Monthly Roundup - February, 2008

The best from cyberspace in the past month. It seemed to be a slow month in the food blogging world.

• Sandy at Junkfood Science debunks the recent mercury in tuna scares scares. It pays to do your research, folks.

• The nacho cheese fountain via Serious Eats. This is brilliant!!

• Another hilarious hot sauce from the Hot Sauce Blog: Ass Murdering Hot Sauce!

• The Paupered Chef goes on a bourbon tour. I do love me some bourbon and Woodford is one of my favorites.

• Not Martha makes a bacon bowl. This is one of the best things I've seen in ages. My regular readers know that I believe bacon is a gift straight from God. I'll definitely be trying this sometime. They could even make a salad fun!!!

That's all I got, but I will leave you with this great photo from Carl Huber. If you ran accross something cool in the cybersoup this month that I missed, let me know.

Steak Toaster

I was going to save this for the monthly roundup next week, but I just couldn't wait. What the hell is this world coming to? Officially, it's the Steakhouse Indoor Grill. Gizmodo has it right, though, it's a $220 steak toaster if I ever saw one. Oh, wait, I guess I've never seen one until now.

Jeez.

Smoked Cheese

Here is another post I've been meaning to get up for awhile. We had a lot of company over thanksgiving and I wanted to have some snacks around for all the football we were going to watch. It had been awhile since I smoked some cheese and I thought that would be good to munch on. I couple days later I smoked a chub of bologna (sadly, no pics) and made the best bologna and cheese sammies.

You can smoke pretty much any cheese you want, as far as I know. I chose a block of extra sharp cheddar (my favorite), pepper jack (always a hit), and swiss. The cheddar and jack were from Sam's, so they were huge. I cut them in half to maximize the smoke flavor. I "borrowed" a cooling rack from Mrs. Hog (shhh, don't tell her) to get the cheese up off of the grate.


The most important thing when smoking cheese is to build a very, very small fire. Basically you don't want any heat, just the smoke. It was pretty easy this time because it was in the 20s outside. I burned down some charcoal, added 3 or 4 briquettes and one small piece of hickory to the firebox. The aluminum foil is just there to keep the stuff from falling through the basket as it burns down.


Simply add small pieces of wood when needed. I replaced the charcoal once as well. With a little practice you'll learn what works for you and how long you need to smoke the cheese to get the flavor you want. I like mine pretty smoky, so I went 2 hours or so on these. Mmmmmm, cheese.

Smoked Eggs

I mentioned way back in my very first Monthly Roundup how I wanted to try some smoked eggs. I was cooking some pork butts overnight sometime last fall (that's how far behind I am getting stuff on the blog) and decided to do a fatty and eggs for breakfast. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning I put a fatty and three eggs on the smoker.


I didn't really know how long to cook them, so i just let them go until the fatty was done (160 degrees; a little over an hour). It was as simple as that.


If anything, the eggs were just a touch overdone, but not too bad. I just peeled the shell off of them and had smoked sausage and eggs for breakfast. It was fantastic. You can see where the smoke penetrated the egg shells and colored the white of the egg. they had good smoke flavor, but it wasn't overbearing. If you like hard boiled eggs, you'll definitely like the smoked eggs. If not...well, you probably won't like them. I'll be doing these again when cooking overnight. I'll do them again sometime to make egg salad, too. Oh, and smoked deviled eggs would be awesome, too. Yep, I'll definitely be doing the eggs again.