Mesquite smoked Tri-Tip

Well almost. I picked up an electric smoker figuring I could put meat in at work for the afternoon and have it ready when I went home. Transportation is not a problem as when slow cooking beef it is a good idea to take it off about 10° early, wrap it in foil and then towels and place it in a cooler for an hour or so to finish it off.

First the things that went poorly. I have done tri-tips in the oven at 200° and they have taken 4-5 hours. This one was done in 72 minutes. Good thing I had a temperature probe with an alarm in it or I would have totally ruined it. When smoking with wood chips you should have the meat exposed to smoke for the first three hours, haven't figured out how to squeeze that into 72 minutes. Because the meat temp ramped up so quickly a lot of the fat/juices cooked out of it. Where I grew up tri-tips were cooked over oak for several hours and I may never have the set up to replicate that, not to mention I can no longer find tri-tip with the layer of fat that should be present. I can seal the juices in by searing it (which I cannot do at work) but then it would also seal out the smoke. I had planned on working all afternoon while the meat cooked but the short cooking time sort of messed that up.

The not so bad part. The meat came out a perfect medium. It actually sat in the cooler for 3 hours and was still at a servable warmth although I think it would have been better to slice and serve it after 2 hours. Though not as juicy and tender as I would have liked it was perfectly edible and I had 3 meals and 5 sandwiches out of it. I still have 6 more tri-tips in the freezer to play with. I had the smoker set at 210° and will try it at 190° after testing it and finding out it runs 10° hotter that it indicates.

This cryovac yielded 7 tri-tips and I trimmed enough off the ends to make a big batch of stroganof.



This is the smoker. A Masterbuilt 30.



And this is the pile of meat. :-)

Did I lose anybody?

After having having the local phone company since I opened my business and having them as my ISP since I got online about 12 years ago I have switched to Cox cable for business. This is a big switch for me, I am old enough to remember the phone company owning everything including the phone and there were no options. My record for utilizing new technology is mixed. Of 5 living siblings I am the oldest and I was the first to have a home computer and the last to get on the internet.

Changing ISPs was something I fought for a long time. Once I got on the internet I became active in several wood working forums and gained several customers and the online link was my email address which was tied to my ISP which began as @uswest.net. It later changed to qwest.net and eventually to qwestoffice.net. Things went fine until they stopped forwarding the previous versions about a year ago. During the years I was visited by several sales folks that could give me a small cost savings at the expense of losing my email address. After Qwest did that to me anyway I started exploring how to solve the problem for the long term. Over a year ago I got a domain for my business and started posting that. When I first got online a domain was fairly expensive at around $50 month but over the years it has kept coming down and when I finally got a domain through Godaddy it cost me $150, including registration, for 3 full years. Last month Cox came in and stated they were installing cable in my complex and gave me a quote about $50 less than I was paying and the billing is a lot simpler than the 8 pages I have been getting from Qwest. In the interim month until they got it installed I have tried to get everything important changed over to either my personal (shrpscott(at)gmail dot com or business stuff at scott(at)scottssharpening dot com. I hope I haven't lost anybody.

That brings up another point. Back in the day when you moved you filed a change of address with the post office and filled out the change of address section on all of your bills and at Christmas you made a point of getting your cards out early so your friends and relatives had your new address. Now with so many things tied to the internet trying to make sure all the stuff you do on line is updated is a real chore. And there is no forwarding address thingy for the internet. Again I hope I haven't lost anybody but I know I will have. :-(

I think the next step will be to jettison the white and yellow page listings which for years have only gotten me calls for work which doesn't fit the B2B makeup of my business.

Long time, no post

Geez, I went through a whole month with no posts.:-( Problem being I just couldn't seem to find time at work to post. And when I have been done working the last thing I wanted to do was sit at the computer some more. I have also been guilty of spending too much time on Yelp and Facebook when I should have been working. The solution I have come up with is to stop fighting having a computer at home. It has been almost 20 years since I have had access to a home computer that wasn't prioritized to my son or ex wife.

The computer I have is a cheap ($350) laptop that came with a 3 in 1 printer thanks to a Labor Day sale at Best Buy. Every time I have upgraded my computer(s) I am amazed at what the next generation has to offer. To put this in prospective the first computer I bought was a used Tandy model I for $500 around 30 years ago. In 1980 dollars my new computer would have cost about $150. About that same time a friend of mine (who reads this blog) spent thousand of dollars on a Tandy model 2 with 8" floppy discs that didn't have 2% of the computing power I now have.

Another benchmark is the printer Best Buy tossed in to the deal. My first printer (attached to a Tandy model III bought used for $800) was a wide carriage pin feed I bought for $1200 because I wanted the then new 24 pin dot matrix head. My new printer was listed @ $40 and needs ink cartridges that cost $32 a set but it doesn't need a ribbon and I don't have to embed printer controls in my document. This was back before the thought of the internet and updated drivers so when I made the move to an Apple IIe ($2000+) I had to buy another printer which was a standard width 24 pin dot matrix for around $900, this was still a pin feed.

So enough of me proving I am old. :-) If things go as planned I should be able to go back to making entries several times a month.