Why I Voted For The Marriage Amendment

1. I believe that marriage was intended to produce life, and the perpetuation of the human race and thus societies. This only happens between a male and female. I realize this still happens outside marriage, but that does not change the main purpose of marriage.
2. In the same vein, marriage laws exist primarily to protect children. They do not exist to give certain rights or entitlements based on the gender of the couple.
3. One of the main reasons I voted for it is because I firmly believe that homosexuals and heterosexuals who cohabit will still have equal protection under the law. All people deserve that protection, regardless of their identity. If I believed the amendment limited those protections, I would have voted against it.
4. The family, two parents producing children, is the basic unit of society. It is not built on the government or whatever rights it may allow. Without stable families, there would be no society or government. Everyone that exists was brought into the world through this family relationship. Marriage offered further stability to the family. There is a moral restraint in marriage (or at least there used to be) to keep couples from breaking apart and undermining this stability.
5. I also believe in tradition. The reason traditions get established is largely because people realized that living one way works and other ways did not. The ancients found that marriage between male and female offered stability for their societies, and not other relationships.
6. I believe in revelation. God does communicate his will to us, both in general and special revelation. Nature (or biology, if you will) shows that the only life-producing relationship is between male and female. Special revelation, God’s direct communication, tells us that He created male and female, and that the male was intended to take female as a wife.

I think there is some hypocrisy when we as Christians talk about protecting marriage. The problem lies in the fact that the divorce rate among Christians is as high as it is among non-Christians. Since the onset of “no fault” divorce in the late sixties, divorce rates skyrocketed, and that lies at our door. We need to repent and begin standing up for traditional marriage. This is a step in the right direction.

1. BBQ bacon cheeseburger – Ground beef filled with cheddar cheese and Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ sauce.
2. Peppers, onions, and cheese sausage – Mild ground sausage filled with sautéed bell peppers, onions, shredded cheddar, and cream cheese.
3. Spicy pepperoni, bacon, and sausage pizza – Spicy ground sausage filled with pizza sauce, pepperoni, and mozzarella cheese.

Click through to read a description and see some pictures of the process and final product.

I adopted a process that can be found on virtually any meat smoking forum. I began by placing the ground meat in a gallon-sized ziplock bag and flattening it out.

1 pound of ground beef per gallon ziplock bag. Be sure to keep track of which is which!

Then I cut the bag off and left the flattened meat resting on some wax paper. From here it was simply a matter of placing the fillings on top of the meat.

Make sure you don't overfill. You still need to be able to roll it up and keep the fillings inside.

Once the fillings were all in place, I simply rolled up the meat. You can even place it in some plastic wrap and roll it up real tight. This is not necessary, but it sure makes a nice tight roll.

Make sure those ends are sealed up nice and tight. Otherwise you'll have a mess on your hands.

Next comes the fun part: The bacon weave. I won’t explain the technique for how to create the bacon weave. I’ll defer to the very helpful tutorials available found all over YouTube, but this is what it’ll look like once completed.

15 slices of porky perfection.

Once your weave is complete, simply place your ground meat roll on top of it and roll everything up.

An unsmoked rolled fattie.

I made three fatties – as mentioned above – and here’s how they looked before going into the smoker. The BBQ bacon cheeseburger fatty was graced with a nice coating of Sweet Baby Ray’s, something I will definitely be doing again in the future.

3 fatties all lined up and ready to go into the smoker.

I smoked my fatties at around 225 degrees until they reached an internal temperature of 160-165 degrees, which took a few hours. As always, I smoked them with Oak, my favorite smoking wood.

Look real close and you'll see the dual probes for my Maverick ET732 - a must buy.

When the fatties had reached their target internal temperature, I threw them on the grill real quick to crisp the bacon up a little bit. (Of course, this is a breeze on my Smoke Hollow 47180T four-in-one.) This is what they looked like after coming off the grill. They were wonderful!

Doesn't that look incredible? Yes, that is pork fat oozing underneath them.

