tony b

@Aussie Ora - so sorry to hear of your brother's passing. My condolences to you and your family. on the tri tip.

@zich6 I use something similar, but it uses MAPP gas canisters. Once lit, then I hit it with an air blower.

That would be our, Bruce - owner of many gadgets, user of none! 😆

You are amazing!

The new Mavericks are very good, much more reliable than the older ones. If you want wireless, go with the Meater+. Another engineer here, but I have nothing to add to Pequod's advice. The old RJ forum was great early, I learned a lot, but it lost lots of folks when he started "banning" people for complaining about the problems with cracking and tile shedding. You'll find this one is equally helpful from the members and Dennis. This forum goes back a few years, but some of the older posts have glitches with pictures and external links due to a platform change a couple of years back.

Tony Chachere's is a cajun rub. I find it too salty, but i think they make a salt free version. You'll probably need to add some brown sugar to it to get close to the Lane's. My go to for pork is Dizzy Dust from Dizzy Pig. YMMV

Nice looking soup. I've been roasting a lot of carrots lately just as a side dish. This could be a nice change of pace.

MEATHEAD!!

That's a big-ass carrot!

Nice pizza!

Nice bird!

Just get 2 that stack, then drill the holes yourself in one. I made a "sifter" out of 1/2" wire fabric in a wood frame made from 1x1 lumber, just slightly bigger than the lid on my plastic tub for charcoal. Dump some charcoal onto it, give it a shake to remove the smalls/fines (kinda like panning for gold - ha, ha!), dump the larger pieces into the tub, toss the dust overboard off the deck - rinse, repeat, until the tub is full.

Agree. Make sure that your fire is up and going before you load it down with all the extra mass. I do the same with my grates. I wait for the dome temperature to get on scale on the thermometer before I even put in the grates, because it's such a major PITA to unload all of it if your fire doesn't catch well. Plus, I always open the top vent way more than what I need for my steady state cooking temperature, just to make sure the fires well established - typically about 2 full turns.

Get the drawers where you plan to store the grates lined with stainless steel. Dennis will also cover the top of the cabinet with stainless steel, as another option, but seeing as it will be exposed to the sun in its new home on the patio, be forewarned that it will get very hot in the sun!!

@Braai-Q - big fan of Lane's BBQ rubs. So much so, that I backed them in their Kickstarter project a few years back.

@Mcjudsten - did I see that you'd stuck the Meater into a spud at the back of the grate on that rib cook?? Interesting idea. While it is a nice holder to gauge air temps, not sure how the internal temperature measurement would correlate to what's going on with the ribs though, if you were using it to gauge doneness?? Most of us use the "bend test" to tell when ribs are done. Pick up the rack with a pair of tongs, about 1/3 of the way from the end. Gently bounce the rack in the tongs. If the meat cracks in the middle, then they are done.

Not a preference, per se, just that sometimes I don't want that much meat (brisket), so a chuck roast is a better size is all.

Happy Birthday, Aussie!! Nice looking road kill chook!

I went into geek engineer mode for a second and started to write a dissertation on choked air flow, but I didn't want to bore folks. Readers Digest condensed version - if you can still control the dome temperature with the top vent, then the pizza stone is not restricting the airflow enough to matter. If you want to test it out yourself, here's an easy experiment that shows it's the thermal mass of the stone that is changing the heat-up time and not the restricted airflow. Cover the same amount of grate area as the stone with a sheet of aluminum foil. See how long it takes to get to some dome temperature, say 400F. Run the same test (same vent settings) with the pizza stone in place of the aluminum foil and measure how long it takes to get to 400F. Anybody want to make any bets as to which one takes longer??

https://komodokamado.com/collections/cabinets

Mostly the extra thermal mass. There's still plenty of room for airflow.

HATE snakes, of all kinds, doesn't matter if they bite or not! Nice side benefit of living here in Iowa - snakes are very rare - too cold in the winter.

Of course I hear about the romaine recall AFTER I've eaten the salad! Well, so far, so good - no tummy issues. Will definitely be tossing out the rest of it though.

We actually had a nice day today, so celebrated by grilling some lamb chops. Plated with roasted potatoes and carrots. Charred the romaine for the salad, too.