Smoking and Super Heroes

Yesterday I put my new Christmas present, a smoker to the test. We also decided to have a Super Hero movie marathon to watch three relatively new movies that we hadn’t yet seen.

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday getting the meats ready to smoke. I had decided to smoke a top loin pork roast, some boneless, skinless chicken breasts and some pork baby back ribs. I prepared a cure or a marinade for all of them and let them sit over night.

I decided to smoke the meats with apple wood. After warming up the smoker, in went the pork. I had planned to smoke the pork roast for 6 or 7 hours. A couple of hours later, the ribs went in, followed by the chicken a couple of hours later. All three were smoked at a temperature between 200 and 220 degrees F.

A fair amount of smoke was thrown up throughout the day and it sure smelled good. We had a mixture of rain and snow throughout the afternoon and the smoker did fine holding the temperature of the inside. And the taste of the food???

The food tasted wonderful. The pork was just absolutely perfect. It came cooked to a very nice white with a nice smoke ring around it. The taste was my favorite of the three. The ribs and chicken were also very good. We now have enough food to eat for a week. Everyone, except for Sean, really liked the flavor of the meats. He was a bit less enthusiastic. I now look forward to using my new smoker to try a bunch of other things.

During the evening and night, we enjoyed three recent super hero movies. The movies were Batman – Dark Knight, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. Of course, all three were Blu Ray versions of the movie. The hands down winner for our family was Iron Man.

All three movies make you suspend belief and reality. While the Academy Awards are likely to disagree with us, Batman was the least enjoyable of the three. Also, the movie just seemed too long and could have ended at several points along the way. Heath Ledger was very good as the Joker, but the movie was not quite as good and seem fixated on him. Iron Man was just more enjoyable and kept you fixated on the storyline the whole way through the movie.

It was kind of funny to see The Hulk feature a few moments of Iron Man in it. I think the two movies may have set themselves up to do a combined follow on movie that features the two super heroes from it.

We had a forth “super hero” move, Hancock, but ran out of energy before we could get to it. So, we will view it later this weekend.