tony b

Love Pot Stickers! I wuss and buy the wrappers. Even better, we have a great restaurant that specializes in dumplings - The Dumpling Darling. https://www.dumplingdarling.com/

Yeah, that's a fair amount of fat drippings. Maybe an aluminum pan on top of the charcoal basket handles to catch the excess. That way you can still "baste" the brisket, without the risk of flare ups!

Nice looking bacon, MacKenzie. Looking forward to doing my next batch, using the Purple Crack in the brine!

@Keith OctoForks - you should be, since several of us are eagerly awaiting the skewers to go with our Forks!! Just sayin'

Nice job, Shuley! I'd seriously think about leaving that drip pan off and letting all that pork belly goodness drip onto the brisket!!!

Isn't it fun experimenting with different combos for the Purple Crack! This morning's eggs were Purple Crack with Sriracha Salt - tasty!

Hey, Ken! Good to see you posting again. It's been too long!

Was going to be my second guess.

Well, after the 1st use of the Meater, I'd have to say that it met my expectations. Was easy to set up the cook. Was fun to watch the displays (there's even a time vs temp graph display). The meat thermometer end tracked along with my Thermopen, so it's pretty accurate. Unfortunately, I forgot to hook up my Maverick along side it to see how well the "ambient temperature" probe (on the opposite end) tracked. It was reading 325F at equilibrium, and I had the dome thermometer reading 375F. Makes sense, as the meat was on the "cool side" of the basket splitter. The one thing - the ambient temperature reading is very slow. While it finally reached equilibrium, it took quite a while to do so - like 15 minutes (but, the KK wasn't heat soaked, so it might have still been coming up to temp, as well for part of that time.) That was also true of the "Time Remaining" display. It took maybe 5 minutes after starting to begin to give an actual time (probably due to the algorithm that they use to do the calculation.) On most cooks where you would use the Meater, these time delays shouldn't be an issue. And, to be on the safe side, I pulled the Meater probe out of the tri-tip before I put in on the direct (hot) side of the grill to reverse sear, as I dropped down to the lower grate for that part of the cook. Like I said before, the jury is still out on a final verdict until I get a few more cooks under my belt with it to see how reliable it is under different conditions, like direct heat in a rotisserie cook. I also need to use it in a very long cook (10+ hours) to see how well the Meater stays charged. Would hate to have it peter out before the end of a brisket or pork butt cook. Per the instructions, it takes about 3 hours to fully recharge, so that could be a major flaw if it doesn't last long enough. One would think the designers would have thought of that and made sure the battery they chose would do the job. We'll see.

Can you say "Arrested!"

Sounds like a Dennis call to me. However, he's on a "hippy retreat" getting his body and soul cleansed, so he's a little hard to contact right now.

Nice. What kind of chile peppers? Looks like anchos to me.

Especially having done it twice! First with the POSK - only 2 of us muscling it up those stairs with a refrigerator dolly - one agonizing step at a time! And then the second time with the KK. Which is why I got smarter the second time around and built the ramp and recruited more beefy guys!

That's the nice thing about this Ponzu base - it has all the other stuff in it except the soy sauce, so you can tailor it to the style of soy that you like. So, you just have to mix it with the soy sauce and you're good to go. I found that it wasn't cost effective to make it entirely from scratch - too many of the ingredients are on the esoteric side of things, i.e., pricey!

Good plan, Charles. I have a separate grinder for pure berries - the "free base" of Purple Crack!! It hit me today that the newly opened bag has more punch than the stuff from Batch #1, which was getting on a month old.

Today I mixed up Batch #2 of the now infamous Purple Crack. Found the "perfect" salt to make it with, too! Mixed 1 oz of Taz pepper berried to 1.5 oz of the Aussie Flake salt. I found that equal parts just wasn't salty enough, so I bumped it up 50%. Nice!

Nice spin, MacKenzie.

Excellent photos, Charles! I haven't tried my own sweet chili sauce yet, but I do make my own ponzu. Here's one of my sources for the ingredients. http://www.marxpantry.com/Yuzu-Ponzu I also like to use the Shoyu (white soy sauce) for it. http://www.marxpantry.com/White-Soy-Sauce

I was skeptical at first, but after MacKenzie raved about her's, I took the plunge. Have to admit that I like it, for spuds in particular. Will likely use mine tonight to do some potato wedges to go with the tri-tip and corn on the cob on the KK.

What's not to love about bacon wrapped around anything??

Thanks, Steve M. De Nada. MacKenzie, the OneGrill website is a tad cheaper right now (sale) and they have free shipping, too. I checked first, as I was about to make the same recommendation for "one stop shopping."

@FotonDrv - no, I built a ramp for the stairs inside the house and 5 of us pushed it from the garage into the foyer, up the stairs, through the house and onto the deck via the kitchen door. We did take the top off to make it a tad lighter. The POSK came off the deck using the same pathway, in reverse order. @Paul - believe it or not, the auger mailbox came that way with the house back in '85. All I've done is occasionally paint it.