Author: Eric Mesa
To find out a little more about me, see About Me
Scarlett’s Easter Photos
As I continue to catch up, I arrive at the Easter Portraits I took of Scarlett this year. Enjoy!
Scarlett Easter 2017
Scarlett Easter 2017
Scarlett Easter 2017
Scarlett Easter 2017
Scarlett Easter 2017
Scarlett Easter 2017
Some April Home Photos of Sam and Stella
No time for working on photos, so here’s a bunch of photos from APRIL!
Sam and The water table tool
Sam and The water table tool
Pouring one out for my homies
Happy on the Driveway
Sam in the backyard
Sam in the backyard
Sam in the backyard
Sam in the backyard
Closeup Sam
Bringing Seating
Here’s Your Chair
I’ll sit here
“HI!”
Butterfly Macros
A few macro butterfly shots from when I took my macro lens to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
Second Smoked Pork Shoulder
This past winter I smoked a pork shoulder for the first time. I learned some lessons, continued to work on getting better with my kettle, and decided it was time for pulled pork again.
I cut the pork shoulder into roughly equal halves. I had three things I wanted to experiment with:
- Would it cook faster?
- Would it be nice to have twice as much bark?
- I wanted to try a Mexican-ish rub on one to have pulled pork tacos.
In my opinion, for a long Weber Kettle cook you can’t beat a snake. If it’s going to go VERY long, it can be a pain as you have to move the water pan to continue the snake. But for medium-long cooks, it’s a nice, perfect way to have a consistent temperature throughout the cook.
This time around I went with Apple wood chunks to see if I could taste the difference from Hickory. Well, without them side-by-side I couldn’t really tell the difference.
Used the Weber Spirit as a safe place to light the first ten coals.
We were expecting rain, so I also setup my umbrella.
With the fire going, I set about to putting the rub on the pork shoulders while waiting for the kettle to get to 225 F.
It was quite windy and I ended up keeping the lower vents mostly open for most of the smoke.
And here’s a shot partway through the cook.
Two shoulders was just a bit too much side-by-side on the Kettle if you’re leaving enough space between them and keeping them away from getting direct heat from the snake/fuse. Here’s the graph of the smoke:
The fajita rub was off the fire first:
About an hour later, the Meathead rub shoulder was done:
First I created a pulled pork fajita:
It was quite delicious! Then it was time for a pulled pork sandwich:
I was reading through Meathead’s sauce page on AmazingRibs.com and saw that Shealy’s was the best South Carolina Mustard BBQ sauce. I ordered some from Shealy’s and …. I did not like it. It just tasted like mustard to me. However, as time passed and I tried the sauce with other pork dishes, I came to taste the subtle difference between this sauce (which is mustard, ketchup, and Worcestershire sauce) and regular yellow mustard and I like it quite a bit now.
Finally, my wife had some pulled pork nachos:
This time the bark was perfect and my wife loved it. Not sure what’s different. The main difference is that it’s spring now and not winter and Meathead does say that humidity can affect cooks. It’s also possible I overcooked it last time. I’m not 100% sure. Either way, it was a resounding success and I had fun trying all sorts of different dishes with the pulled pork. Also pretty awesome (but I didn’t get a photo) was my pulled pork breakfast burrito.
Grilled Lamb Gyros
We were debating what to eat. There are a lot of dishes we like, but it’s easy to forget all of them when you’re constantly thinking of the half dozen foods your toddlers eat and the dozen or so foods your preschooler eats. Lamb was on sale at Costco, so I told the wife we should have lamb and I would cook it outside and we’d have gyros. Well, modified gyros because we used naan for the bread instead of pita. The image above is Danielle’s wet brine for the meat. Based on the size of the chunks Danielle chopped up, I decided to do a reverse sear.
In the middle of the charcoal there is a chunk of hickory. I wanted to just give the lamb a little something extra as an experiment. I didn’t try to make it 225 or 325 or anything special. I just threw a bunch a probes in the chunks and waited for it to get to about 120 F. Then I put it on direct heat until it got to about 135ish.
Then my wife sliced it nice and thin:
The wife put together a tzatziki sauce sauce and we created our delicious gyros:
My boss, who happens to be Greek (and not from generations ago) said it was among the best lamb she’d ever eaten. She loved the hickory flavor as it was different than the usual way she’d eaten it before. I shared the marinade recipe with my grill/BBQ buddy at work. He said it was great and his entire family loved it.
Bacon Cheeseburger
I’ve been perfecting my diner style hamburgers (aka quarterpounders) thanks to the tips from Amazingribs.com. But there’s a guy at work I talk to about grilling, BBQ, and smoking. He was telling me about his bacon cheeseburgers. I thought about how I tend not to like bacon cheeseburgers in restaurants. Usually either the bacon or the cheese is substandard and I end up just preferring a hamburger. But then I thought about one key thing – when I make the burgers I decide all the ingredients.
My wife likes Kraft singles for her cheese, but I prefer melting some grated cheddar cheese. If I was going to be making dinner, I didn’t want to make more work for myself or the wife by cooking the bacon indoors. So I put those on the cast iron skillet first:
I use good quality bacon and I can cook it to my desired crunchiness level. It’s bummer I can only fit 2 burger patties at a time if I’m making diner burgers.
Then toast the bread and add the condiments:
One thing Meathead suggested that has made eating hamburgers easier for me to eat is to have the condiments on bottom with the thumbs and all the rest up with your eight fingers. It makes it a lot less slippery to keep everything in. It also allows the meat juice to mix with the condiments.
