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The deposit was paid today for a 23" KK. I got the one with bells and whistles. Judging by other orders- most recently Hammo- coming into The Port of Brisbane it's expected to be about 3 months away. Summer will be kicking in by then, however, before the KK arrives I have plenty of work to do in preparation. Our house is a timber "workers cottage" built in 1913 so during summer all doors and windows are open to breathe. Given the back deck is attached to the house, the smoke doesn't go down that well from the back deck. My back yard is a mess and the current ODK sits on the deck so a new ODK needs to be built to house the KK, and other toys. It'll be detached and far enough away so the smoke doesn't cause a problem to house. I had in mind something like this- A mate of mine has been milling some grade 1 blue gum hardwood timber from his property and kindly wants to donate some 150mm posts and slabs for the bench. It'll cost about 10 years of cook ups. I also found some cool river stones carved into bench top sinks. I think they might be from Indonesia. We have street gas that I can run to the ODK so the gas burner will always be on tap with no need to refill bottles. And the KK can just rolllllll around at will.

Tee hee. I knew there was something I had forgotten. I have not sealed the lid on the smoke pot with paste for a long time. The lid is good and heavy and fits well so I rely on that for sealing. I have to admit that I have not checked for leakage once it has got going so I don't know if I am undermining the effectiveness of the smoke pot significantly by not adding the extra seal. I remember @Syzygies saying that he found applying the seal was good work for hands that might otherwise be idle. Decided my hands would be better occupied with a drink.

We purchased the house off 3 brothers- their father built the house. The 3 brothers lived through WWII and between the 3 of them they had 3 legs. The last brother alive had 2 legs! Do the maths. When we moved in, the toilet in the house had a dirt floor. This was considered a step up from the original long drop in the back corner of the garden. Tough to access during thunder storms! Is there something about old men and young men where they cant aim straight? Man that dirt floor absorbed everything. Could have bottled it and sold it to a footy player for a half time wake up! For 2 years after we moved in the old fella would pop up in the back yard out of habit and walk into the back door.To him It was still his home. We didn't mind, he was a pretty good bloke and he filled us in on the history of the area while i made him a cuppa.

We moved in 20 years ago when the house used to look like this from the street. It now looks like this from a slightly different angle Fell out of love with the house over the last few years so the new ODK and KK is like a renewal of vows. Looking forward to revisiting the honeymoon!!!

Did a couple of pork chops last night with roasted fingerlings and haricot verts. Direct @ 375F. Cherry wood chunks. Sauce on the pork chops was a homemade raspberry BBQ sauce. Plated with some nice black pepper Boursin cheese on the potatoes and chopped pecans on the pork chops.

Tyrus Brisbane is a river city with a population around 1.3m. I’m about 1km from the city centre and river, about 15km from the ocean. pebble, autumn gold or harvest gold? Not the olive one. Yes tekabo. 80 years living in the same house is going to leave a high level of familiarity. He only left to go to a war, then came home to the same house. Bells and Whistles- everything Dennis has that rings and hoots, cold smoker, half grills, stones, side tables, rotisserie. No cover, I want to see this ornament.

If there's a demand, Dennis will come up with something - just like he's done many, many times before!

You will love this charcoal. It's what I'm using right now. Have to admit that I didn't even look at the back of the bag.

His work is amazing: Sam Maloof Woodworker I oscillate between obsessed with walnut and obsessed with cherry. This was opportunistic cherry, it will turn red with more sun. My next door neighbor is a master woodworker; he used to work at Berkeley Mills and now has his own shop other side of our fence. Steve Jobs lived in an empty mansion because nothing was good enough for him, until he bought Pixar and they walked him down the street to see Berkeley Mills. In any case, my neighbor has a serious problem with exotic scrap wood; we've sat around fires that included bits of mahogany and teak. We've bought various pieces from him (outdoor table that used to be theirs, solid cherry kitchen table, an exact reproduction/replacement for particle board box store bathroom vanity in solid cherry). Much of the storage in my garage is from his "customer changed their minds" cabinetry. This was an unneeded sheet of 7-ply (middle layer MDF) plywood with Cherry veneer, that he sold me. I loved the math involved in how he reworked my cut list, to get new edges on all sides with a minimum number of cuts. I love my $900 Kreg track saw table, but his table saw is in a different league. In any case, they're also flooded with tomatoes, and they'll be using this dryer too. In Sicily they spread paste on tables in the sun, over multiple days. I buy two 20 pound boxes of Santa Cruz dry farmed Early Girl tomatoes at a farmers market, for $100. Wash several times, core, quarter, add 35g salt per ten pounds gross (here, 140g salt) and simmer in a commercial stock pot. (My favorite is the VOLLRATH SAUCE POT, 22QT. PROFESSIONAL STAINLESS STEEL - 3905.) Pass through coarse then fine food mill screens. By my records this yields 20 quarts of sauce. Each full sheet pan lined with Silpat will hold six quarts liquid to the brim, with an absolutely level dehydrator (note the leveling feet on my base). Seven trays is 42 quarts, so 20 quarts is less than half full, a comfortable margin. One scrapes and combines down to fewer trays as the sauce thickens. One aims for a 4:1 or 5:1 reduction. This used to take on the order of 12 hours in a conventional dehydrator; we'll see with this new rig. Right now the heater is 1000 watts; I've ordered a 1500 watt replacement to be able to reach any temperature / fan setting combination that I want. My version of estrattu is less salty and less dried than the Sicilian original. Theirs did not require refrigeration; we fridge or freeze ours, leaving a concentrated but fresher flavor. This is a matter of taste. For cooking year round, we freeze packets of skinned (shown above after blanching 30 seconds), sliced, salted, partially dried garden heirloom tomatoes. I'll be laying them in these same Silpat-lined full sheet pans, oiled with olive oil. 22.75 square feet of surface area (7 full sheet pans lined with Silpat). That’s nominally a bit more than the 24 American Harvester dehydrator trays we used to use. However, one fills an 18" x 26" full sheet pan much more efficiently, and efficiency isn’t a liability because there’s 3” of headroom per tray, and stronger airflow. That takes on the order of ten hours, depending on temperature and airflow. Again, we'll see with the new rig. Tom Colicchio's "Think Like a Chef" had a strong influence on me when it came out, even though we don't follow the recipes. He had a version of fussy tomatoes in there: Following his lead, we used to roast tomatoes in a cazuela in our Kamado, pulling off the skins as they came loose. This is spectacular but doesn't really scale well. Later I spotted versions of precious tomatoes in books by some of my other zombie masters (such as Thomas Keller), and I reworked the approach to use a dehydrator as above, for handling our entire crop (200 pounds so far this year). It stuns me that something like this isn't for sale, e.g. at Eataly in NYC; if I had a restaurant, I'd be busy stocking tomatoes for the year, selling my overflow through Eataly. If I go to a $100 Italian restaurant, I more or less have to avoid tomato dishes. I have to ask first the provenance of the tomatoes, which makes me sound like a jerk if I don't nail the tone of the question right, but otherwise I can taste the canned tomato effect, which I don't like. We grind our own flour, which startles many people who grind their own coffee. They need a drug as inducement for obsessive behavior that comes naturally to me. Similarly, my peer group for this project would be my neighbors who make beer. (One neighbor is an owner of More Beer, where I bought the temperature controller.) Again, the alcohol is an inducement, but every beer maker becomes a DIY fanatic. The scale of my dryer project is nothing compared to some of the garage brewing rigs I've seen.