Nick

No camping trip is complete without cans of vienna sausages and potato sticks.

Sorry, Katherine, but many years ago (many, many years ago) my grandmother put a can of brown bread into a water bath to heat it. She'd always done this, but this time she forgot to punch a hole in the top. End of the can blew off, resulting in brown bread all over the ceiling. This is a true story, not a myth.

Tuna fish sandwiches. Wonder bread, Miracle Whip, and canned tuna in oil. Bring some Velveeta to make tuna melts in the toaster ovens.

In all fairness I have to say that the help at SOB were nice people. It's a case of the owner being too tacky and too greedy. As an example, when we went to buy beer on site there was only Miller or its derivitives. Since I can't stand Miller, I asked the counter person why that was. She said the owner of SOB also owns the Miller distributorship for the area and wouldn't allow any other kind of beer to be sold on site. She was helpful in directing us to the closest off-site store with a wider selection. But, plastic Pedro was lucky that night.

Pedro's lucky he didn't get his balls shot off on our way out.

A cup of "Miso-Cup", a plum, and an Alessi garlic breadstick.

Right. We stopped because we'd seen so many cars back here in Maine with the bumper stickers. While we weren't expecting the Hilton.... I guess other people have since discovered its unique charm as I haven't seen a bumper sticker from there in the last couple of years.

?????

John Hiatt's got it down.

South of the Border is the worst place I ever stopped at. A friend of mine and I stopped in there coming back from fixing my father's house down in the Keys after hurricane Georges. The room we'd taken for the night stunk of some kind of chemical they used to clean the rooms, the windows wouldn't open, and the restaurant we ate at had a "prime rib" that wasn't much more than a step above shoe leather. About midnight after having had drunk a significant quantity of beer after all this, unable to get a breath of good air in our room, and pondering our options, I thought about taking my father's old Springfield which we were carrying back to Maine (as well as a case of M2 machine gun ammo that fit it - every fifth round a tracer) and shooting out the lights on that giant sombrero that dominates the whole place. Common sense overtook us and we bailed out, hit the road around 1 am, and booked it to some motel we found in Virginia. After sleeping all day we got up and from the thing in the motel room went to Wagstaff's restaurant that was advertised. About a six or seven mile drive down a regular two-lane road we came to Wagstaff's. It was one of the best places I've ever eaten at on the road . A salad bar that I've never seen the equal of and pick your steak to be char-broiled. Server comes by the table with a cart and two loins - one a rib-eye and the other a strip. Asks which you want and how thick you want it. Then he asks what time you'd like to be served. Dynamite! Sure beat the county jail fare I would have been served if I'd shot out those light bulbs on the sombrero. Katherine - You ready for a road trip?

Get one of those rentals on wheels like Varmint's doing for his "Pig Pickin'."

Varmint- 900 miles in 13 hours is averaging nearly 70 mph! I've gotten a bit more sedate than in the old days.

Katherine, Now you're putting me on the spot. I've been kind of hanging back thinking about how far it is from Maine to NC. It's a hard job to get me to go Portland, to say nothing of all the way to Raleigh. It's still aways off before this happens so there's plenty of time to think about it. Now I've got to get back to smoking some (wild) deer whole tenderloins. Been in the freezer too long and it was finally time to do something. Smoking isn't proceding as smoothly as I'd like. Never buy one of those Brinkmann "bullets". To put it in plain terms, they're a piece of shit. But, I'm still thinkin" about Varmint's get-together. It's going to be the egullet event of the year down that way.

FG - Interesting you mention that. Rebecca Charles was just on NPR's Weekend Edition with Liane Hansen. Audio available after noon today. Here's the link.

All good observations. I don't do much smoking (Klink has to get in here), but I have been designing and building wood-fired heaters since 1975. The most interesting change (to me) you propose is, "2. A thermostatically-controlled damper in the flue; I think this would even out the temperature changes a little." Take that and go beyond to electrically connecting that to a servo driven firebox air intake and it could be interesting - though if it worked right it would take all the "fun" out of having to constantly watch things. Don't know as a vent control between the fire box and smoker would do much. Have to wait to see what Klink thinks.

Steven, I think you should give up going to law seminars for awhile. Could this be translated as - It's okay to do anything within certain bounds and others should not make a big deal out of it?

Hangover?

Good info, Alan. If the castings are now now stable through a range of temperature change (700F), then that could well be the problem - people high-firing right away with no break-in. My experience is with masonry heaters/ovens and they have to be broken-in with several low firings to get rid of moisture. If I were to get one I'd probably skip the tiles as they could always be a future source of problems, particularly if they're out in the open exposed to the elements. Edit: Fifi mentions silicone as a bonding material, but I'm not sure there are any that can take the temps these cookers can reach. The soapstone heaters and ovens my customers build use water glass (sodium silicate) as the bonding agent between the stones. I'm not sure if this would work with tiles though.

Barley miso. Haven't been using miso much lately - like ten years. Back when I was into it I liked the corn miso made by South River. Got some Erewhon miso (barley) in the cupboard that's going on thirty years old. Just dug it out and had a taste - it's getting pretty dried out. Taste is now more salt than flavor. Guess I blew it.

Last night I went to the Kamado link given by Jason and noticed this under the history section at the site - "A major component of the U.S. made Kamado was a ceramic mineral that contracted with heat, allowing for a zero coefficient of expansion. The mineral came from Rhodesia; however, in the early 1970’s the U.S. put an embargo on all imports from Rhodesia. Efforts to find a substitute formula failed, and production of the Kamado was discontinued." Underlining mine. Perhaps they have still not found another ceramic material with a zero coefficient of expansion. With a significant differential in expansion between the foundation ceramic and the tiles, it would take an amazing joining compound to keep the tiles in place. Just my .02.

What??? Got a pic?

Since this has come up I've gotten to wondering if it doesn't have something to do with the table cloth. Like skewing it one way or the other. (We always ate with a tablecloth - usually white linen at the more celebratory dinners.)

Right of course. Would have been something if we'd used Euro ways and he'd had to reach all the way across himself with the fork held in left hand.

Not really. But, when I was growing up my father sat to my left at the head of the table and if I chanced to have my left elbow on the table I would soon receive the tines of his fork to remind me of proper manners.

Add me to this small uncultured group. Somehow eating this way seems more deliberate and thoughtful of whatever it is that you're about to put in your mouth; rather than always having fork and knife at the ready for another shovelful. I always eat this way, even in the company of those more of the "proper" etiquette set. They can always shrug their shoulders and assume that I'm from some far off Province - which I am.