Playing with fire again!

This is how I spent the majority of my Saturday. I also made some time for house cleaning, shopping, and a little reading, but the barbecue was definitely the highlight!

Let me introduce you to my new grill. Yes, it's charcoal, not gas, so it takes longer, but boy does it do a good job! It's a Weber of course - when it comes to these kinds of grills they're definitely the best bang for your buck. I got mine off craigslist for $25 after a few months of patient searching.

I use a chimney starter to get the charcoal going. There are two main reasons for this: 1) to avoid the chemical taste which comes from using lighter fluid and 2) it concentrates the heat and causes all the briquettes to light evenly, ensuring that I will have consistent heat across the grill.

I set up the grill for indirect medium heat. There are a few chunks of hickory in there too.

The hickory gave me some nice smoke to work with.

Here's my setup.

Here are my fully-assembled "pork fatties" (no, I didn't name them). I didn't have enough light inside the house to get photos of me putting them together, but basically they're just a plain round of pork sausage, stuffed with some veggies (i.e. onions and green bell peppers), and wrapped in a sheet of "woven" bacon. If you want to see how they're made, check out the BBQ Pit Boys show on Youtube.

They're about half-done in this photo. Notice the drip pan - I had to put it down there because these things started dripping like crazy midway through the cooking process!

Look at that golden, crispy bacon!

Here's the grill being prepped for the tri-tip steak. First I do direct high heat to sear the steak, then move it off to cook indirectly for a while.

There it is! The cajun makes a great seasoning, and it turned out pretty much perfect. The final stage for these tri-tips is wrapping them in foil with all the juices, and placing them on low in the crockpot overnight. Talk about tender!