Easter Weekend 2014

The weekend started with some happy Spring stuff going on.  The first of the Humming birds made their way to our porch.  By the next day I had some humming bird nectar up in the feeder, and I've seen it come by a few times.  We seem to have two breeds of humming birds around my place, with the larger ones showing up early in Spring, and the smaller ones coming in around mid-summer.  It leads to a few push fights between them when they arrive at the same times.  Our flowers are acting so strange this year.  Usually we have this huge, beautiful bloom before Easter, and the flowers have wilted and died about the time the gathering starts.  This year, even with a later Easter than usual, the flowers are just now blooming.  Its almost time to get some really nice pictures.  Bumble bees sure have been busy though.  I call them flying cows.  I imagine them as dopey, but happy little flying bovine, and it makes me smile.

The Easter gathering went off pretty well.  Each year I get better and better prepared for the onslaught of food I have to cook.  We did about the same amount of food as last year, but I got a much earlier start to cooking it all.  I got up and got most of the hotdogs cooked and into a warming tray before anyone arrived.  I tried to do a nice mix of burnt and unburnt.  See, you can always tell who is not blood relations by what they say of the hotdogs.  People with my family's blood love a super charred outside to their hotdogs.  The poor suckers that get tricked into being a part of the family will come up and say things like "get those hotdogs done enough?" or some other smart ass comment.  If I did not burn the hotdogs, I would have a riot, and be recalled as the official grill-meister, and be replaced.  I try to get a mix for the silly people that like normal done hotdogs.

The best thing to help with the cooking is having two chimney starters.  Hamburgers just get done better over high heat, and when you have way over 30 hamburgers to cook, you need the heat to stay hot.  I go ahead and fill the entire grill with two loads of charcoal.  That gets REALLY REALLY hot, and so I keep a spray bottle with water and apple cider vinegar.  Apple Cider Vinegar will cook clean on grilled meats, leaving a nice, very low key taste of anything its sprayed on.  Its not vinegary at all.  When the coals flare up, which will always happen when cooking that many burgers, you just spray down the coals.  I was very happy that my hamburgers are not so dry you can use them as coasters, and yet they are done all the way with a nice crust.

I have this thing that happens, I can't remember how many times I've mentioned it, but the heat and the smoke gets to me when I'm cooking for 4+ hours in front of the grill.  By the end of it, I do not want to eat a hamburger or a hotdog.  Last year my girlfriend made a chicken salad.  It was the most perfect food I can ask for when grilling.  Its very cold, its not overly sweet, but it has apples in it to give it a little bit sweet.  I can stand there and eat it all day long, its just kind of "cleanses" the grill away.  It greatly improves my mood and decreases my "decompression" time after the grilling is done.

This week:  A beer review will hopefully pop up.  I keep a beer journal on Evernote, but I'll put it here as well.  I'm limited by what's available, but I'm hoping to try a risky beer from a brand I haven't had before.  I will talk about Trainwreck amps and their connection to me(I think I said I'd do this earlier, I'll get around to it eventually).  Also I'm finally giving Enterprise a chance, so I'll talk about it through the weeks while I watch it.  I think Netflix might be losing the license this year unless they re-negotiate, so I'll go ahead and take the opportunity.  Ok, that's enough wall of text for today.