In 3 weeks exactly, my barbecue competition teammate, Mark, and I will be holding our first cooking class!  (Details can be found here.)  With that in mind, later this week, we’ll be reviewing the class and deciding what we’re going to be doing.  The theme is tailgating, and, weather permitting, we’ll set up a pseudo-competition site to show the people in the class how a comp might be run.  We’ll also be cooking all the food we’ll be going over with the class.  My thoughts are to include more than recipes, though; I want to talk about the different types of outdoor cooking and how/when to use different types of outdoor cooking (direct, indirect, smoking).  I hope to have a really good packet of info for everyone, with the 2 part goal of getting more people interested in barbecue/outdoor cooking and to be asked to do a class again.

Also this week, I’m going to go over flank steak and how I like to prepare it.  It’s a great, healthy hunk o’ beef.  The only real downside is the toughness, which is negated if cut correctly against the grain.  I’m partial to coffee based rubs for flank steak, and I may try grilling it directly on the coals this time…

I am planning on doing a little bit about over-smoking.  Over-smoking can leave bitter tastes, and can really turn someone off of smoked foods.  There are easy ways to recognize over-smoking, though, and some pretty simple ways to avoid it (hint: don’t use so much wet wood!).

Next Monday is the deadline for the next Carnival of the Grill, which I’ll be hosting.  Click here to submit entries, and the Carnival of the Grill will be posted on September 5.

And the next week, on September 11, I’ll be posting the first of the Carnival of the Food Photography entries, with the topic of "Grill Marks".  Submit any blog entries you have that show great grill marks!  If you have any suggestions for food photos you’d like to see, let me know!

It’s week 3.  How did I do?  To be honest, I didn’t weigh in this morning.  However, I do notice some small changes since last week in how clothing fits, so I’m still progressing.

I was a bit worried this week; last week, my wife and I judged our first barbecue competition.  Even though I was careful, I still probably ate the equivalent of 4-5 servings of meat… I’d guess well over a pound of barbecue in one sitting went down the ol’ gullet!  To help out, though, I made sure to eat all of my dessert (4 desserts, 2 of which were cheesecake!).  I didn’t eat any more that day, but that was more than enough!

So I’m progressing, but I’m having some issues.  I’m really stressed.  My dog is doing better, but his sleep pattern is affecting mine, and I only slept about 2 hours last night, as well as losing sleep the nights prior.  I may have discovered what to do, though.  He wakes up around 4 or earlier.  I need to go ahead and get up, get him outside quickly, feed him, get him outside one more time, then go back to bed.  After that second time of going out, he zonks for a couple of hours.  I can use that extra 2 hours to get more sleep!  Good thing I don’t have kids… I would have sold them to gypsies by now if they kept me from sleeping! (No, I wouldn’t have, of course, just in case the blog police are scanning this!)  The good thing about the dog situation is that, several times a day, I carry a 70 lbs. dog up and down flights of steps. 

Before signing off, I have a pet peeve about online barbecue posts that I read now and then:

Since when do grown men call sandwiches "sammies" or "sammiches"?  How much harder is sandwich to type than sammich?  And, don’t you think a grown man using the word "sammich" sounds a bit off?  I’ve never felt the need to have a nickname for a sandwich.  "Vegetable" to "veggie" makes some sense… that’s an ugly word.  Even ‘taters’ as a word isn’t horrible; it’s at least a well known colloquialism.  But "sammich"?  If I heard someone use that in actual talk, I’d have to give them pink belly, I think!!! (again, or course not… at least not physically, just mentally!)

(The reason for the photo of Woody will be evident as you read down)

I’m calling what I’m doing a lifestyle change, not a diet.  I won’t stick to a diet most likely, and just the term ‘diet’ makes me think of a temporary thing that, once I’m where I want to be, I can go back to eating whatever I want. 

Won’t work.  I already know that.  So why use semantics to get around this?  Partly because semantics actually do mean something.  Semantics can give positive or negative connotations to things.  Understood definitions of terms can imply things.  "Lifestyle change" allows me to keep telling myself this isn’t temporary and that I won’t be doing what I did before.  "Diet" says, "Lose weight you fat pig, then you can eat again!"

