Dinners Out the Yin-Yang:

As a recent comment points out, it's been a while since I posted and I have backlog of dinners to report about. So, here goes. We'll start with the most recent and go from there.

Hickory and Applewood Smoked Pork Shoulder - This was my project for this past weekend. A

 week of watching grilling specials on FoodTV had me wanting to get outside to spend some quality time with my Weber. Anyway, I picked up a 3 pound hunk of pork shoulder at

 Wegmans the other day. Saturday night I rubbed it down with a mix of salt, pepper, garlic powder, 

onion powder, paprika, celery seed, cumin, and coffee (the last three items I ground down in my mortar and pestle). Sunday I fired up the grill, generally using about 15 kingsford briqu

ettes to maintain a temperature between 225 and 260 degrees F. I also soaked some hickor

y and some applewood chips in water for about 30 minutes and put them on top of the first two sets of coals to provide some extra smokiness. You're looking at about 90 minutes per pound of pork shoulder to get it up to an internal temperature of 185 degrees F. Mine cooked from about 1:00 to about 5:00 on the grill and then I took it inside to finish it in the oven (250 degrees) while I prepared the rest of our meal. Q purists will shudder at this move, I suspect, but I figured that I'd gotten all the smoke penetration I was going to get in those first several hours and didn't want to deal with going in and out of my apartment to check on the meat and fire while I was doing other

things. Anyway, once the meat hit 185, I pulled it out of the oven, let it rest for a while, and commenced shredding wit

h a couple of forks. Look at the smoke ring in the first picture there! Bliss!

For sauce, I whipped up a combination of ketchup, cider vinegar, worcestershire sauce, molasses, grated garlic and grated onion, and chili powder. I also sliced up some poblano pepper that I had smoked for the first 90 minutes of the time the meat was on the fire and added that for a little oomph. All in all, this was a fantastic meal and one of those things that's so inexpensive (the meat was $0.99 per pound) that you can't believe it tasted that good. We had some cole slaw on the side.

Mahi-Mahi in Herbed White Wine Sauce with Grilled Lemons:

OK, this one was from a couple of weeks ago. The sauce started with some sauteed onion and garlic, to which I added fish stock and white wine in roughly equal parts (the original recipe called for bottle clam juice, which I had forgotten to buy at the store...). I added thyme and oregano to this and let it steep on very low heat while I prepared the rest of the meal. The fish was simply salted and peppered and pan seared. The lemons were sliced very thin and caramelized over low heat as well. To finish the sauce, I added some butter at the end. Over the fish I sprinkled some walnuts that I had roasted, some sliced roasted red pepper, and finally some fresh chopped flat leaf parsley. I had a Washington State Dry Riesling (Covey Run) with this.

More to come from my archives of the last couple weeks.