Smoked for about 14 hours @ 225-250F with smoked from a live oak/pecan fire. Freshly made bread from leftover pizza dough. Tamarind/Chipotle sauce.

Beef back ribs cooked @ 135F for 2 days. Then cold-smoked with pecan/oak smoke for 2 hours. Then fired for a few minutes with a tamarind/chipotle glaze. Served with smashed honey/thyme yams.

Had some smoked turkey leftover from the weekend. Wanted to try a white pizza using a recipe I like for the legendary Big Bob Gibson’s White BBQ Sauce. Shredded the turkey, mix in the leftover stuffing and gravy. This was more of an attempt to make use of leftovers rather than create something delicious. Surprise! It was very delicious.

There was enough residual heat in the WFO to make calzones today with the leftovers of the leftovers:

In the wonderful movie, Julie & Julia, de-boning a chicken is presented as the biggest challenge facing Julie in her quest to cook through Julia’s book. In reality, de-boning a bird is fairly simple, and with practice takes just a few minutes. I take a little longer with turkeys since I like to remove all of tendons in the drumstick.

This turkey was stuffed, smoked, and sliced up for sandwiches using this sourdough bread:

Also served with cherry chutney.

Increase resolution to 720p for best results. View in HD in YouTube even better.

Two important things about the preparation of meaty, tender, and juicy beef ribs:

1) Under no circumstance buy ones that have the meat between the ribs gouged out. That’s the best part !

2) I separate into individual ribs before marinating and smoking. This allows the larger globs of fat to render out and accelerates even cooking.

What started out as a plan to use up some leftovers or expiring food turned out to be a real feast:

• Bread from leftover pizza dough
• Mushroom turnover from some aging button mushrooms and leftover puff pastry
• Tomatoes from the garden – the season has suddenly ended. These were probably the last.
• Aging asparagus, cheese, avocados.

And I made a split-pea soup from the Moosewood cookbook, but needed to make a correction to the obvious omission by throwing in a big chunk of leftover smoked ham shank.

Reconstructed Pork Butt and Pork Belly – Cured and Smoked

I bought some “Country-style Pork Ribs” because they were on sale. Permit me to rant for a moment:

OK, I get the need to sell pork butt to people who are intimated by the size, fat and toughness of a whole pork but. Cut it up into smaller pieces. Call it something appealing: Country-style. Meaningless (to me), but appealing, harking back to a simpler time when hogs weren’t raised in ginormous factories.  But ribs? Also appealing, but also totally fraudulent unless the factory hogs have been raised near a nuclear power plant. How about calling it filet pignon?

OK, rant over. I feel much better

So, I also had a small piece of pork belly in the freezer and a hankering to cure and smoke piggy parts. So what if I cure the “ribs” and pork belly, reconstruct the pork butt by putting the cured “ribs” back together hiding the cured pork belly deep inside the butt, sandwiched between the two layers of “ribs”.

Anyway, here is a little video:
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After smoking:

Re-deconstructed. Not pretty, but the best cured pork ever: