2025, Family, Food, home, Uncategorized

New Toy

34 Comments

Husband loves to grill and smoke meats. He has an enormous wood and charcoal smoker/grill in the back yard. It works pretty well, but it is often not possible for him to take a whole day to smoke something, and it isn’t possible to do it in the winter. In December he found on-line an electric indoor smoker that uses wood pellets as fuel. It is made by GE. We got it, and he used it for the first time last week.

I was somewhat skeptical that we could use a smoker indoors without smoking up the house, but it worked well, and there was only the smell of smoked meat, not smoke, in the house. It took 7 hours to completely cook a 4 pound chuck roast. The smoker is really quite small, and fits nicely on the kitchen counter. The smoke is filtered through water reservoirs and comes out of the smoker as warm air. It is a brilliant machine.

Have you acquired any new toys lately? What do you like to grill?

34 thoughts on “New Toy”

  1. i like to smoke everything . cheese is great fun but requires really low temps. vegetables, tofu, sauces, and of course meat for family get togethers chicken turkey ribs and brisket. i dont have that cool smoker accessory that the grill partners with, i use a soup can with soaked hickory or apple wood chips and witch them turn to ash in the cans over a low flame or actually next to a low flame smoked slabs of different cheeses is a favorite. cheddar, mozzerella, gouda,havarti, as a salad topper or on a sandwich with lettuce tomato and mayo. my sandwich last night was smoked gouda with wine mustard and horseradish.

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    2. As a young Army veteran, newly returned home after a year in Vietnam, followed by a year in Alabama, I was amused, one day, to see a bumper sticker on a passing car in the San Fernando Valley. It read, “Enjoy Smoking…” (then, in smaller letters) “tobacco products”. I imagined it was driven by a salesman for R. J. Reynolds or Phillip Morris. But in the valley back then, “Enjoy Smoking” implied something else.

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  3. I guess my smart phone is the new toy. I resisted getting one for many years, but I do have to admit it’s come in handy several times. It will be particularly helpful next Thursday when Husband will have a minor surgery at Gunderson in LaCrosse.

    Only problem is the number I was given gets phone calls for someone named Donna in South Dakota. I block them, or reply Stop to the texts, but it gets old.

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    1. why dont you try taking on a donna personna
      create a alter ego to play with. make her a librarian or a hooker or create multiple dinnas to draw from. your favorite can change from day to day. be the marathon runner from the bronx on day and the classical pianist from london the next or be our old donna from south dakota what was her boyfriends name?

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  5. I’ve gotten three new toys in the last month. First I got a Madeleine pan. I’ve always wanted one and turns out that Madeline’s are a lot easier to make than I had thought so there will be plenty of them in my future. I also an adjustable pastry cutter. So imagine six pizza cutters attached together like an accordion so that you can cut a bunch of things evenly without measuring. It’s hard to describe. And then I got a new die cut that I couldn’t resist, a shopping cart. Don’t ask me why.

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  6. My wife just bought a natural peanut butter stirrer for when you first open the jar and need to mix the oil with the solids. Pretty cool, eh? . . . said the skeptic who is rather annoyed at all the techie gadgets and tools we have to do things for us that aren’t that hard to do manually. I got along with a knife for stirring the PB for decades.

    Chris in Owatonna

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  7. What qualifies as a toy? About the only thing I’ve purchased for myself this month is a copy of The Bookshop by Evan Friss, which describes itself as a history of bookstores and bookselling. It was OK, as far as it goes but not as far-ranging as I would have liked.
    I have a shelf of books about books, which includes books by and about book hunters, collectors, dealers, publishers, restorers and cataloguers to which I have added     The Bookshop.

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  8. I dropped my personal laptop at work a couple of weeks ago and cracked the screen. It couldn’t be fixed, so, Happy Early Birthday to me! I have a lovely new touch screen laptop. I use it at work to play, via wifi, Classical MPR on my Bose sound bar which is also new in the last month since the old one broke.

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  9. We’ve had a few new toys lately. Newest is a rice cooker, which we’d been thinking about getting for a few years. It seems silly for something as basic as rice, but getting rice perfect every time isn’t as simple as it seems. The rice cooker is from a company in Japan, and it’s very fancy, with settings for different types of rice and even porridge. After a couple of trials, we’ve figured out the ideal combination of menu settings to get good results. It’s fun to use now, I can just set it and forget it while I cook the rest of dinner.

    We also got a new bread machine, made by the same Japanese company. We had one of their earlier models from when bread machines were first popular. It still worked, but it made vertical loaves that were awkward to use. The new one makes a classic loaf. We make bread about once a week; it’s much better (and less expensive) than anything in the grocery store.

    The last new toy is a waffle maker. Our old one died after 40+ years of service, so we got a new one with ceramic nonstick plates that can be changed out to make Belgian or traditional waffles. Husband loves waffles and is overjoyed.

    Husband likes to smoke and has a cylindrical Weber smoker. It’s not something you could easily use this time of year, but in nicer weather he makes wonderful ribs, pork shoulder, turkey, and other goodies.

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  10. We just had a visit from some Native friends who brought us some deer sausage from a nice whitetail they shot this fall. They also have tons of elk and bison meat they get as tribal elders. The younger people don’t want it, for some reason.Their tribe has herds of elk and bison. I bet Husband can smoke some of that!

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        1. Husband has great plans for elk and bison stew and chili! The deer sausage will go into Hungarian and Czech (Eastern European) Bigos, which is a stew.

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  11. Better Late than Never, Baboons,

    If our walk-in shower counts as a toy (I don’t think it does. But it does count as a medical device) then the new shower, which is quite wonderful would be one ofthe few new things we have. Otherwise, last Christmas we obtained a robot vacuum that is handy to pick up dog hair. Corgis shed ALOT.

    The temperature here is falling quickly as predicted, triggering a migraine for me. Tomorrow is the deep freeze again.

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  12. I haven’t really got any new toys. I got new carpet and LVP flooring in October and it cost me plenty, so I’m trying to save now. I have bought some new clothes, which is fun.

    The HOA here banned grills last year. They also banned any kind of stored compressed gas, like propane or butane. I thought about what would work to replace my Weber Q grill. I finally decided on a Ninja Foodie. It can be used to grill, bake, roast, air fry, and dehydrate foods. I haven’t tried to dehydrate anything yet, but I’ve used all of the other settings. I like the air fry setting the best. I tried to bake an egg bake in it and that didn’t turn out very well. Veggies in the air fryer are great though. I tried to bake tofu in it but that didn’t turn out very well either. I like it but I still miss grilling outside.

    A new friend gave me an amaryllis for Christmas. It’s been fun to watch it bloom.

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