And suddenly, I’ve skipped an entire month of updates. Where does the time go? I swear it’s the rain, it is actually affecting my routine in general. Who even wants to go outside and get pummeled with water? Or, in more than one case, hail? We’ve even seen thunderstorms, which seem an extreme rarity to me since moving here. Between the weather and the necessary but wholly unenjoyable drudgery that is work, I just haven’t done a whole lot. But hey, now it is Spring and I’m ready to turn the corner. Still getting some lack of cooperation from the weather as far as that goes, but it’ll change. Won’t it? Please?!?!?!

What have I done in the month of absence? Well, precious little honestly. Our mothers both came out for a visit, which was fun. We went down to the Bay and did some sight-seeing, up to Placerville for some shopping, and other random activities. And, of course, I’ve taken a few opportunities to use my new smoker. Literally, a few. The rain doesn’t even come into play really; The outside of the cooker is like 3″ thick insulated steel, and it’s under the covered patio, so it does fine. But who wants to spend the afternoon huddled inside watching crappy tv, occasionally putting on a jacket to go outside and check the temps? It just ain’t the same. I’ve been so excited to use it I went ahead and fired it up a few times anyway. The first cook, honestly, was a challenge. It took me two hours to get it up to temp, then I spent the remainder of the day (literally, “the day,” a full 14 hours) messing with the air intake. I cooked a few slabs of ribs and two pork shoulders; The ribs were passable, but I didn’t really enjoy the pork that much. Setback, to be sure. I called the builder a few weeks later, lamented my troubles, and he spent a good 45 minutes (well past my attention span but I appreciated his time and the subject matter was interesting enough to keep me on) offering advice. Key points were his recommended start up procedures, and “quit messing with the temp.” OK, OK, I get it. I fidget. So, last week I gave it another go. I threw on a few small corned beefs I had left over, a turkey breast that was in the freezer, and a package of andouille sausage I’d picked up at a butcher shop a few weeks ago. Start-up went much better; Still took an hour but at least that cut the time in half. And, I actually just left it alone to do it’s thing. (I may have “tweaked it” just a few times. I actually cannot help myself.) What do you know, it ran fine without my help. The meat all came out very well too. The corned beef was, I think, the best I’ve ever done. The turkey was over salted (I left it in a brine too long, waiting for a sunny day that would never come,) but very juicy and just the right amount of smoke. I didn’t try the sausages as I’m saving them for gumbo, but eh, it’s just sausage. So, I feel that I’m back in the game. Ready for my first full brisket I think. I JUST NEED SOME SUN!!!!

Man this rain is relentless! I think it is affecting my quality of life. It just won’t let up. “Oh we can always use the rain.” If I hear that one more time… We made the most of the weekend despite the crummy weather though, well at least some of it. OK, on second thought, we only did something Saturday. Huh. And here I thought we had a big weekend for a second there.

So anyway, we did absolutely nothing all weekend except Saturday. That day was a good one though. For some background, on our semi-recent trip to Italy, we ordered Wild Boar Ragu on a few of our meals out. Odd sounding, but it was pretty good and even the picky eaters in the group (not to name names, but Michael & Alaina,) enjoyed it. We’ve talking about making it since we got back, a plan that has been slightly deferred due to various other menus, and my local grocery store not happening to stock wild boar. The second issue was remedied when I found it at a small butcher shop in Folsom. I could really tell some “interest” from the guy that sold it to me. Or was that skepticism? Joy at finally selling it? Something along those lines. Anyway, I ended up with a nice 4 lb wild boar shoulder. We scheduled dinner for Saturday, and the search for a recipe began. I settled on sort of a mix between a Food Network and a New York Times recipe. It came out pretty good, if I do say so my darn self. We made homemade pasta to go with it, and everyone at least pretended to enjoy it. I’ll have to type up the recipe, since I haven’t updated that part of my site in a few years.

In other big news, as news goes in my life, I got a new smoker. My old one has definitely served me well, I’ve had it over 20 years. I just felt like upgrading. I actually started talking with the guy back in November, and he just now got it done. I was hoping to cook Christmas dinner on it; Guess he didn’t quite make that date. It all worked out though, I’m very happy with the end result. I really wanted to fire it up last weekend and take it for a test run, but with the sketchy weather the pasta seemed like a better option. It will happen in the near future though.

Not a whole lot to go on this week. The weather has been atrocious (all things being relative,) restricting me to a steady routine of playing on my computer and/or binge-watching DVR’d Gunsmoke episodes. I have done no small amount of both. I even updated the main picture on pkenagy.com; It needed a little freshening up. Of note, the picture was taken at the same spot as the previous one, ten years later. (Napali Coast on the north shore of Kauai.)