Stella tries to get shaving cream on me
The Strangest Things Make Toddlers Laugh
(if you’re on Facebook you may need to visit the post to see the video)
The Kids Murder some Flowers
(If you’re seeing this on Facebook you may need to follow the link to see the video)
Sam mows the lawn
Each of the three kids is a little different, of course. Sam LOVES loud things. He loves cars and trains and planes and …. lawnmowers! When I cut the grass he follows me around. When others cut the grass he wants to follow THEM around.
Scarlett liked to imitate what the adults were doing, but she never reached the same levels of obsession with the lawnmower as Samuel has.
Stella the Builder
I was bringing some more concrete pads over to my BBQ area and Stella wanted to help.
Review: Black Mercury
Black Mercury by Charlotte E. English
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This book started off seeming as though it would be some sort of Victorian, Steampunk Speed Racer. But that turned out to just be a red herring to introduce us to the characters and set up some of the conflicts. I also thought it would focus more strongly on the floating island, Inselmond. It seemed as though it would be one of those islands that feature in many anime and JRPGs where the rich or magical live. Nope, that served as a McGuffin of sorts – although in a lot of ways the Black Mercury of the title is practically a McGuffin, but there might be some debate about that.
In actuality, this ends up being a Victorian Steampunk thriller. Like many of the steampunk novels I’ve come across, the main theme is that of a world in which women do incredible things, but have to fight for recognition and prosperity. The world as conveyed by Ms. Charlotte English is a fascinating world full of many characters I’d love to see again. I’ve come to find out this was a Kickstarter-funded series. I hope it did well enough to convince the authors to return to their characters.
On the assumption that Ms. English is not writing under a pen name, I don’t know if it’s because she’s a woman or if it’s inherent to the steampunk genre, but it was nice to read a story that focused strongly on relationships and how people react as the relationships change. Sure, that’s story-telling 101, but it’s not always as believable as it works out in this novel.
Review: Massively Multiplayer
Massively Multiplayer by P. Aaron Potter
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I don’t really think this book was “AMAZING”, but I gave it an extra star for doing a good job of messing with my expectations. I’ve been reading nearly 30 years now so it’s very hard for an author not to fall into the trap of various tropes that leads me to be able to guess the plots of most books before they get to their twist. (With the exception of noir or detective novels and some POV books like ASOIAF because the characters have an extra-limited perception of what’s going on)
This book, however, was quite timely for me to read now as I just heard the Fresh Air interview about the book Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked in which he mentions how some MMOs like World of Warcraft use psychology to keep us coming back to the games almost against our wills. That’s not exactly the plot of this book, but it’s not too far off.
Speaking of that, I got this book as part of a bundle and most of the other books in the similar vein focus on either the players or the designers. This one focuses on both and actually does a good job of not drowning under too many characters. Everyone’s set up well and has a pretty good arc. Even the most one-dimensional character, CEO secretary Mrs Hernandez, ended up being one of my favorite characters because of how her portrayal made me think of secretaries differently. It was also neat to get glimpses of the side characters’ real lives because it gives an idea of the diversity of gamers and how their real lives affect their gameplay.
I also like how the book is layered – both the players of the MMO and the employees are playing games and in each case, those who understand the game mechanics best do the best in their respective games.
Finally, let me add that P. Aaron Potter (hopefully old enough not to have been teased about that surname) has done a pretty good job on the realism of everything and everyone. The parents are pretty realistic parents, not YA book parents. The gamers seem pretty realistic compared to gamers I know. The feds are portrayed pretty realistically as far as fiction goes. Shoot, the author even avoids all the stupid NSA tropes and more or less seems to understand what the agency does (and how it differs from the CIA and FBI).
Excellent all the way through and so far the best of this genre that I’ve come across.
Review: Hunt at the Well of Eternity
Hunt at the Well of Eternity by Gabriel Hunt
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I’m pretty dang sure I got this book during one of B&N’s free ebook fridays. I don’t know if they still do that, but it’s something they used to do when I first got my Nook. There’s no way I would have bought this book on my own. That said, this book is just as pulpy as you’d expect from the cover – a painted look from back when they would use illustration rather than photos for book covers and a mostly naked woman watching a muscular man dispatch someone else. This cover’s pretty accurate to a scene in the book except that the woman isn’t wearing a bikini – she’s fully clothed, but her recently ripped shirt has exposed her bra.
Reminding me of the action of an Indiana Jones movie mixed with Johnny Quest, it was a blast to read this action-archeology fiction. It’s like The Da Vinci Code, but without its head up its arse trying to seem all conspiratorial. To keep the comparisons going, the main characters – the Hunt Brothers – reminded me of Batman and Oracle. Not in the sense that an animated version of their most famous story ends up with an awkward sex scene, but in that they’re rich and well-connected in society, but one also can do battle with bad guys and survive despite the odds while the other stays at home and does all the research and smart guy stuff.
As for the plot, again it’s nice and pulp and McGuffin-y. A woman tries to give the Hunt brothers a historical artifact and is kidnapped. One of them tries to save her and that chase leads all over the world. There’s sex (but no sex scenes), action, adventure, ruffians, rich people who are pure evil, and bad guy Russians. Oh, and despite the cover and pulpy nature – it was written in 2009 and takes place in modern times.
If you want some pure dessert as a break from more serious fare, this is a good book to read.