As I continue to catch up, I arrive at the Easter Portraits I took of Scarlett this year. Enjoy!

No time for working on photos, so here’s a bunch of photos from APRIL!

A few macro butterfly shots from when I took my macro lens to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

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:

1. Would it cook faster?
2. Would it be nice to have twice as much bark?
3. 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.

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.

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.

(if you’re on Facebook you may need to visit the post to see the video)

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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.

https://youtu.be/oCuEJ_pVoqc

Scarlett liked to imitate what the adults were doing, but she never reached the same levels of obsession with the lawnmower as Samuel has.