire and you better get on it before you get a 400 degree temp spike. Once you've beaten your head on an ECB smoker for a couple of years you can REALLY appreciate the graduation up to a WSM. The control of the air intake as well as the knowledge of smoking with proper fire control really enhances the experience. So, Klink, jmcgrath... You guys up to an EGCI class on smoking?

Don't know when you consider to be "night before the pickin" (Many folks seem to be arriving in Raleigh on Friday, which would make the night before the event to be Thursday), But Rich and I will be in DC on thursday evening, and will be arriving in Raleigh on Friday afternoon. Would be game to meet up with folks in DC on Thursday or to hit up a NC joint on Friday...

I'll have to second the Thuman's recommendation. Luckily my market sells them loose so I can purchase them fresh as needed and not get stuck with a months worth to go bad in the fridge until I'm in a dog mood again and don't feel like driving to the local Windmill.

Can of Campbells pork & beans. fry up some cubed Schaller & Weber double smoked slab bacon and onions and the P&Bs are almost paletable!

When you give out the URL of eGullet to folks do you just give them the straight www.egullet.com or do you give the URL that links to the forums? I've given the vanilla egullet.com to folks and have had them not find the forums.

Who are these people? The link is more sex! I don't know, I clicked the link and I didn't get any sex.

As stone said, keep that puppy in the smoker until it hits at least 190. Prior to that fat and collagen are still rendering out. Regardless of time and temp, an easy way to gauge doneness is to stick a standard issue dinner fork in it and give a twirl. If it turns easily the hunk 'o pig be done. Yank it, wrap in butcher paper, parchment or foil (No foil if it was basted with an acidic sauce), and let rest for 30 to 45 minutes. As far as pulling it I've found an excellent tool is one of those cheap hard plastic pasta utensils, the ones that have sort of a claw like end for pulling long pasta out of a pot (Pulled 8 smoked pork butts at once for my son's graduation party). Hold firm with one hand and shred away with the pasta claw, you can finish a butt in just a few minutes and you get nice chunky shreds, not that dog food texture of over worked pulled pork.

Something has come up and it looks like I won't make this event after all, but hopefully between the NJ and NC pig pickin's I'll still get to meet everyone!

In the original test, Scoville blended pure ground chiles with a sugar-water solution and a panel of testers then sipped the concoctions, in increasingly diluted concentrations, until they reached the point at which the liquid no longer burned the mouth. A number was then assigned to each chile based on how much it needed to be diluted before you could taste no heat. I've not found a mention of what they rinsed their mouths with I find this interesting in that they start out with the strongest solution then work their way through more and more dilute solutions. I have to wonder about their accuracy as the tasters within a session as well as over a period of time would nessesarily develop a resistance to capsaicin which would skew the results as time went by.

That may be difficult as the signature of the heat can vary not only between chiles but with the same type chile given varying degrees of ripeness as well as varying growing conditions during different seasons. As Alton Brown is known to say, that might have to be a whole other show...

A fun and interesting meal can be had at Hee Been Korean restaurant in Alexandria. It is one of the more authentic Korean/Japanese restaurants in the area. The only real drawback is a very extensive menu coupled with a waitstaff that can be somewhat underversed in English. It would be helpful if there were someone who understands the nuances of Korean cuisine, but it is still an adventure to muddle through, especially with a large group that will allow extensife sharing (Though I know you're not into that, Rosie ). We had a memorable time with the lettuce wraps & multiple fillings as well as cooking our own meatss and seafood on the Hibachi.

Bourdain commented on this in Kitchen Confidential, something to the effect of "Bathrooms are expected to be seen by the customers, and are easy to clean. Kitchens on the other hand are not usually seen by the customers, and are difficult to clean." You do the math.

Another instance of politically correct butchering processes gone mad. It's bad enough that they are breeding ridiculously lean hogs that result in pork that is dry and flavorless. To counter this they then proceed to inject the pork with up to 12% water, brine and god knows what else. Then they go and trim off whatever porcine piggy goodness remains.

I can always depend on a pint of Ben & Jerry's to satisfy my craving for dioxin.

