marinade

Ughh! Two days not enough! Since you're starting in Brookings, check out Brandy Peak Distillery if you're into spirits. http://www.brandypeak.com/ In Newport, just south of the bridge on the west side of 101 is a pretty good seafood house/shack with a big crab cooker out front. Sorry, but the name escapes me at this time. In Lincoln City there's Barnacle Bill's and Mr Bill's Village Smoke House for tasty smoked seafood treats. It's been a while, but I enjoyed the Bay House. And a friend highly recommends The Blackfish Cafe. http://www.oregoncoast.org/pages/dining.html Cannon Beach is home to two related brew pubs. Warren House Pub in the south end of town offers up some tasty smoked seafood. I also always stop in at Ecola Seafoods. I'd also have to recommend stopping off at McMenamins' Edgefield. Truly unique. http://www.mcmenamins.com/index.php?loc=3 ← Great stuff, thanks for the tip on the distillery. I wish we had more than two days but we're doing a lot milage. We have three major parts of the trip over nine days: The Oregon Coast, Portland-Willamette, and Seattle. Any one of those parts could be worth a week. Thanks again , Mr. Bill. Jim

Trader Joe's @$5.99 per pound (cryrovac). Made some perfectly acceptable pipikaula from it.

I saw that after I zapped it out. Pulling the rug out from under merchants is not so unique to RTM. Out in the burbs we have a collection of Farmer’s Markets or maybe the term Fauxmer Markets is more applicable in the light of the fact that there are no real farmers actually participating in them. One such case occurred when the management of Albrecht’s Farmer’s Market (Narberth/Penn Valley) pulled the lease out from on all of their clients at the same time. This was a small market with a little over half dozen merchants, some doing well, and some struggling. Management had worked out a deal with someone who would occupy the entire property. Less fuss with just one lease and one rent check. The merchants were on a month to month lease. Two of the merchants rebounded back with storefronts elsewhere but most of them just lost a piece or their entire livelihood. Turns out the new client pulled out of the deal at the last minute and the market stood idle for a few years. Some merchants were dropped when the Ardmore Farmer’s Market moved across the street in Suburban Square. As much as I hate to say it, most folks will just keep shopping and most folks will keep eating steaks.

The last of chains? Yeah right. To RTM's management way of thinking - things go better with Coke. At least the hints to the markets direction are far from subtle.

From one of Foster's RTM neighbors, Kitchen Kapers is looking into that site and loosing the demo area.

The same holds ever so true with fish. Back to topic. The real sleeping giant in all of this is still Whole Foods. That giant will awake with a booming voice when it opens on 15th and Vine ... with a food court ... with parking... and within a few walking minutes from the convention center. While conventioneers will still find it convenient to walk across the street to grab lunch, some of the non-lunch vendors are going to take a hit. What could evolve is a quirky food court with Amish earrings, that is the food purveyors become ornaments. To be perfectly honest, RTM is not a lunch stop for me. I like the choices when I'm there but in the last few decades I can't say I've tried every single one of them. I miss the fact that I can’t get a good liverwurst sandwich with choices of that German pate since Freidrichs left. Cheese steaks I can get just about anywhere, the same with hoagies, falafel, breakfasts, and burgers. RTM floor space is a precious commodity. I can’t help but wondering if somewhere someone made somebody an offer they couldn’t refuse. Jim

Rumor has it's Kitchen Kapers without the demo kitchen according to one of Foster's RTM neighbors. Jim

What I'd really like to get my tongs around is a pound of Yukon King River Salmon. It has a two week availibility according Kwikpack. A friend of mine sent me a link to his new fishmonger in Chicago Dirk's Fish. I was on the phone to Samuel and Sons to see if I could land some. That's one pretty salmon. They do, and I'm heading down to grab some, film @11:00. Jim Edited to update

Thanks grimrod! May be a possibility for lunch. We'restaying in Florence that night so I'm planning about 5 meals on 101 for two days (one of thejoints is B&B). But I'm thinking a lot of oyster snacks along the way. Maybe we'll look at Newport for dinner.

