Month: January 2021

Broken Spoke will be gone in 12 months.

I received a LinkedIn invitation from this guy the other day. I’m pretty sure it’s a fake account, but there’s part of me that really wants it to be real.

Successful Man Company is actually an exclusive upward bound institution paid attention to expert men that really want even more out of live. Our purpose is actually to allow men to work toward and also obtain individual and also expert targets that enable them to live “over the top”. Our experts partner with men to assist them recognize their aspiration for their lifestyle and also generate and also put into action a life strategy that combines the complete man: health, wealth, family members, buddies, organization and also spirit.

This is exactly why I’m going to (eventually) move.

Mark my words. California transplant will buy/lease the space and it’ll become some kind of overpriced fusion joint.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

The in-laws didn’t want to have turkey for Christmas dinner. I really wanted to smoke a turkey, but understood where Steve and Joanne were coming from. They bought a 16 lb. turkey for Thanksgiving and had been eating on it ever since. They were rightfully tired of eating turkey. I didn’t feel like brisket was an appropriate Christmas dinner, so we settled on a nice beef top roast.

Steve and Joanne can’t come down without me barbecuing something, so we decided to hold off and due the brisket the Saturday after new years. I went to HEB and picked up a 17-pound prime packer. I’ve only ever purchased select briskets because I was of the thought that it didn’t matter what grade the cow was given. I was slow cooking cheap meat so why should grade matter? I think it does matter. So much so that I want to smoke another prime brisket very soon. The prime just had so much more marbling in it.

I still don’t know how to really trim a whole brisket. Especially the big fat layer between the point and the flat. I was getting frustrated when I was trimming this brisket and was going down a rabbit hole in how-to videos on YouTube, so I finally just split the brisket into the point and the flat and treated them as two separate briskets.

If I recall correctly, I think I had a 5 lb point and an 8 lb. flat after I trimmed both cuts. And instead of cooking by weight, I cooked by temperature this time. I received an instead read thermometer for Christmas and decided to put that thing to use. Whenever each cut got to 165-170-degrees I pulled it and double wrapped it in foil and put it back on the smoker at ~230-degrees until the brisket got to above 190-degrees and then I pulled it off the smoker. I let both cuts rest for 3+ hours and they were both amazing.

Here are the 4 main takeaways from this last brisket I smoked:

• Buy a quality brisket (Prime or better)
• Trim the deckle but don’t worry so much about removing the huge fat layer between the two muscles
• Use a water pan underneath the brisket if you’re not using an off-set smoker
• Cook to temperature vs. weight (wrap at 165, pull at 195)

I’m not quite done with Christmas yet.

It’s the first Monday after “the holidays.” I’ve always thought of it as the first day of back to “normal” after Christmas. Christmas is that holiday and time of year that I think most people who celebrate Christmas traditions look forward to the most in a year. Family, gifts, food, traditions, time off of school and work, memories to be made. And everyone seems to just be in a better mood for a small slice of time in the Earth’s tour around the sun.

We stayed at our home in Austin this year and Steve and Joanne drove down from Des Moines on the 23rd and spent the holidays with us. They’re hitting the road and heading home today. And today I’m back to work.

The season just abruptly ends. I guess it just kind of has to. I feel like Christmastime has a bit of a lead-up. We start getting “festive” around Thanksgiving. The day after Thanksgiving they start playing Christmas music on the radio and in stores and restaurants. We start sending and receiving Christmas cards. People post their family photos and photos of trees and decorations on social media. And than all culminates into whatever exciting tradition(s) we have. For us it’s Mass, the dinner on Christmas eve, and waking up on Christmas morning and ripping through wrapping paper to unveil presents.

But there’s not really any kind of wind-down of Christmas. Steve and Joanne will be gone in a couple hours and I’ll be at my desk, responding to communications with no reciprocating sense of holiday cheer. Conversations that easily take place in the middle of August, where Christmas isn’t even a blip.

It’s like when a movie ends or you finish a really good book. There’s a mourning that happens. Only in this story, you’re the protagonist. I always wonder if I did enough, gave enough, loved enough. It’s always been like that for me, ever since I was a little kid. And then that turns into that brief period of the Post-Christmas Blues that I think a lot of us endure.

All too often these days I feel like I’m acknowledging how life is fleeting, so in that theme is easy to realize it that Christmas will be here again before we know it. While I’m not a religious person, I married into a religious family, and I know that Christmas doesn’t actually officially end until Epiphany on January 6th. So we’ve a couple days left.

Merry Christmas!

This is a great photo. I’m hopeful that the child will remember and appreciate this moment. She has the world ahead of her. She’ll soon learn that life is fleeting.

I started measuring the girls’ height when they could barely stand.

I’ve seen a lot of folks measure their kids in a closet door frame. And then when they go to sell their house, they have to paint over those memories.

I bought some trim and tacked it up in the garage so we can take these memories with us.