On the PC / Home Network scene, I rolled out a super-neato new ad blocking setup. For the last several years, I have run an ad blocker on my home router, which has served me well. But, I had a few old Raspberry Pi’s laying around collecting dust, so I decided to put them to work. After a little reading, I decided on Pi-hole as my solution. A very little reading, I might add; It’s pretty much the go-to for ad blocking. It took me a little longer than I expected, due to some of the “oddities” of my home network that I’d long since forgotten about. After a few hours I had it up and going though, and I am quite pleased with the results. As it happens, I had two of the little Pi’s laying around, so I made a second one as a backup, in case the first ran into trouble. The house is now happily ad-free online. What advantages does this new setup give me over the previous config on my router? Well, in truth, none at all. It did serve to kill several hours of my weekend, and that’s about it.

Other than that, it was quiet. We had another couple over for Valentines dinner, and enjoyed what I considered a tasty meal. We went the traditional steak-and-lobster option. At least it’s something of tradition for us… That has been our menu for the last few years. I did the steak sous vide this year though, with rather successful results. For a relatively simple cooking method, I feel I’m just now starting to get the hang of the whole sous vide technique. We did chicken in it last night, and it came out tasty also. Just needed a year or so of practice I guess.

Lamest Super Bowl ever! It didn’t really help that I was entirely disinterested in the game in the first place, but then add in the fact that it was just a poor excuse for entertainment and it felt like a waste of a day. Well, the day wasn’t completely wasted I suppose. I kicked the morning off with a good cleaning of my PC’s. Ummm what? Yeah, cleaning my PC’s. To be exact, my NAS devices, but for the sake of conversation let’s stick with “PC’s.” That project was kicked off the other day when I happened to glance down and notice that one of them was completely covered in dust. The side vents were plugged, the external ports were all packed with dust, and they just looked generally grimy. I don’t know how they heck they got that way. I guess they have big fans, and big fans suck in dust. I dunno. At any rate they are not particularly cheap devices, and are semi-important to my day to day existence, so I resolved to give them a cleaning. First thing I did was order an air duster off Amazon. Little more than I intended on spending, but I just can’t bring myself to buy disposable cans of air. Through the magic of Prime, I ordered it Saturday morning and it showed up that same night, ready for me to use Sunday morning. I took the drives out of both devices, carried them out in the back yard, and just dusted away. Wow. Needs to be a regularly scheduled maintenance for sure, they were in bad shape.

I’m sure it seems like a day just couldn’t really get any more exciting after that, but we gave it a go. Since the game held no interest for us, we decided to at least eat some good football-ish food. We went the classic route; Wings and Nachos. For the wings I used a tried-and-true recipe I found some time ago that is supposed to be a knock-off of Peanut wings. I don’t know about that, but it is a solid recipe at any rate. Unfortunately due to some inclement weather I had to use the gas grill, but they still came out pretty darn good. They are even better cooked on the Weber kettle, but it was pouring rain. For the nachos we used some pork and chicken that were left over from a BBQ we had last week. You just can’t really beat pulled pork nachos, and the chicken was a dang solid topping too. That pretty much wrapped up the day. And now I’m staring at another long week of work, but doing so with a full belly and clean computers.

We were able to sneak out of town for a quick getaway last week. It was short, but much needed and quite enjoyable. We got up super early last Sunday morning and drove down to San Jose airport, and flew out for a nice week on the beach in Kauai. We pretty much nailed the weather; It was rainy and “chilly” in El Dorado Hills, and sunny and 80 all week in Kauai. (I used the quotes there to point out that weather is pretty relative… By chilly I mean high in the 50’s. I understand it is chillier elsewhere on the continent.) All-in-all, a great trip. Donette’s nephew Justin and his fiancé joined us, and we did some mighty serious relaxing. Plenty of beach-time, not a whole lot of “activities.” We did take a whale watching trip, which is one of our Hawaii staples. It was a good one too. Nothing super exciting, but we at least saw lots of them. The only snag of the week (my trips always seem to have at least one snag,) was a minor fender bender in the rental car. We were stopped in the seemingly endless traffic on our way to the beach, and out of the blue got blasted from behind by some lady. She actually hit the guy behind us, so hard that he was pushed into us. It turned out to be a minor ordeal though; The cops came, took a report, and we were back on our way. We’ll see how minor the rental company thinks it was when they get back to us….