Hey Sara, Thanks for launching this topic. The info is coming in real handy. In October my wife and I will be flying to SFO and then begin a drive up the coast starting at Bookings Harbor up to Astoria. We'll be spending about two days on the coast and then we plan to loop back through the Willamette wine region while using Portland as base camp. We’re continuing along the Columbia and up the Cascades and will be hanging out in Seattle for a few days before flying outta there. So keep the recommendations coming gang. Thanks in advance, Jim

I love it! - Done! I flashed the idea by Fred Pirkel and he seems to think the magnet's strengh (5 lb. pull) would be okay. In fact he's developing and testing a new module with a magnetic cradle. What were some of the early warming signs (if any) did you notice? ← It just died - It wiped one of the ICs. The one I've got now I'm going to put a 1" wooden spacer between the magnet and the transmitter. ←

Be careful with the magnets on your Procomm transmitter - I killed my first one doing the same thing. Oh yeah - here's my rig ← Awesome rig! I'd take your logo and add: " Smoke 'em all. Let God sort 'em out!" ; ) I flashed the idea by Fred Pirkel and he seems to think the magnet's strengh (5 lb. pull) would be okay. In fact he's developing and testing a new module with a magnetic cradle. What were some of the early warming signs (if any) did you notice? Jim

My first smoker was a Brinkman charcoal fired cheap-o. It was ok, but there was no way to really regulate the temps. I used it a few times than just got rid of it. Later I bought a WSM and it was a revelation to me. A wonderful device for smoking all sorts of things in all sorts of weather. I respect rigs like marinades. And I know people who use guru's with their WSM. But to me, a guru is overkill. I have no trouble maintaining a good steady temp in the WSM just by using the vents and being aware of wind and ambient temps. I am always happy with my results. I look at the weber virtual bullet site and see all the modifications guys have made. I enjoy looking at them, but for me, it works just fine the way it came ← Mike, You and I are pretty much on the same page about running the vents and external temps and winds. I would run the Bandera to cook everything from sweet peppers, fruit, fish, and all types of cue. What got my imagination up about this rig was it's ability to hold low temps for long periods of time. I had a chance to grab a Meadowcreek TS-60 cooker. You can see it here I had to pass on it because of it's width. In other words I would have to take down a fence (including poles) to get it in the yard. I opted for this rig to play outside of the 'cue arena with things like jerky, bacon, bratwurst, and even messing with variations of chipotle and pimenton' along with smoking cheeses. I can use this as a curing cabinet without smoke (and heat) and can even run it indoors to do it.

They are, what these guys have done is to develop mod/adapters for these and other cookers.

I’ve had a New Braunfeld Bandera for about 14 years before the sucker rusted open (not out) and finally I had to give it up. I’ve repainted it a number of times but I needed bricks to keep it shut. I was at the Mid Atlantic Barbecue Expo last April and had wandered into the parking lot during the night where a few of the barbecue crews were setting up and cooking. I brought a bottle of single barrel bourbon and my 5-string and was looking around to see what trouble I could get into. During the night while we were passing around the sacraments, ‘cue, bourbon, and bluegrass, I ran into “Shotgun” Fred Pirkel, who is an engineer and owner of a company that designs and manufactures thermal couplers. Besides being an ardent fan of the late great Ernest Tubb, he also designs a device called the Barbecue Guru along with a line of smokers. The “Guru” is a module with two probes that will alligator clip onto the grate of a smoker (PIT) and the other into the meat (Meat). This is more than a temperature probe; the module also controls a fan that will stoke the wood or coals of the smoker. If you set the PIT temperature on the unit to 225oF. Once the temperature is sampled by the unit, the fan stops and the cooker is choked. It resample’s again after a few second intervals and if the temp has dropped it stokes the heat. The probe into the meat is a really cool feature. If you set the internal temperature of the MEAT probe to around 165o to 170o, and the unit is set to “RAMP” mode, the internal MEAT probe will take over the choking/stoking process. The temperature range will hold from 60o to 400o F with the lower end 90o suitable for cold smoking fish. In fact you can use it to cure by just running the fan without any fuel in the fire box. It runs on AC but I’ve seen a number of these units at BBQ competitions that they are running off car batteries and small generators. He makes these units to couple to other cookers like the Big Green Egg and the Weber Smoky Mt and others. Now for the smoker. The Caldera Tall Boy is designed to be a “knockdown” wood cooker. It racks restaurant supply 13x22 size so if you need extra racks, they’re not proprietary and you can use full or half pans as water or grease pans. It’s bolted together with brass thumbscrews and it took me all but 20 minutes to assemble without tools. It’s double insulated and its cover also adds a third layer of insulation to make it even more fuel efficient. The mods I’ve done to it (besides the Fast Flames) was to mount the control unit on to a horseshoe magnet so I can put it any where I want on the unit. I cooked a Berkshire pork shoulder (from Heritage Foods) over pecan wood and charcoal last Saturday. It was perfecto. Here's the site BBQ Guru Jim

