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.

Just using the Weber Kettle mom got me last winter to make some AWESOME fajitas!

For a long time we’d been avoiding New York Strip Steak. I’d tried to grill some a long time ago and it just couldn’t hold a candle to a Ribeye. But recently my father-in-law bought a bunch and gave us some so I gave it another shot. I took all I’d learned in the past year or so from Meathead and used my thermometer to get a prefer medium steak. Here’s where I ended up:

As a manger, I’m often thinking of ways to show my employees how much I appreciate their hard work. Recently, while watching a Meathead video, I saw his quote at the end that cooking for someone is an act of love. And love is not far off from appreciation so I figured I’d ask my employees if they’d like it if I made them some smoked baby back ribs for the cost of raw materials. We settled on a half rack per person, salad, and bread for $6. So then I just had to pick a date to make the food. Thanks to my mom getting me the Weber Kettle for my birthday this year, I had enough room to smoke to the ribs across both my BBQs as long as I used rib racks. So I used the Weber 6605 rib racks (which you saw in the featured image and will see again below)

Long-time readers of my blog will know that while I’ve been working at mastering my grills for a few years now, it was in 2016 that I decided I would take my BBQ to the next level. Back in June I smoked baby back ribs for the first time. Then I realized that I wanted to step up my smoking game I’d need a Weber Kettle. Mom got me one for my birthday and at that time I started pining for a chance to take on one of the two kings of BBQ: Pulled Pork or Brisket. The local area made up my mind for me. Apparently it’s next to impossible to get full packer brisket in Maryland. So pulled pork it would be.

Ever since I bought my house and got a BBQ/grill I’ve learned that most of what I thought of as BBQ growing up was actually grilling. The key difference is that you BBQ at a lower temperature (typically around 225 F) and that BBQ is cooked via indirect heat. Grilling is cooking directly over a fire and, typically, done at the highest heat your BBQ/grill can provide (at the very least starting around 350 F and higher). Although I’ve been cooking ribs successfully on the BBQ/Grill for the past 6ish years, I’ve never really been BBQing them. So I looked around on the web and I found the recipe for Last Meal Ribs.

As an adult I have discovered a love of cooking. Sure, it can get mundane on a day-to-day basis, but I enjoy creating something tasty. I especially enjoy learning how to cook food that is much more expensive to eat out. Recently when I went to Costco, I was in the pork section and noticed they had pork bellies. So I wanted to try and recreate a  Samgyeopsal-gui dish. So I found a recipe that included the sauces that go along with the dish and tried it out. It was a hit on the first try. Enjoy some images of my cooking:

When Dan and Katie were last in town, they invited Scarlett and I out to the Papermoon Diner. If you’ve seen John Waters movies and wondered if that Baltimore still exists, it certainly has one enclave at the Papermoon Diner. If you’ve been to a TGI Friday’s or a Chili’s you’ve seen restaurants with crap on the walls.

Well, the Papermoon Diner takes that and filters it through a Baltimore sensibility:

I heard about this on Boing Boing and then a month later on Marketplace: a sushi restaurant in New York that has eliminated tipping. Sushi Yasuda decided that instead of making people sit there at the end of the meal and agonize over how much to give the wait staff, they’ll just pay them the right amount and not charge the patrons tip. This means that they had to raise prices accordingly, approximately 18%, but I’m quite supportive of that. If there’s one thing I’ve come to hate, especially as money has become more tight since the baby was born, it’s that the true price of eating out is hidden from me. I don’t want to have to take out my calculator and do a bunch of math (sum everyone’s entree and add 18%) to know the true cost of the meal. I want to have a reasonable idea as I order how much money I’m going to spend. This also gets around the issue that comes up everywhere from Reservoir Dogs to any time tipping is brought up on the Internet: how much is the right amount to tip and is it ever ok not to tip? Everyone has crazy different rationals on this and I think just including the tip in the price and paying a living wage gets around that. Really, the only people who benefit from the current system are the credit card companies and restaurants who see us ordering more than we can actually afford because the prices aren’t higher. If a federal living wage law were passed, everyone’s prices would go up at once and restaurants wouldn’t have to worry about being at a competitive disadvantage for raising prices.  Then again, maybe it’s not a bad thing to be a first mover while people still think of tipping as customary:

Back in May I came across an article on Boing Boing Titled " You Don’t Have a Moral Obligation to Cook":

I have found myself frustrated with Michael Pollan lately. In the course of promoting his new book about cooking, he’s taken to spouting some opinions that I’ll frankly call claptrap. He’s mocked women who felt trapped by the kitchen drudgery that they got stuck with simply because they owned a vagina. He’s implied that it’s easy (if you’re not lazy) for everyone to make every meal an ideologically sound slow-food meal. In general, he’s disparaged the very idea that some people don’t like to cook.