dive into mark: “REST for toddlers”

If you’re not a web geek then you might not get this..

I just finished eating the Sampler Platter at Missouri Hick Bar-B-Q in Cuba, Missouri. Situated on a bend of the Mother Road, Route 66, MO Hick is a ‘must stop’ each time I go to St. Louis. Most times I’m passing when it’s either too soon or too late to catch a meal, but tonight I hit it just right: dinnertime!

The black cat on the on the front porch should have warned me, though. I got inside to find out that the pork shoulder and corned beef were wiped out at lunch. Instead, I went withe Sampler with extra ribs in place of the pulled pork.

Disappointing is the first word that pops in to my head. The ribs and brisket were overdone, signalling that they were leftovers from lunch and not ‘stagger smoked’ to prep for dinner. On the otherhand, it looked great! I snapped a photo for everyone’s enjoyment.

With the move to a new webhost, I had forgotton to fix the redirect from “rss.xml” to my FeedBurner RSS feed. If you’re checking for the old rss.xml file, please stop. It’s not likely to come back soon so point your readers to [my FeedBurner RSS feed](http://feeds.feedburner.com/houseofwarwick) and that will help make the subscription numbers a bit more accurate.

Security of any type is a necessary evil.  Lately, my weblog’s security has been a focus of too many brain cells as I’m spending time worrying about who’s getting my content and why.  Luckily, [TextDrive](http://textdrive.com) has been a great host so far and the tools and my disposal are fantastic.

I snagged a couple of the Linksys NSLU2 network attaced storage servers for a little over $30 a piece at Office Depot. They were sitting on a clearance table, staring at me with sad eyes. I hadn’t heard of the device but for that price, I snagged them both. It’s a good thing I did. The NSLU2 runs Linux and the sourcecode is included on the install CD. I’ve found some great hacking resources and that will make it a breeze to set up more services like NFS. Now it’s looking like I need to buy a RAID hard drive enclosure.

Tammy’s exhibiting at this year’s Winterfest at Juanita K. Hammons Hall for the Performing Arts in Springfield. Stop by (if you’re in the neighborhood) and see some of her enamel work in addition to her full line of silver jewelry.

MAKE Magazine: “There are few if any models in the world to rival the Ferrari 312PB built by Pierre Scerri. This 1:3 scale masterpiece is the real thing in every sense, from its operating 100cc 12-cylinder engine to the exact scale operating Ferrari gauges which are calibrated precisely to indicate rpm, oil pressure, water temperature and oil temperature.

The source post over at MAKE has the video. It’s worth it to hear the engine fire up and rev. I really does sound like a miniature Ferrari.

Due to unfortunate events, I had to move my webhosting today and I picked TextDrive, the “thinking man’s webhost”. I paid for a year up front and got up to 5 sites, email and well, the works.

Sorry about the transition issues. Hope you all made it over just fine.

I’m listening to Radiohead’s song “fake plastic trees”. So haunting.

If you don’t own their album “the bends” go buy it. Seriously.

A couple of months ago, I promised that I would do turkey on the smoker for Thanksgiving. I had no idea it would be so easy! Last night, I stopped by the store and picked up two “self-basting” store brand turkeys, each 13.75 pounds. I partially thawed them in our kitchen sink, immersing them in running cold water for two hours. At the crack of dawn (6AM Central Time) I was out of bed to finish the job.

I had two hours to:

* finish thawing both birds
* prep each bird
* light the smoker and bring it to temperature

The turkeys needed to be on the smoker for a total of 4 hours so that meant “lid on” at 8AM (Central Time again) which made for an exciting ballet of prep work. First things first: get the water bath running again. Both turkeys went into the sink full of cold, running water. Next, I reassembled the smoker with only the bottom rack in place and the top rack set off to the side. I checked the fit and positioning of the center section and verified it was good so I separated the sections again. I lit one chimney of charcoal and went back inside, prepping some spices and oil that I’d need for the birds.

At 7AM I started to wrangle one of the still slightly frozen birds out of it’s packaging. Leaving the other to continue the thaw, I pulled the neck and giblet pack out of the center and started trimming neck fat, extra skin and “other” parts that needed to be out of the way. A through rinse was next, then draining, then drying with paper towels.

For the first turkey, I used Penzey’s Northwoods seasoning blend, a favorite of Tammy and I’s and something that’s rapidly becoming my trademark flavor. Northwoods went under the skin by the breast meat, and all over — inside and out. The final touch was an over-ripe pear, quartered, placed inside the cavity.

The second turkey was done thawing (it’s 7:30 at this point) so I stopped the water and went outside to assemble the smoker. I poured the fully lit charcoal in the ring and then filled it to the top with unlit briquets. This would allow the lit charcoal to slowly light the unlit charcoal over the four hour cooking time. The last step outside was to assemble the cooker and let it heat up. That gave me 45 minutes to finish the prep on the second turkey still thawing in the sink.

Turkey #2 was simple: oil on the skin and sprinkle with cracked pepper. This bird got two over-ripe apples inside the cavity, the idea that the apple flavor inside would combine with the apple-wood smoke during the cook.

By this time, it was 8AM and time to load the birds. I didn’t use a probe thermometer because I knew that I would need at least three hours to cook. Instead, I monitored the upper vent temperature and the temp at the access door. The cooker was 350?F when I loaded the turkeys and after one hour, it had only dropped to 310?F, a good sign but not right. At an hour and a half in to the cook, I propped the access door open by turning it upside down and using a branch of my backyard maple tree. That gave me about a 1/2″ inch gap at the bottom, just enough to boost the cooker temp to 375?F to finish the cook.

At the three hour point (11:15AM) I checked the dark meat at the thigh and drumstick and it had made it to 160?F so I knew we were close. Here’s a [picture of the turkey](http://houseofwarwick.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/11/img_3398.JPG) when I pulled it. Yum!

Right now, they are both wrapped in two layers of aluminum foil and towels to try to keep the temps up. I figure they will be fine until 1PM when we’re ready to carve.

Whew!

Happy Thanksgiving!