Conclusion
I had a great time smoking fatties for the first time. I took away a few mental notes from my experience. I will share them with you now:

1. All the sites I checked beforehand insisted on using thick cut bacon. I got mine from the local Fresh Market and paid a hefty premium for it. While it was delicious, I must admit that in the future I’ll probably just stick with something cheaper and thinner from my local Kroger. The thinner bacon will crisp better than the thicker stuff, and I like my bacon crispy (but not brittle).
2. The flavored breakfast sausage I used overwhelmed the ingredients rolled up inside it. I was disappointed, especially with the pizza fatty — I could barely taste any of the pizza flavor. In the future I will use unseasoned ground pork instead of pre-rolled breakfast sausage.
3. The beef fatty with the BBQ sauce both inside and out was by far the star of the show. It went REAL quick.
4. All these fatties were good as leftovers, especially when sliced and pan fried in a little bit of oil.

I hope you enjoyed this blog entry of my latest smoking adventure. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to drop me a line.

A cored out Russet potato. Be sure to keep the core.

2. I chose some very simple ingredients to fill my potatoes with. I was more interested in trying out the technique than I was in trying to be super creative.

Selecting what to stuff your potatoes with is the hardest part of the process.

I elected to make two different kinds: 1.) Canadian bacon, green pepper, onion, and cheddar cheese; and 2.) Oven-roasted turkey breast, green pepper, onion, and cheddar cheese. Selecting the fillings is actually the toughest part of the whole process, simply because the varieties are endless. But once you pick them out you simply stuff as much as you can into the potato and plug the ends with the tips of the core.

3. Once the potatoes were all stuffed and plugged, I wrapped each one with two strips of bacon.

How could anything wrapped in bacon go wrong?

Next I wrapped each of them in foil. I was careful to fold the foil differently for each kind so I could tell what was what. Thinking ahead = good.

Make sure you know which is which before you start to cook them.

4. I grilled the potato bombs using the smoke box of my Smoke Hollow 47180T. I grilled them between 380-415 degrees for about an hour or so, turning them once halfway through. In the BBQ Pit Boys’ video the bacon came out crispy. Mine, however, was not. So to crisp it up I unwrapped a few potato bombs and placed them over the coals to finish them off.

Yes, that is cheddar cheese you see oozing out the end. Mmm...

5. The final product turned out very nice. The potatoes were done all the way through, and all the ingredients stuffed inside were cooked perfectly. I ended up cutting one in half lengthwise and covering one half with Ranch dressing and the other half with some Sweet Baby Ray’s. My wife went the sour cream route. Both of us were stuffed after eating one potato and a side salad each.

The final product with some Ranch dressing.

So there you have my first attempt at potato bombs. I have all sorts of ideas for other kinds to make, but I’m interested in what you might come up with. Leave a comment with your own creative ideas of what would taste good inside.

My blog has now been migrated from Blogger to my own hosted instance of WordPress. I am SO pleased that I have done this. The Blogger settings console and templating system was not getting the job done for me, and WordPress gives me a whole new world of control over the look and functionality of my blog. Here is just a quick sample of some the new things that you might actually care about:

1. None of my old permalinks – that is, the direct hyperlink to each individual post – have been lost.
2. None of the 900+ comments from this blog’s history have been lost.
3. All of the almost 400 individual posts are now categorized!
4. Internet Explorer users, rejoice! Everything now looks and functions the same for you as everyone else. (At least, everything should.)
5. The blog search utility now functions properly. The old one broke and I couldn’t figure out how to fix it.
6. RSS feeds can now be customized according to entries, comments, author, category, or date!

There are a whole bunch of other new things, but I’ll let you discover them for yourself. Enjoy!

I am going to do my very best to migrate all my old posts and comments to my WordPress installation, while preserving my permalink structure and search engine optimization. If you don’t know what any of that means, don’t worry about it. Just trust that when I am done you won’t know anything changed, with the exception of how the commenting system works or if you are one of those crazy types of people who still uses Internet Explorer.

So cross your fingers and say a prayer for me. This is probably going to be a total nightmare, but I think it’ll be worth it in the end.

See you on the flip side.

