Haha. Any time you are in the states you are welcome over for a bbq!
I should go see Auto first but yeh, I’m on for that.
Lock up your herd beasts, I’m hungry.
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I basically just live off frozen pizza. 
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I sometimes will cook, but my thing is I’ll end up make the same thing for a while and then I get sick of it, let my supplies run out, get out of the habit of cooking, and end up ordering out.
I mean, I don’t mind too much ordering out if I can do it cheaply, but a lot of times it isn’t, and I like cooking stuff because when I make something good it’s way better and cheaper than getting the same thing elsewhere.
It’s just when I end up making the same thing, and I get kinda bored with it. Like, for a long time I’d cook up potatoes in a pan, sometimes maybe with some type of meat thrown in, with seasonings and everything and some eggs. Eating potatoes started getting old tho.
Then sometimes I’ll make pasta, and throw some chicken in or something, but then it’s always just chicken with spaghetti. Then sometimes I’ll make grilled cheese with eggs or soup, but that gets a little old, and plus I go through bread really quick so sometimes I just don’t have bread.
I do have some steaks I’ve been meaning to cook. The thing about steak (or any protein on its own), is that I really have nothing else to go with it, and it makes me kinda anxious to just eat meat, like, I can’t just eat meat that’s just not right, like, I can’t just eat a bunch of meat no.
Occasionally I’ll make like breakfast burritos or something, and those are actually pretty good and fairly easy. I do do pancakes every so often, cuz they’re freakin’ cheap, quick, and easy to make.
I just need to get some more creative/functional cooking ideas.
So when this shit is over and assuming I make it out the other side:
a) Share a beer with Auto. He’s Italian so if he makes it past one it will be a miracle. But fuckit the music we’ve been making is hilarious.
b) Requesition a flight to the US of A and check out Relic’s cooking. There’d better be some good beer to wash it down with and lots of it 
Yeh this is worth making it out the othe side for.
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@IO_Madness I can give some advice on getting into better cooking habits if you like. I pretty much lived on pizza and taco bell in grad school and that was no good for my body! Changed my ways and cooking isn’t that big of a deal. The main issue is that its hard to cook a real meal that makes just enough food for 1 or 2 people.
We make a lot of things you can freeze. So we will make chili and immediately freeze half of it. So we get dinner. A lunch that week. Than two weeks later easy chili.
But like steak is easy. Buy one steak. Make yourself a small potato. Cook like 1/3 bag of frozen peas and close the bag back up and put it in the freezer.
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I would cook when I had roommates. I do stuff here and there (I make a MEAN dry curry and rice), but now I’m spending as little as possible. I have a microwave, plugin electric burners, a toaster oven, and a mini fridge. Honestly, I’ve seen people waste a lot of food. Never been much of a culinary critic, it’s just a source of fuel. I ate a shit ton in Japan and had to spend a year losing 75 pounds when I came back to the states.
I also practice fasting. I can live off one meal every two days, it’s crazy to see how some people are behaving. I know a person who recently told me that they have a “psychological addiction to food.”
I made a bunch of sweetass sandwhiches when I lived in Moab. Not so much any more. It’s just a waste (the bread molds before I can finish).
Nice to see Roo here! I don’t venture out into the wild lands of IDMf all that much any more.
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Bruh, youtube. There’s like a million cooking channels. Just search for something that sounds good.
Couple of suggestions:
Bon Appetit - Chili colorado (takes awhile to cook, but it’s mostly simmering and mind-blowingly tasty).
Josh Weissman - Killer easy pizza
Marion’s Kitchen - Clay pot chicken and rice
But seriously, just search for a recipe, try to follow it, eat well. Hell, search for a recipe of the thing you’re going to order. You’ll learn some techniques that you can carry on to other stuff and expand your pallet.
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I have an electric smoker. It’s ok I guess but when you start with something like raw pork shoulder and smoke it for like 8-10 hours, the smell of the wood really gets to you. Normally can’t eat any of it until the next day. Plus the smoke just seems to stick to anything/everything for a day or two. I much prefer soaking my applewood in water and then wrapping it in foil with some holes poked in it, then dropped near or directly onto the coals. Not so much an overwhelming smokiness and it is way quicker to cook!
Oh and update, still just hanging out playing video games. I had a friend that recently came back from New York and kind of just acted like he was gonna come over when he arrived in town, had to tell him that’s a negative.
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Yes! I try to stay away from the smoker as much as possible. It can be a lot. I sometimes use a smoke box for longer smokes (8-10) hours, it is basically what you are doing with tin foil. Metal box with holes. I always soak my wood chunks or chips as well whether I put them right on the fire or in the box.
If you find the 8-10 hour smoke too much, sometimes I will do a 4 hour smoke and then finish the slow cook in the oven. From my reading online most meats won’t take more smoke after four hours anyway.
