Coffee and Smoke

Before you start this little tale of country folk you should probably nip over to my other blog and have a squint at this http://kimscar.blogspot.com/2008/03/smoker.html I promise that we will wait for you.

OK welcome back, now as I was saying. I was pottering around in Homo Depot collecting bits and pieces to finish the project when I bumped into one of my customers. Spying the armfuls of dexion and angle iron he mentioned that it looked like I was into a project. Ever one to regale my fellow man with a story or two I explained the design behind the smoker. He then shared his design for a Kissbotty smoker (and I swear that this is verbatim). You find an abandoned refrigerator and strip out all the plastic. You then put back the racks and use an Hibachi grill full of wood to smoke you meat. Of course you need to vent the smoke from the top for which purpose the correct tool of choice is a 12 gauge! Isn't that great?

He also gave me a recipe for beans. You place a bucket of beans on the base of the refrigerator next to the Hibachi but under the meat. This was so that the fat from the meat would fall into the bucket and make the best beans ever. He looked at me wistfully and said "That was before we discovered cholesterol now food tastes like crap"

People like these are why I am never leaving Kissbotty County

Coffee and Pies

I don’t know why but we don’t have a county fair here in Kissbotty, it’s a shame but there you go. We do, however, have a fair and what a jolly good one it is too. In fact I have been to County Fairs that aren’t a patch on whatever we have instead of a County Fair. I spoke to Kissbotty’s tourism officers and they have promised me that next year we will have a County Fair, their excuse is that this year they were concentrating on the fishing thingy instead. I suppose from a revenue point of view the fishing thing makes more sense but you know my views on fishing. (Unless you are dressed in waders and casting flies, which does require a modicum of skill).

A few weeks ago the Boss and I were invited to be judges, I got pies and the Boss got cakes. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was, as to be honest, eating pies is where I am a Viking. Almost everywhere else in the world the word pie is prefixed with a silent but understood meat. Steak and Ale, home made Pork Pie and thrill of thrills a Steak and Kidney Pudding is like a thousand angels copulating in your mouth. So last Saturday the boss and I arrived, clipboards and silver sampling forks in hand and discovered that here in Kissbotty the word pie does not involve the meat word. To heap disappointment upon disappointment there was only one entry. Imagine that in the whole of Kissbotty County there is only one woman who can make a pie. In a fit of pique I awarded her a desultory blue ribbon and stomped off to have a look at the barbeque smokers. I really don’t know what is up with Kissbotty but there were only two barbeque entries (and between you and me, one of them was using propane, how inappropriate is that)? My next project is to build a smoker so I figure with a field of three entrants I should be in with a good chance, especially if someone were to accidentally tip a bucket of urine down the smoke stacks of the competition.

So if you want to unmask the Coffee Bitch (aka the Smalltown phantom flasher) I will be at the 2008 Kissbotty County Fair in the barbeque section standing next to an empty bucket.