Monday I wrote about my first experience with my new Smoke Hollow 4-in-1 offset smoker. This outdoor appliance offers a lot of bang for the buck, but in factory condition there are a few modifications you might want to make. I previously alluded to several that have been detailed by Chris G. on his blog, Nibble Me This. In this new blog post I want to share with you a modification of my very own. Read on for the details on my deflector plate mod.

The Problem
Deflector plate mod? What’s the point in that? Well, the smoking section of the Smoke Hollow 47180t is a typical cheap offset smoker. It consists of a large chamber that houses the food you are smoking, a smaller offset chamber for your indirect heat source, and a hole where the two chambers connect for heat to flow from the source, across the food, and out the chimney. See diagram 1 below.

Diagram 1: The anatomy of an offset smoker. Image courtesy of http://dixiegrilling.com.

The inherent problem with this type of smoker is that the side closest to the heat source tends to become much hotter than the side away from it. Some estimate the difference to be as much as up to 50 degrees! The Toast Test (pictured below) demonstrates this phenomenon. The bread on the right side of the cooking chamber closest to the heat source got a lot toastier than the bread on the left side of the cooking chamber. Imagine this problem with two giant pork shoulders sitting on either side of the smoker for 12 hours of more! The one on the right would cook much faster than the one on the left. When cooking ‘low and slow’, temperature control is everything, so something must be done to remedy this problem.

The Toast Test. Image courtesy of http://www.amazingribs.com.

This problem is exaggerated with cheap offset smokers because they tend to be made of thinner materials and have leaky seams, compared to the more expensive models. The Smoke Hollow is no exception. While not a junky smoker, its materials are definitely on the thinner side, and the spot-welded seams tend to leak a lot of heat and smoke.

The Solution
Most simple offset smokers are very easy to modify to correct this problem. The answer is found in the installation of a deflector plate. A deflector plate is a piece of metal that lays across the opening where the two chambers connect that deflects the heat and smoke downward as it crosses from one chamber to the next. Rather than the heat immediately rising as it passes through the hole, it is forced downward and then up, creating a more even heat distribution inside the cooking chamber. This concept is illustrated well here (see Mod 3, PDF link).

But, wait! There’s just one more problem: The Smoke Hollow comes with an adjustable charcoal basket in the heating chamber.

The adjustable charcoal basket of the Smoke Hollow 47180t.

While a nice concept, the basket assembly sits right in front of the hole connecting the two chambers.

Viewing the smoke basket assembly from the firebox side.

Even worse is the fact that even at its highest point the arm that adjusts the smokebox up and down still blocks the hole.

The basket assembly arm still blocks the passageway.

Because of this design you are left with one of three options: 1. Forget a deflector plate and just deal with the heat variations; 2. Remove the charcoal basket assembly entirely, or heavily modify the cooking chamber by drilling and moving parts around; or 3. Use the left half of your brain and come up with a creative solution. Clearly options 1 and 2 aren’t good enough, so that left me with option 3. A creative solution it is!

My Custom Deflector Plate
I figured that since the basket assembly left me virtually no room for installing a typical deflector plate inside the cooking chamber, and since I didn’t want to remove the basket assembly altogether or start drilling holes and moving things around, I came up with a solution that required zero modification to the smoker itself, is very easy to pull off, and should do its job when completed.

The solution: Metal flashing.

A role of simple 10″ metal flashing can be purchased from Lowe’s for about $10.

That’s right. The same 10″ metal flashing I used to extend my chimney down to the level of the cooking grate can also be used to serve as a deflector plate. Given its thinness and pliability it can serve as the perfect material to fabricate for a cheap solution to the problem. Furthermore, instead of mounting a piece inside the cooking chamber – resulting in a tiny deflector plate angled almost 90 degrees straight down in order to clear the basket assembly – I elected to mount the deflector plate from inside the firebox chamber using the three existing mounting screws and route it through the connecting hole! More on this in a moment.

Sheets of metal flashing are easy to cut and shape into the exact dimensions you need.

The first thing I did was take all the necessary measurements of the space I would be working with. The cooking chamber is 18″ wide (measuring from front to back). The firebox is only 14″ wide. The hole connecting the two chambers measures 12″, with a 1.125″ lip extending into the cooking chamber. I began, therefore, with an 18″ length of flashing and began cutting it down to size. The resulting piece looked like this.

