Monthly Archives: April 2021
Now All I Need Are Ping Pong Balls . . .
I’ve been looking over online recipes to combine several of our new toys, our FoodSaver Vacuum Sealer, our Inkbird Sous Vide Immersion Cooker, and our George Foreman Grill.
And I think our first meal is going to be Sous Vide BBQ Pork Ribs.
I’ve looked over a lot of different recipes online, and this one seems to cover everything.
The Food Lab’s Complete Guide to Sous Vide Barbecue Pork Ribs
Depending on how you want to do it, you can cook them either low and slow – 145° for 36 hours, or hotter and faster – 165° for 8-12 hours, or even somewhere in between. It all depends on how you like your ribs.
But no matter how you like them, they all start with the vacuum sealer and end with the grill.
You first coat the ribs in your favorite rub or sauce, add a couple of drops of Wright’s Liquid Smoke, vacuum seal them, and then pop them in the water bath with the Sous Vide cooker. And that’s where the ping pong balls come in.
With some of the cooking times running as long as 36 hours there’s always a danger of the immersion cooker’s water reservoir running dry while you’re at work or just out and about. So you float the ping pong balls on top of the water bath to slow down the evaporation of the water.
And after the ribs are finished in the Sous Vide cooker, then you remove them from the bags, and put them on the grill for 30 minutes or so, after covering them in your favorite rub or sauce.
Tomorrow I’m going to take a first run at my computer-controlled hibiscus watering system, to see how long the pump has to run to provide sufficient water each day.
Thought For The Day:
“If you ever resort to violence there is one thing that you must never do, and that is to lose. — Dwight David Eisenhower”
Two. Count’em. Two.
Today was a quiet one for a change, with lunch at Los Ramirez and then a quick stop at the nearby HEB.
Jan got her usual Pechuga Rellana, with a grilled chicken breast, grilled shrimp, and grilled broccoli,
while I got my usual Beef Fajita Taco Salad.
It’s easy to see why we both get our usual ‘usuals’.
You can now add O’Reilly’s Auto Parts to the list of companies that have made masks optional, at least here in Texas. No more masks signs when we stop off there on the way home.
And, although they still have the signs up, HEB didn’t seem to be policing the lack of masks at our local one this afternoon.
Well, after not grilling anything since about 2012, somehow, we’re now a two-grill family.
When we were getting ready to start RV’ing in 2007, our kids, Chris and Brandi, gave us a very nice Weber Q200 gas grill,
and we used it a lot as we traveled around the country the first 5 years or so. But the last time I can remember using it was while we were gate guarding in 2012, when we did hot dogs. And that was it.
Then a few years ago, we loaned it to Brandi and Lowell who’ve had it ever since. But since we’re redoing our patio area, we wanted to start grilling outside, so when we were up there visiting over Easter, we brought it back home with us. Their poolside area has a big built-in BBQ grill, so they hadn’t used ours in a while, anyway.
But while we were up there, we saw an ad on QVC for the new George Foreman Inside/Outside 15 serving electric grill.
So since Jan wanted something that would also let us grill inside as well as outside, so I put in an order for one. Which showed up this past Friday.
After I got it all put together out on the patio, I cleaned up the Weber, getting the dust, dirt, and a dirt dauber nest out of it, and then used a wire brush on the grill surface. And it came out looking really nice.
So my next step was to connect up a new propane tank, and hit the igniter button a couple of times. And amazingly, it fired right up.
So we’re now a two grill family, I guess. Jan says the first thing we’re going to do is hot dogs, and then some ribs.
But with two grills I guess we could do both at the same time.
I mentioned a while back that all of the Texas Bunch is heading up to Illinois the 2nd week of June for a big family reunion with her sister Debbie and the rest of the Illinois Bunch. Then on our way back home, we plan on detouring down through Alabama to check in with family and friends.
But since we’ll be gone about a week and a half, Jan was worried about her patio hibiscus not getting enough, or any, water. So I came up with a computer-controlled watering system to keep it watered while we’re gone.
I’m going to use an empty kitty litter bucket for the water reservoir, a small submersible pump, some plastic tubing, and a smart plug like this to control it.
I can set it to automatically turn on for several minutes a day to keep it watered, or even control it manually from anywhere. I’m going to set it up in the next week or so, and let it keep the plant watered until we leave so I can get some idea how long it needs to run each day.
Hopefully, we won’t come back to a dead plant.
Thought For The Day:
If a Right of yours can be rescinded, it was never really a Right to start with, now was it. – Paraphrased from author Russell Blake
