All Iowa Dinner

The other night we decided to have and all Iowa grown dinner. We bought pork chops from Iowa raised pork, sweet corn from Adel, and zucchini from Kathy's mom's garden. We threw it all on the egg and it turned out very tasty.

I rubbed the pork chops with Plowboys Yardbird rub and a little black pepper.

I put olive oil, sea salt, and black pepper on the zucchini.

As you can tell from the look on Graham's face, he thoroughly enjoyed the all Iowa dinner!

Sunday Evening Gumbo

I like to make a big Sunday night dinner and this week's menu was Chicken and Sausage Gumbo. I started off by smoking two Andouille link sausages and 4 chicken thighs on the egg.

Once I had the egg going with the meat, I started on the roux. I combined cooking oil and flour to make the roux which cooks for 4 minutes on high heat and then you reduce it to medium heat and have to constantly stir it for 15 minutes....15 minutes doesn't seem like a long time but try stirring for 15 minutes, it seems like an eternity. Next you mix the roux and chicken broth together and then you add onion, celery, okra, salt, pepper, crushed red pepper, chicken, and sausage. Once everything is combined it needs to cook for about 5 hours.

I finished it with wild rice. Great flavor and very filling, I'm now in a food coma as I type this.

Borderline Brisket Disaster

I decided I was going to do a brisket Friday to get ready for a competition in KC next month. I got a large brisket from Costco and trimmed it and rubbed it Friday night for an overnight smoke. When I fired up the egg it was very calm outside and there was NO wind. Because of the conditions I opened up the air flow gauge more than I normally would to allow the egg to get up to 230-240. I put the brisket on about 9:30pm, checked it about 10:45, and everything was looking good....235 degrees.

I woke up around 3:30 to howling winds outside. I ran down to the deck to check out the temp and sure enough the wind had raised the temp on the egg all the way up to about 700 degrees. I have no idea how long it had been this hot but the internal temp on the brisket was 235 degrees, about 45 degrees over what I wanted it to be....boy did I have some choice words for the freaking wind.

To salvage the brisket I took it off the egg, wrapped it in foil with Head Country Marinade, and let it rest for about 2 hours. To my amazement, it didn't taste too bad although it was a little on the dry side.