A sheet of 10″ metal flashing cut to fit as a deflector plate for the Smoke Hollow 47180t.

Next I measured where the three screw holes needed to go. Remember, this plate is mounted inside the smokebox chamber and then routed through the connecting hole. It is not mounted inside the cooking chamber. The true beauty of this method is that it requires no drilling or modifying the existing smoker because you can mount the plate using the existing mounting screws that hold the smoker together.

The three 3/16″ screw holes to match the mounting screws inside the smokebox chamber.

Once the holes were drilled, all that was left was to pre-bend the plate at the point where the plate begins to enter the connecting hole. Having this bend made the installation a lot easier since I wasn’t trying to bend the plate after it was installed.

The deflector plate ready for installation.

Once the plate was cut, drilled, and bent it was a simple matter of inserting into the smoker. The pliability of the flashing made this the easiest step in the entire process. While my own measurements were perfect, unfortunately my cutting with a carpenter’s knife on my garage floor was not. But the flashing was easy enough to work with that installation went virtually without a hitch.

The deflector plate installed, as viewed from inside the smokebox chamber.

My biggest struggle was getting the mounting screws through the flashing and then through to the cooking chamber. My drill holes were slightly off, plus I had no one to help me hold everything together while I worked. But 10 minutes of focused effort got the job done.

The cooking chamber with the deflector plate installed.

The 10″ flashing – once you factor in the 3″ needed to mount in the smokebox chamber and clear the lip of the connecting hole – provides almost 8″ of deflection. This, in theory, should force the heat and smoke to rise up more towards the middle of the cooking chamber instead of primarily on the right side, hopefully serving to equalize the overal temperature a little better. In the pictures it looks as though the plate is really close to the bottom of the cooking chamber, threatening to constrict the airflow from one chamber to the other. This is misleading. The space between the left end of the plate and the bottom of the cooking chamber is barely shorter than the space between the top of the connecting hole and the bottom of the cooking chamber. Hence, this plate should not constrict the airflow, just extend it to the middle of the cooking chamber more evenly. Just to be safe, however, I plan on making sure all my seams are sealed in both chambers, especially where the lids close, just to make sure the air flows from right to left as needed. A high-temperature gasket is definitely in order here.

The airflow gap as viewed from within the cooking chamber. Not much smaller with the plate installed.

So there you have it. I have shown you how to install a makeshift deflector plate in the Smoke Hollow 47180t using common 10″ metal flashing without removing or modifying the charcoal basket assembly or drilling a single new hole. I have no idea if this will do what I expect it to do, but I sure look forward to testing it out. In the end, this mod can easily be removed if I decide it’s not accomplishing what it’s intended for. And if it comes to that, at the very least I got to spend an hour playing with my new smoker.

Update: Here is a picture of some babybacks I smoked after the installation. See commentary in the comment section below.

For me, the Super Bowl means three things: football, friends, and food…and not in that particular order. This year a friend of mine and I teamed up to put together a spread of food for our families to be proud of.

My contribution? Smoked chicken wings.

Smoked, you ask? Yes. Read on to learn more.

Over the past year I have become ever more interested in the art of smoking meats. My first smoker came in the form of a Father’s Day gift from my wife. It was a very simple electric dome smoker (EDS) from Lowe’s. The perfect gift for newbs like me to get their foot in the door of the smoking universe, this type of smoker is unrivaled in its ease of use. Simply plug it into the outlet and it does its job. However, as I delve deeper into the craft I have discovered that the ‘set it and forget it’ method has some inherent flaws.

For starters, my EDS has no temperature control. It cooks food – rather well, I might say – at a steady 225 degrees. This is fine for the average smoke, but I want the flexibility to adjust the temperature at will.  In addition, there is something missing in the flavor of your food when you remove charcoal from the picture. Charcoal brings a sort of “X” factor to the table, and when I taste meat smoked with charcoal I can tell a distinct difference from food cooked with an electric element.

