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Finally got around to bottling a batch I made after a friend gave me a Lagunitas Born Yesterday pale ale. Used the AIO successfully to rack and then bottle the batch. 22 oz bottles will help reduce my drinkage total for any given evening. The batch uses the same hops as the Lagunitas but I can't do the tricks they do to the hops with hop backs etc., so I just dry hop it for a week or two and cross my fingers. Also had time to make up a charcoal grilled meal of tuna steaks and shrimps for me and my Son who is still at home. Yum!

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Made a vegetarian eggplant parmesan casserole for tomorrow's diner. I like to make it the day before and prepare it up to the point where we bake it. It lets all of the flavors come together before baking. All we have to do tomorrow is bake for about 40 minutes at 350 degrees.
 
Half the household is fighting a dreaded cold. It's been working on me all week (been tired) and finally won on Tuesday night. Last night I went to bed at 6:30 pm and didn't get up till my normal 4:30 am. Best I've felt in days. I actually drank a beer tonight! Trying to get rid of the worst symptoms before we visit my oldest brother in State College for a holiday celebration on Saturday/Sunday. Wifey has to stay home to pick up the "boy" at the airport Saturday night. Probably better off since I hear her hacking up a lung in the kitchen. My cough isn't too bad (very infrequent so far), just start dragging my butt around work about noon time. Maybe if I drink enough it will scare the buggers out of my system?
 
I am off for the holidays and so it is my traditional time to cook, jar and freeze chili and stew. Both are mama's recipes. Tomorrow, I will become a baker and for the first time ever try to make my mama's bread recipe. It was so good as rolls at the holidays that when my cousins had moved away across country and could not attend family gatherings anymore, they always pestered her to make rolls and send them to them. She shipped rolls to California!

On Christmas Day evening, I'll lay three pork butts on the smoker overnight in homage to my time in the South. When it's done that smoked meat, too, will be mostly frozen. All this makes for easy meals later on harried nights when we are too worn out to cook from scratch. I just finished the last of my January 2019 batches last week.

This Christmas we have received a special gift. My wife found a small notebook my mama had written some more of her Italian family recipes in, so we can add that to the recipe legacy she left with me. I am so glad that when I was in college I asked her to write down recipes for me. At the time, cooking was a great way to attract girls, but now I cherish that notebook. This new one is a welcome addition.

So below is chili being cooked and then jarred, stew being cooked, and the pork butts prior to being rubbed and laid to rest in the refrigerator until Christmas.

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Now we wait for the rise. I dunno if they'll bake up as good as Mom's, but it's her bread and rolls recipe she gave me back in 1977. I wrote down what she told me in a notebook and then sometime later she wrote at the end "Bread takes about 50 minutes, less time for rolls. Watch it!" I love to see that note now that you're gone, Mom. Doing this brought back to me memories of a very young age, playing on the floor next to a bowl covered with a towel where her dough was rising next to the kitchen heat vent. Her bread and rolls were a family tradition at Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings. When it's time to bake, I'll be watching, Mom. You help me watch, too.

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I set these piggies down to rest at 5:30 last night and pulled them at 200 internal this morning. Now resting. Gonna be pulling them later. Mmmm... Falling off the bone!

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My favorite part about the barrel smoker!

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I am a "sauce on the side" kind of guy. That way you can experience just the meat and the smoke up front. If you sauce 10lbs of pulled pork then you got 10lbs of sauced pulled pork. You leave it sans sauce you got pulled pork that can go on nachos, pizza, eggs, burritos, soups........
 

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