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What is it about salmon?  I can hate it or love it.  I’ve found that the quality varies greatly, and that, to be good, I need to get better salmon.  To me, this means to look for 2 things:

1. Wild-caught salmon
2. Scottish salmon

First, Atlantic farmed salmon is listed by the Audobon Society to be avoided, while wild-caught is ‘green’, meaning safe to eat.  Second, the flavor is so much better.  Scottish salmon has taken some quality hits, mainly in smoked salmon, but the fresh, good quality Scottish salmon is organically raised and very high quality, on par in flavor with the wild-caught salmon.

I also think that salmon takes well to outdoor cooking better than about any other fish.

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This week in blogging…  Great start, huh?  I thought I’d do a blog preview of the week, to keep me focused and hopefully keep my readers’ interest!

First off, I submitted my tomato pie entry to "Carnival of the Recipes - The BBQ Edition", and it got included!  This is a feature that can be hosted by just about anyone, but pulls together a topic of recipes.  The tomato pie is included in the side dish part of the entry.  I’ve submitted another entry for an upcoming "Carnival of the Grill"; if it makes it, I’ll post about that, too.

Later this week, I’ll have some info on salmon.  I have generally cedar-planked salmon recently, but I hot smoked some really great salmon, and I’ll talk about salmon in general for outdoor cooking.

I’ll also have my next installment of updates on how I’m doing diet-wise.  Already, I’m noticing a difference in how my pants are fitting!

And I’m preparing for my first judging experience at a KCBS event.  My wife and I will be going to Madison, IN, this Friday to judge Saturday.  The only thing that will change that is whether I can leave my dog overnight… Woody’s having some issues, and I have to be comfortable leaving him with a friend that will come over to watch him.  We’ll see how he’s doing later in the week before I make up my mind.

That’s what I’m planning for this week…  If there are any topics of interest, email me or leave a comment.

It’s not really a full week yet, but I thought I’d do these at the end of the week instead of the beginning.  This has been a tough week all around.  My dog, Woody, is having some pretty major issues, but we’re praying that things settle down.  He’s such a great dog, and I want him to be around a long time still!

With the stress of dealing with Woody, I wasn’t great on my 3 hour plan, but I wasn’t horrible, either.  I’m down 2 lbs, which is a good, healthy start, even if 2 lbs to me is like throwing a deck chair off the QE II…  But 2 lbs is 2 lbs, and enough weeks of that will put me where I should be.

I did cheat twice this week.  One night, we had pizza, and another we had chicken, but I took the skin off, so it wasn’t horrible.  Today was the hardest, though, partly regarding the picture above…

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I got home last night and didn’t feel like cooking much.  However, I new I had a hunk of wild-caught salmon in the meat drawer that needed to be cooked, so I sucked it up and grilled the fish, along with a few chicken sausages that I wanted for lunches this week.

I had some mesclun salad, too, so we had salmon salads.  Well, I did; my wife doesn’t like food together like that, so she had a salad and some salmon.

The tastes were simple but very good, and there are some good ways to kind of ‘dress up’ a meal like this very easily.

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I have been reading some interesting blogs lately.  A couple that got me going a bit were from Dave Barnhart at The Fumbling Foodie, writing on the "Pleasure Behind Obesity", and Adam Byrd of Men In Aprons, writing on the same topic in "Is There Pleasure in Obesity?".  I thought about writing this, decided not to, then decided to do so. 

The fact is that it’s a topic I’ve fought for some time.  Both Adam and Dave seem to think it comes down to us just not doing what we should.  It seems very plain and simple, and, on the surface, it is.  However, I’m going to respectfully say that both blogger’s viewpoints are a little too simplified.

This isn’t a typical topic for me, so wait a day or so for a different one if you’re not interested in weight issues (it deals pretty directly with barbecue, and you’d know that if you have ever been to a competition! )

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