But more importantly than these two issues is the fact that the EDS removes me entirely from the equation. Perhaps this is a good thing, especially while I take the requisite time to learn what I am doing. But for me, smoking meat is becoming more and more an opportunity to exercise an element of creativity, and while smoking with an EDS is easy to do, it prohibits me from leaving my own signature on the final product.

This is where my new purchase comes in.

The Smoke Hollow 47180t four-in-one by Outdoor Leisure Products.

Meet the Smoke Hollow 47180t, made by Outdoor Leisure Products and sold at your local Sam’s Club or Gander Mountain. I bought the Smoke Hollow for two reasons: 1. Versatility, and 2. Affordability. It’s versatile because this unit is really more like four in one. It comes with a searing burner, a standard propane grill, a charcoal grill, and a smoke box for indirect heating. While it’s clearly not the most high-quality outdoor appliance on the market, you definitely get a lot for the price.

Before I made this purchase I did my due diligence and read every review of this product that I could find across the Internet. (I found the review on the Nibble Me This blog to be particularly helpful.) While it was clear from the get-go that this smoker – as with any other barrel smoker priced on the cheap end of things – needed a little TLC to reach its maximum potential, I felt up to the challenge. The first two things I did were seal up some of the seams in the lid of the charcoal side, as well as extend the chimney down to the level of the grate. (Details on these processes can be found on Nibble Me This’ follow-up post.) While I still have several other mods to make, these were tremendously helpful in getting me headed in the right direction.

My maiden voyage with the Smoke Hollow was a lot of fun, if not a lot of work. This is definitely not the set it and forget it method I have practiced before now. It’s apparent that I need to truly learn my smoker in order to properly use it. I kept a pretty detailed log of my experience, noting everything from the amount of coal and wood I used to the food-level temperature to the ambient outside temperature, making notes nearly every 10-15 minutes.

Finishing off 5 lbs. of smoked chicken wings on the propane grill.

Since I had virtually no time to practice with this thing before the Big Game, I was cooking food on my first try. (The curing process does not count.) In the end I was able to smoke 5 lbs. of chicken wings between 240-275 degrees for about an hour, then I finished them off on the grill for another 20 minutes. This was not my original gameplan, but it worked out just fine. The smoke flavor coupled with the texture from the direct propane heat produced some incredible chicken wings despite my miserable attempt to reach, and maintain, my target temperature and time (300 degrees for 45 minutes).

I look very much forward to making a few more modifications to my new cooking tool and mastering the technique required to use it properly. I will try and share with you my milestones along the way, just in case you might be interested. In the meantime, I will provide my recipe below. Enjoy!

The finished product. They were truly worth the effort.

Smoked Chicken Wings

1. Purchase a pack of fresh, raw chicken wings from your local butcher or grocery store.
2. Remove them from their packaging and rinse them off with cold water.
3. Cut the bony tip off the end of the wing, since it has no meat in it. Then find the joint between the flapper and the drum and cut the wing in half. Also, trim off any excess skin that might be hanging off unnecessarily anywhere.
4. Let the wings soak overnight in your refrigerator in some lowfat buttermilk.
5. In the morning, rinse off the buttermilk and move the wings to a new container where you cover them liberally (but not excessively) with the following rub mixture:2 Tbls kosher salt
   2 Tbls Hungarian paprika
   2 tsp garlic powder
   1 tsp cayenne pepper
6. Let them marinate for several hours in your fridge.
7. Smoke the wings for a hour or so between 250-300 degrees with hickory.
8. When you are done smoking, move the wings over to the grill on medium-low heat for 10-15 minutes (this all depends on how done they are when you remove them from the smoker) to firm up the skin and add a slight crunch to the texture. A little char is a good thing. Catching them on fire from flare-ups is not. Pay attention.
9. Serve and enjoy.

I support Mississippi Amendment 26. I believe that human life begins at conception and that this life is sacred. I believe that abortion or contraceptives or any fertilization methods that intentionally destroys a living human zygote, embryo or fetus is morally wrong and should be illegal. Amendment 26 will establish the legal principle that lawmakers and courts can build upon to protect innocent human life.