FWIW, there's arestaurant in Louisville by the name of Park Place on Mainhangs their charcuterie in their wine cellar (even after some of it has been smoked). Jim

$1,500 is about the price they'll quote you for hard drive data recovery and it can get meaner.

Ditto on that. I use the same software to back up via wifi to an HP Media Vault. It's painless. I lost my laptop during a New Year's Eve dinner when a glass of champagne tipped into it. I had hooked the laptop into my audio system to play music and a guest wanted to hear some Miles Davis and the mouse nudged the glass the wrong way. Could have been coffee or wine at a restaurant. Notebook hard drives are notorious for failing accidentally or mechanically. It's not about replacing hardware, it's about replacing lost hours and a lot of your thinking that went into them. Now I'm doing daily backups with weekly incremental s on DVD's.

Ditto on the these two: Both of them are years ahead of their time. The Palladin book is getting rarer. It's first (run) printing was only 3,000. At that time the publisher thought he would be stuck with extra copies according to Palladin. Grab it while you can. It's getting harder to find than early issues of Art Culiniaire and it's that damn good. Another sleeper in my collection is: In Madelines Kitchen by Madeline Kamman. Jim

I'm thinking that would cause some texture issues. As water content in muscle tissues expands during freezing it can break the cell wall leaving a puddle of liquid in the bag. Some of the newer vacuum sealers on the market will allow you seal wet. Like this one for example : Food Saver. Those steaks do look like choice eating. Jim

I went through a similiar situation with no shows and last minute cancellations for two of the dinners I hosted. I was sold out early on and even started a waiting list, yet on top of that I still had holes after I negotiated with the restaurant to jam in more seats. I even sent confirmations to the attendees. It's not fair to the restuarant, the host, and the folks who would have come if there was room. These type of events are fueled by trust and the for the most part do work fine on that. As far as the final cost of the event - get confirming snail or email fom the restaurant with a cut-off date for the market order. I wouldn't host an event without it even if the restauranteur is my long time friend. Jim

Hi Gabe, About a year ago the Dangerous Dinning Club hosted a cassoulet dinner at Caribou Cafe with Chef Olivier De St. Martin. I emailed him yesterday to find out what he likes and what he actually uses. Here's his response: We had about 40 people turn out for this, some of them are part of this discussion board. Hope this helps.

Oh hell Gabe, get the #11 bag and scale up. Cassoulet: It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Hi Gabe Try Assouline & Ting. Jim

We were at the Four Seasons a few weeks ago to celebrate a batch of February Birthdays. I was looking at their computer reservation system and not only did they have a layout of the room they also had a lot more data toys to play with.They have a customer data base in place that can tell you how often you've eaten there (dates and times), the times you cancelled, the times you no-showed and what you ate and drank. If it's like any other data base it can sort to phone numbers and a service of res buying could be picked up over time. Jim