We were at Trader Joe’s and I was walking towards the cereal. There was a semi frazzled looking man (SFLM) asking one of the store clerks if they had anymore Hemp Milk. I nearly laughed out loud. The clerk informed the guy that they didn’t have any.

SFLM: That’s just too bad man, it’s good stuff, I love it so much better than regular milk, it’s kind of nutty.

ME: But does it have any THC in it? (I just couldn’t hold it in anymore)

SFLM: No but most people seem to think it would.

ME: Ah that’s just too bad, it’d be so much better and REALLY COOL then.

SFLM: Yeah it’d probably be pretty good, though I don’t know if my 2 year old would like it then.

ME: You never know…

SFLM: Yeah, he may actually like it a lot then!

ME: Good luck on your Hemp-milk journey!

HIPPIES!!! What else can they put Hemp in? Does simply adding Hemp make a product, a super product?

After a busy week I was looking forward to a hopefully less busy weekend…

Friday evening I sort of surprised Lori with a sporadic (I planned it) dinner and movie (outside the Home Theater even!). We saw Across The Universe.

The movie is great if you’re a Beatles fan. It’s sort of cheesy, the singers are great and there are a ton of little references. There is a loose storyline and along the way they’ve taken a song and interpreted it into a scene in the movie. We both really enjoyed the movie and it really makes me want to go back to see the Love show again in vegas.

Saturday I did some cleaning up around here, talked to Jason L. Parks, and ran some errands until we left to go to the Revo Downey pumpkin carving event. This brought us to Eric and Ashley’s place which happens to be located on the Peacock farm in Norwalk next to the Target. It was fun to be on the farm, eat chili, hang out and watch people carve FAKE pumpkins! The pumpkins were fake so we could give them to the children of city of hope where Ashley works. Later a few of us continued to hang out and have some cocktails at the Chili’s at the Landing…

Sunday morning started out with me somehow sleeping through my alarm (a super rare occasion… Kevin I must be catching this from you!) I raced over to the Lakewood campus and helped finish the setup, troubleshooting and educating the band on operating the new system. Still half-asleep I raced over to the Downey to start our setup. After church I took a mid-day break at home and then met up with Paul at the Lakewood campus to educate and observe the night service.

The sound at Lakewood has improved so much, the range and clarity was staggering. However, the new amp was failing so I decided to stay and pull it out after the service so it could be exchanged for a newer one with room for a bit more overhead.

Overall it was a busy and eventful weekend. I had fun, worked hard at times and I learned a few more things about myself that I’d like to continue to work on improving.

I like waffles. I’m not a big fan of Eggo brand waffles, but they usually get the job done. Occasionally Lori treats me to homemade waffles and then she will make extras and freeze them so I can re-heat/toast them later in the week. I feel bad when she has to do all that work just to make me waffles simply because I don’t like the burn the back of your throat variety of eggo waffles.

Recently I was introduced to a fantastic product called: Batter Blaster They claim it’s organic (who cares) but I claim it’s delicious! It’s like a can of whipped cream but instead it’s filled with pancake / waffle batter.

Turn your waffle iron on wait a few minutes for it to warm up then spray the batter onto the iron’s cooking surface and a minute or so later you have a hot tasty waffle!

So far I’ve only seen them at Costco and I don’t remember how many you can make with each can but I do know that I love this product! Move over eggo, Batter Blaster is here!

The perfect way to start your day off at Hardee’s. Let’s hope Carl’s Jr picks up on this…

The perfect day, I can picture it now…

Breakfast: Country Breakfast Burrito

Lunch: The Baconator

Dinner: BK Stacker 4 x 4

Roll over to bed and never wake up!

Here are a few cooking related things because I love food (and scotch… scotchy scotchy scotchy…) Found a website called StartCooking.com which features decent easy to follow recipes and cooking tutorial videos. Good basic stuff to start with.

And then there’s this:

Seriously he needs his own cooking show where he can lightly dance while he’s cooking or go over some of his more famous lines from his movies!

If you know me, then you know I love to BBQ. When we first moved into the apartments I was excited to see we had access to 4 BBQs… however, the more I used them the more I became disgusted with them (dirty fish remains often left on the grill by the Tilapa / Football fish cooking lady) and most of the grills had weak flames or didn’t work well. I finally decided we just needed to get our own grill and put it on our balcony. The problem with our balcony is that it’s small. So when looking for girlls I ended up buying a Weber Q grill.


left;” hspace=”8”>
The weber is smaller than most standard sized grills (it’s like a larger / improved coleman stove) but it cooks well. It has a cast-iron grilling surface which radiates plenty of heat and leaves nice char marks on your food. Initially, I felt it was not putting out enough heat, so I ended drilling the brass connector to make the opening double the size, this really improved the heat output.
A few months back I decided to try to make a pulled pork roast on the grill, my first attempt. I learned a lot from that trial; my grill cooks too hot and too fast! After a few more attempts I was able to *tweak* this grill and finally I think I’ve reached Q grill perfection.
The first thing I did was to *trip* the propane tank’s safety valve in order to lower the flow of propane from the tank to lower my heat output. All tanks produced within the last 5+ years have a safety valve in them which is supposed to guard against accidental leaks (basically it’s a small ball that is triggered by the wrong amount of pressure in the line; usually caused by turning on the tank valve too fast or by leaving the grill valve on then turning the tank on). This valve will restrict the amount of propane and will limit the maximum temperature (mid 200s) the grill will reach, which is perfect for slower cooking!.
Next, I realized that for most cooking the cast-iron grilling surface is perfect… but for slower cooking it is not and will often burn the outside of meat too soon. To solve this problem I went to BBQ’s Galore and bought a small grill (which was on clearance!) and I put a few ceramic bricks under the grill to raise above the standard grill.
Finally I added a small smoker box which I could load up with different wood chips to produce distinct smoke flavors (and fantastic smoke smell). The result is finally allowing me to slowly cook roasts while adding *natural* smoke flavoring

I guess the biggest reason why I wrote this post is to introduce my new section Food where I plan to document different trials at cooking on the grill. To start, I’ll probably post my photos, recipe and methods/experiences on cooking a Beef Brisket last Sunday. More to come!