I am amazed at the sheer amount of lies and misinformation about 26 that have been spread across the Internet – some intentionally and some not. The Left tends to use fear tactics and appeal to people’s emotions to promote its agenda, and in the case of 26 this has clearly been the case. A huge campaign of deceit has been waged on 26, and many people from both sides of the political spectrum have bought into it. This saddens me and makes me fearful that 26 might not pass.

While it is true that Amendment 26 does not explicitly detail all of its own ramifications (and this by design), here is what I think is safe to say:

If Amendment 26 passes…

1. Abortion will become illegal in Mississippi.
2. Human cloning will be banned in Mississippi.
3. The morning after pill will be banned in Mississippi.

But what about all the other scary scenarios concocted by 26′s opposition? Will women who miscarry become criminals? Will ectopic pregnancies become criminalized? Will IVF be outlawed? What about birth-control pills? Some of these questions are valid, yet some are insanely stupid, especially the first two. The principle established by 26 only serves to define what the terms ‘person’ or ‘persons’ mean in the existing MS state code, thereby giving the same constitutional rights to the unborn as the born. To think that a woman whose baby – by no fault of her own – did not make it through the duration of the pregnancy would be prosecuted is illogical and silly. Of course, if she willingly and intentionally acts in a way to destroy the life inside of her then she would be held responsible for destroying human life, just like she would for having an abortion. The same is true with ectopic pregnancies. No woman would choose to have one of these, which is beyond her control anyway. No woman or doctor would be charged with a crime for actions that were taken to save a woman’s life in this scenario. To suggest otherwise simply makes no sense.

(Amendment 26 from a theological perspective, by Dr. Bill Ury)

And what about IVF? Well, if 26 passes it would mean that some IVF tactics would have to change. The discarding of unwanted successfully fertilized eggs for example would become banned, but then again, why shouldn’t it be? If human life begins at conception, does it matter where the conception took place (whether inside the womb or out)? The same is true with the circumstances of the conception. I know this can be a very unpopular position, but if a baby is conceived as a result of rape or incest is it still not a baby just the same? Why should the innocent pay for the crime of the guilty? I know these are very difficult situations that deal with very tough decisions, but Amendment 26 would finally provide the legal framework that would protect the voiceless innocent.

I’m sure there are other issues of this discussion that I have not addressed or exhaustively thought through. I am not a scientist or a woman, but I don’t think that precludes the possibility of me forming a sound moral position on the issue of life. And ultimately I am willing to grapple with the side-effects of 26′s passage for the sake of outlawing abortion. It is a small price to pay, I think, for ending the most barbaric, immoral practice in the history of the world in the state of Mississippi.

In my humble estimation, we’d be crazy not to vote ‘yes’ on 26.

(P.S. If you disagree with me, that’s fine. Just be respectful in stating your disagreements. I’m not trying to start a war with anyone, but this is an important issue that needs to be discussed.)

U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis spoke to the Florida Democratic Convention this past Saturday in a campaign speech for her boss. She attacked the Tea Party and called them ‘teabaggers’. This really bothers me, that someone at this level of the administration would be permitted (once again) to use such a vulgar description for a group of American citizens. But what can you expect when your boss used the very same language and has permitted countless others to wage a war on the activists. For example:

On August 22, Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) told supporters in California (many dressed in purple SEIU t-shirts), “[As] far as I’m concerned, the ‘Tea Party’ can go straight to Hell.”

In August, Rep. Andre Carson (D., Ind.) told the Congressional Black Caucus, “Some of them in Congress right now of this Tea Party movement would love to see you and me . . . hanging on a tree.”

Vice President Joe Biden went so far as to compare the Tea Party to terrorists, and at a Labor Day speech he told a union audience that they are “the only folks keeping the barbarians from the gates.”

This is all from the very same people who call for ‘civility’ in public discourse. Apparently what they mean by civility is that people are not allowed to criticize their policies that are running this country into the ground while they can use any inflammatory language they desire to smear people’s character and incite hatred toward one or more groups.

I’m a fair guy and pretty thick-skinned. While I don’t agree with leftist policies, I welcome an honest and sincere debate on the issues. But this sort of tactic utilized by Obama and his minions is despicable and should be pointed out as such.