(this post was actually from a few weeks ago)

So today is the day.  I’ve been working up to this moment for a few weeks now, and it is literally minutes away.  As you may have read earlier in the summer, I (finally) managed to procure myself a smoker for our house in Milton.  Getting the smoker was both a feat of marital manipulation and somewhat of a retail challenge to locate.  But I have it, and have been working up slowly to a “big cook”.

Dinner number one was chicken halves, which is pretty hard to screw up.  They were tasty but I found the hickory smoke a bit strong.

Dinner number two was baby back ribs, more of a challenge and a test of one’s ability to control temperature for a long time.  Temperature went smashingly, texture was great, but the grocery-store ribs were pretreated and came out tasting like ham.

Dinner number three is a personal challenge.  Invite 45 people over for the afternoon and attempt to feed them all via the smoker.  I went to the local butcher last week to order the pork butts.  They literally had no idea what I was talking about and had to pull out a diagram of a pig with various cuts labelled.  This morning I stopped in to check on them, just to make sure they were actually able to get me the cut of meat I needed.  Alas, they had arrived and were awaiting my slow-cooked smokey reinvention.  This evening I trimmed the fat cap off of the three roasts, leaving me with approximately 21 pounds of meat.  I slathered them with yellow mustard, applied a dry rub and threw them back into the refrigerator.  I had planned to set the alarm for 4:00am, but after doing some additional reading today have decided to get started at midnight instead.  At seven pounds each, the time estimate for cooking is anywhere from eleven to fourteen hours.  I’d rather they be done early, apparently they hold nicely in a cooler for several hours.

As for the rest of tomorrow, we have guests bringing side dishes.  I prepped some fresh salsa using hot peppers from the garden (tomatoes need about a week more before they’re ripe).  Jodie has prepped some “dirt cake” for the kids which is served in a flower pot.  Now if only the weather would cooperate.  Until this afternoon, the forecast had been 26 degrees and sunny.  The most recent forecast however calls for 70% chance of thunderstorms.  Oh well, if it rains it rains.

Well, it looks like it’s time to fire up the smoker!