LeadDog

I thought Black and Blue were the only manly colors?

I saw the post he made where he tried to include images. The photo URLs were things like C:\ blah blah blah how ever windows does that stuff. Anyway the links were to the directory on his computer.

Ok here are some of them on the other coast running around in my almond orchard. When you look like a dumb dog they don't run away from you.

Curly that looks really yummy and I really don't care to eat turkey.

I don't think he liked the witch.

Now it has been a long time since I have read the Chronicles of Narnia and I don't recall CS Lewis ever writing what Aslan eats or doesn't eat. I did read "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" twice that I can recall. Did I miss something? Is he really a vegetarian? Or was he a vegetarian just for the movie?

You know they are not stupid. When they see something that looks like a lion they are going to take off. It must be that look in your eye.

Re: Almost ready Yo Curly those trees are not manly colors! What are they doing in your back yard? You knew someone was going to make fun of your colors right?

Re: Hello from the land of palm trees and pelicans Welcome Turtle to the land of textured black Komodo Kamado cookers! I have seen glimpses of the new website and it is nice. I think the pictures that you took of your new cooker could come in handy but that is up to Dennis.

Ok follow up pictures. Bags of charcoal. 8 lb bags of charcoal. We don't have very many in stock right now and they do fit into a box so that can be shipped UPS. I thought someone asked about the size of the lump in the bags so here is a picture of our discard pile. This is the size of the lump you find in the bag. We run the lump across a screen as we are filling the bags so that almost all of the fine charcoal falls through the screen. The small stuff gets put back out into the land. The website is up. http://hotstuff.servehttp.com/ The thing I hate about the 30 pound bags is if we ship them the bag tears and then you have a mess. We do have a box around here somewhere that they will fit into but the location is unknown right now. I was wonder what people thought about charcoal in a box? It would be a lot easier to ship. Here is a picture of the charcoal pit empty. I should get a picture of the stumps that we put in there. My thought on making charcoal from the wood staves is you wouldn't end up with a lot of charcoal from a batch. The wood looks to small to me. My thoughts on the wood staves is I'll let you know when we start pulling it out of tanks again and I'll PM some of you who want to test it.

Thanks guys I think I have figured out to do it.

I love my chinese cleaver, it should work just fine then. I imagine that the backbone still holds all of this together but the joints can be popped apart after the meat is cut? I'm starting to drool ~~~~~ just thinking about this.

I got all messed up in my thinking, yes the chop is still attached. Now I really like this idea. I'm thinking that the meat needs to be left on the ribs too, or else there will be another revolt here. I'll do some research and see what I can come up with. Is there a way to break up the big chunk of meat after it is cooked? Like in this picture?

You were crazy enough to let our vote determine the color of your cooker? I think I need to see if Majestik can alter the poll so that pink wins.

Well PorkChop I can't believe the rest of the gang doesn't have any ideas in this area. I've done kabobs before and they were good. We do have a meat grinder or two around here but I wasn't thinking about grinding up any meat. A guy from work made sausages with wine in them and that was really good. I'm tempted to try that sometime. Here is mostly what we have done my whole life. The ribs get BBQed and the rest gets cut into thin steaks and fried. We make hamburger and jerky out of parts that don't make good steaks. We have always BBQed the ribs cut apart and not as a rack. I wonder about doing them as a rack but I'm unsure about it. There are a couple of areas that I thought would make a nice large piece of meat that could be cooked on the KK, the rounds and the shoulder. I just have never even thought about doing something like that before. I have done lamb and beef recipes before and that works just fine for venison. I'll look into the crown roast but I might get in trouble if I start grinding up the chops. Funny think about venison rare, I don't like that way. I like it cooked, it does something to the flavor that is so much better. Now beef is a totally different thing for me, strange.

Curly that is the wrong color, it is just plain ugly! DJ I voted for black just for the record.

Ok now that you have seen the meat, I have a question for all of you. Since I have never cooked on anything like a KK, is there a cut that you would do and how would you cook it on the KK? I still have one more deer to cut up and would like to try something new.

You know I just thought of a forum feature that I want installed! Could someone make it we can taste that cooking instead of just looking at it?

Ok here is a picture of the oak soaked in wine. You can see the holes in the ends of the staves. The bundle of staves comes connected all together with a heavy duty zip tie running through all of the holes. The pile of broken up pieces is one stave. The staves seem to be really easy to break up into smaller pieces. Yes they really smell good too. Now of course is the wrong time of the year to get staves because we just made the wine and are putting it into tanks with the staves. Later this year we will empty the tanks and ditch the staves. Last year at the end of the season after much of the staves had been hauled off there was still a construction dumpster full plus 20 or so 4x4x2 bins full of the staves. I have no idea the volume of wood we throw away at work but it is a good size amount.

You know greggd's post reminds me about the moldy charcoal and maybe how that came about. There have been times when we have shut our charcoal pit down, cut off the air to the pit, for several days. Then we would unload the pit and bring the charcoal home. Then at some point in time later the charcoal catches back on fire! Now what do you think we did? We hosed it down with water to keep it from all burning up. We don't package our charcoal in plastic so there is no reason for it to ever mold but I can see how charcoal packaged in plastic could get in a situation where it could mold. We BBQ all the time with charcoal that has been hosed down and rained on and it works fine for us, just in case you were wondering.

Porkchop you mean I have to post the pictures of how to skin and gut a deer? It really isn't that much work.

Ok here is the scoop on the lump. We have been making it for 15 years but has always been from almond wood. Paso Robles was the almond capital of the world at one time. There was 45,000 acres of almonds planted here at one time. The industry was in decline for many years and finally the drought of the early 90s halted all comercial production. My family sells firewood and the stumps from the almond trees is what we make the charcoal from. Now if I sent a bag to TNW and it was really great I don't think I could meet any kind of large demand. There is a limited supply of almond trees left in this area so if the demand isn't great we will produce lump from it for a long time. If the demand is huge it will all be gone in a much shorter time. Another problem is my dad was the charcoal maker and he died in July so we have yet to make a batch since then. We intend to keep making it but we need to get organized. Here is a question for all of you. Can you tell what your meat was cooked on if the lump is made from different types of wood? If you can't then you just want lump that performs the best for you. Now I do have something that might interest some of you as far as wood. I work at a huge winery and add oak staves to our tanks instead of putting our wine into barrels. We throw the staves away after we empty the tanks. Would any of you be interested in wine soaked oak staves for cooking? We throw away tons of this stuff every year. They are about the size of a picket in a picket fence. I can get a picture of some if you like.

We currently sell our lump only at our store so don't try to mail order it from me. We sell a 8lb for $3.25 and that includes tax. The 30lb bag is $10.25 including tax. I want to see how this burns in a KK before I'll even consider selling it to any of you. The wood we use to make the charcoal is Almond wood. People who use our lump says it burns hotter than Mesquite. Most of the time it doesn't spark much but every now and then it sparks like a 4th of July fireworks. It only sparks when it is catching on fire after that it is calm. We have made Oak Charcoal and compared to Oak this charcoal burns hotter, longer, and less ash. To me it seems to be easy to start but then it is mostly all I have ever used.

No I don't do road kill. The mess a car or truck makes of a deer when it hits one isn't pretty. I guess I would eat the heart if I wanted to go through the trouble of cutting it out. The law prohibits you from picking up deer from along the side of the road or at least it was that way.

I know the Bambi complex comes up from time to time but I don't think I have ever seen that movie. I have seen "Babe" and "City Slickers". What do you beef and pork eaters do about the Babe and Norman complex? I do eat beef and pork too just for the record.