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I hate to be that guy, but soaking wood chips for smoking is counterproductive (I say that as someone who soaked chips for years before someone bent my ear). It takes over a day of soaking for water to penetrate any appreciable distance into the wood. All you’re doing by soaking is filling the outer layer of the wood, which then has to burn off before any smoke is produced, as wet wood won’t burn. The steam also lowers the temperature of the smoker, which can be ok if you plan for it, but it makes it harder to control temperature.
On the other hand, if you’re going for an all-day smoke, soaking means you can time-delay your wood. I sometimes will set up wet chunk and dry chunk - by the time dry one are ash the water’s burned off the wet ones and it just keeps going.
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Very good points! Personally, I have trouble keeping the temperature down so maybe I got in the habit subconsciously because it kept the temp down?. I also put a beer can filled with water in the grill near the charcoal which I’d heard would help keep the temp steady. I’ve not thought about the science of it over the years but just figure out what gives me results I like.
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You are correct about everything you just said, as you already know. 
Yeah if I’m doing them in the grill, I normally soak overnight, which tbh still doesn’t get all the way through. That’s why I’ll normally place them off to the side, and I’ll usually do so before my charcoal is completely full temp just to ease some of the time in the steaming. It doesn’t last all that long either way, and sometimes I might add another foil packet of some dry stuff the same way towards the end, just depends.
Three confirmed cases in my town. Got some good words of encouragement from a friend about my latest collage. If I don’t hear back about my computer by Saturday, I’m getting a new one. Zero communication at work. I will be there tomorrow morning. We are being hit by snow. Got my check. Filing for unemployment Monday. My schedule is fucked. 
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Re: my Trump Bucks. The short version is I had last years tax return put on this weird kinda pre-pay American Express debit card so that is where my stimulus check went. I had to get a new card because I cut up the old one ages ago not understanding exactly what it was. I spent a total of something like 8 hours on hold over three days and it took three customer service reps to activate my card. Turns out the first two just never completed the process in an attempt to shove me off the phone as quick as possible. I strongly suggest no one fucks with American Express Serve. As soon as I can get my money off that card and into my checking the better…
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Ha, stick to one card. There are a bunch of people who are fucked right now (basically everybody but me… ) because of credit card shit.
I’m holding out hope that most of us around here are immune, but that hasn’t stopped everything from being closed. Local stores are a maze of closed off sections and confusing one-way signs. Meanwhile, I got a youtube add (damn not having a computer with adblock at the moment!) that told me I could be killing somebody by leaving my house. Ugh!.
I don’t grill, but I do like me some basic engineering, so I know that water has a huge thermal mass. It takes a lot of energy to change the temperature of a given mass of water by 1 degree, around 8 times the energy for the same mass of steel. This is why most coolants are based on water. The flipside of that is that once you have hot water, it takes a long time to cool down. So minor fluctuations in temperature would be minimized by having a sort of “heat battery” there radiating a constant heat once it had that heat put into it.
But, how much energy can a beer can filled with water hold, I wonder?
Well, I’m going to use a specific heat of 4.18 Kj/Kg/ degree C, and figure this out because I’m bored. Assuming your beer can is 12oz, we need to convert that to liters. That comes out to .34. Water has a density of 1g/ml, so that’s .34kg of water. Multiply that by the 4.18 from before, and we know that it takes roughly 1.42 Kilojoules of energy to raise the temp of the water in your beer can by 1 degree celsius.
So, what the hell is a 1.4-ish kilojoules of energy?
Wikipedia says it’s about equal to the energy received at sea level from the sun on a 1 meter squared patch of land, per second. So, in the case of your cooker, that’s roughly the equivalent of being able to move it from sun to shade and shade to sun as the water temp changes.
EDIT: Forgot how much energy the can can hold as a whole. I assumed a cooker temperature of 40C (I have no idea how hot a smoker gets, but I assume the water doesn’t boil) and water starting temp of 20C, so 20 times 1.42 is 28.4 kilojoules of energy, or about half a minute of thermal reserve for temporary cloud cover. It most likely doesn’t release that fast because of limitations of surface area, so call it 5-10 minutes of extra heat.
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I try to keep it between 210-225 F
All the math is fascinating btw. My brain doesn’t work that way but I love reading/watching about it. Its like myth busters on idmf
So, I was informed by my manager today that a guy we work with visited an uncle (who’s much older) last week that was showing signs of pneumonia. They’re hoping it’s just pneumonia, and not symptoms of COVID. However, they don’t know at the moment, and as my coworker (the guy who visited the uncle) had contact with him, it potentially could be a point of exposure for us as we’ve been working with him over the past week.
So, tomorrow morning we’re gonna wait to hear back from the head of our department to see if we want to shut down the building completely (at least for our department). Currently, it’s closed to the public but a few custodial staff and a few people from various branches within our department go in.
The unemployment club ain’t so bad right now man, the virus has the rates of pay a lot higher.
I was laid off and at least in Utah the unemployment was rated for me at $550/week, which, fuck was a lot more than I thought they’d give me.
Still nothing but, who knows how long shit will drag out so its good to have some sort of funds dripping somewhere.