I've dried and smoked peppers to preserve them. Depending on the local weather conditions most thin walled chiles may be just left on a hard surface and allowed to dessicate over a week or more. This is why ristras of chiles are made in the southwest US. Thicker walled chiles such as Jalapenos may have to be sliced in half lenthwise and seeded to prevent spoilage. They can be helped along by placing in the oven at low heat with the door cracked open with a metal utensil (Note, oven drying of very hot chiles may require thorough ventilation). I've smoked Jalapenos in my Weber Smokey mountain smoker, just load it up with lump charcoal and wood chunks as with smoking any meat, and place halved, seeded chiles on the cooking grate (I place an expanded metal pizza pan on the grate to prevent any sacrificial leaps thru the grill) I place a piece of foil over an empty water pan as the idea is to dry the peppers without scorching them. Keep the temperature no higher than 250 and let the smoker go overnight. The next day you will have dark, leathery chipotles which are OK for storing, or further dried via the oven if one wants to grind them. I suppose you could do the indirect smoke on a kettle grill but I've not tried that. Another method of preserving chiles is by soaking in alcohol, this has the added benefit of yeilding a spicy liqueur that can be used for drinks and in cooking. For over 5 years a group of Chileheads have been meeting at the Bowers Chile Pepper Festival and imbibing in a drink they invented called the Lemon Drop, named after the Lemon Drop Chile grown and sold by Jim Weaver's Mennonite farm that hosts the festival. It started with a bottle of Bacardi Lymon Rum into which are added a handfull or 3 chopped lemon drop peppers. Ice is added to a glass, then a lemon or lime wedge is squeezed in and dropped in, The Lemon drop Lyman rum (Steeped overnight) is added, then it is topped off by a splash of sprite... A group of Chileheads at Bowers enjoying their Lemon Drops: In Bermuda the standard preservation method is to keep the chiles in a jar/bottle of sherry. The sherry is terrific in soup and the peppers are good in almost anything, having both the sherry and the chile flavor. I use dry sherry, but one could also use Chinese rice wine. To make any of these alcohol preserved chiles, pack the washed and stemmed chiles into a glass container; fill the container with the alcohol of your choice and cover. Most any Chile can be preserved in Vinegar, but one has to be OK with the vinegar flavor that will be imparted to the chiles. It is a good idea to pierce or slice the chiles to ensure penetration of the vinegar inside the pod. Preserving chiles in oil is somewhat problematic in the chiles are not acidic enough to prevent spoilege and risk contamination by botulin toxin (Anyone else out there been to those trendy restaurants with the herb infused olive oil that looks suspiciously like something is growing in there? ) Since it would be difficult for the average home cook to determine the acidity of any given batch of oil, the safest way to achive this would be to thoroughly dry the chiles before adding to the oil. Since the 3 nessessary things for the growth of botulinum are an oxygen free, low acid environment and moisture, removal of all water from the chiles by oven drying will prevent any nasties from messing with your preserved peppers. I don't have a sweet tooth, so have not personally experimented with jams or jellies, but I have found a site with a ton of recipes. Check out Pepperfools Recipe Links.

Call me Fred! I've not noticed that taste, all I can say is poke around until you like a particular sauce and then go with it. My fridge (Yeah, typical single guy fridge; full of stuff to go on food but no actual food to speak of) has more than half a dozen different hotsauces so I can vary according to my mood. My favorite sauce outright for a few years has been Hoboken Eddie's Mean Green with roasted jalapeno and lime juice.

Franks is a good Louisiana style hot sauce, but my favorite of the cayenne style sauces is Tapatio. I know it is a Mexican sauce, not a Louisiana sauce, but it is a cayenne style sauce which I feel has better heat and spices with less of a vinegar aftertaste than Tabasco. At 79 cents for a 5 oz bottle it's a great deal too (Though I did see the same size bottle for sale in a New Orleans hotsauce shop for $6.95)! The Crystal "Double Hot" sauce is also good if you can find it.

I think the idea that pleasure + a little pain = more pleasure has been around for quite some time in various forms. Frankly, over the years, the more tolerance I get for capsaicin, the more I find it actually enhances the other flavors. Capsaicin and ginger, for example, work together better than alone. Whether this is due to endorphins or pure adaptation, I don't know. I've at least convinced myself that its not just that I'm getting better at tasting through the "heat", but that the other tastes actually ARE stronger. I could be fooling myself. I don't know. There's also an element beyond that which is even harder to explain. Sitting down to a nice bowl of TOM YUM GAI and just breathing it in... who can explain that? I've found that lime juice also enhances the heat of chiles. This is brought home whenever I sit down to a nice platter of Larb...

I've given extended BS stories on this depending on how much I wanted to string someone along, but there's a rather simple explanation. Back in the mid to late 80's I hung out on local electronic bullletin board systems (BBS). They acted much as the forums on the web do today. I found that putting special symbols in front of your user name helped to make it easier to find your posts, and would sometimes even bump them to the top of the queue with some software. I started with a hyphen, then when other folks started using that I switched to the equal sign. After a few years it just started to become a "handle," and so it remains...