After the longest downtime in the illustrious history of pkenagy.com, I am back online. What was the root cause of this extended outage, as I’m sure you have been wondering during the many sleepless nights without access to this critical content? Well, nothing really. I just didn’t feel like it, how ’bout that. I’ve been wanting to move the site back inhouse for some time, and as is the case with everything these days it turned out to be harder than expected. After weeks and weeks of online tech support meetings and troubleshooting though, the site is now being hosted out of my house where it belongs. OK, maybe it was more like a few hours of googling error messages, but even that was nearly more effort than I care to expend these days. Databases, ugh. Glad I didn’t pick that for a career.

So what have we been up to during this 1.5 months of silence? I’m sure you know the standard response to that. We did, however, work in a good trip to our hometown, KC. It was a great trip. I felt like we managed to hit a lot of my standard-issue highlights without the somewhat frantic pace of my birthday trip five years ago. See all the family and friends, check. Several favorite food and drink spots, check. Catch some live music shows, check. Crappy trip back to CA with an unexpected, unwanted stay in Phoenix, check. OK could have done without that last line item, but it’s almost expected these days.

I do have quite a stash of photos, so I guess I’ll put some of those up. Hopefully I’ll get back to my regularly scheduled updates now that I have the convenience of updating this on my own server. Truth be known, it is quite literally exactly the same as updating it on the hosting service I’ve been paying for the last 1.5 years. But, I suppose I do get some (very small) satisfaction out of managing it myself, as well as an extra $3 a month in my pocket. Still need to figure out how to allocate that unexpected windfall of cashflow.

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a test

Ugh, oncall weekend again. No bueno. I am way too old for that sport. It was insult to injury, kind of piled on to the lack of fun last weekend. I guess it could have been worse. Not entirely sure how, but I suppose it can always be worse. We did make good use of the down time on Saturday, with some fridge cleanup. We’ve got tomatoes coming out every corner of the house, so we cleaned them up, roasted them on the smoker, and froze them. Now what will we do with them? I guess that’s a puzzle for another weekend. At least they’ll go bad from freezer burn instead of from rotting on the kitchen table. I also finished up the Great Tallow Experiment. It had been sitting in the fridge since last weekend, taking up our favorite mixing bowl. So, this weekend I dumped it in an aluminum pan, melted it down in the smoker, and put it in mason jars. I had a little bit extra, so I fried up some green tomatoes in it. As far as I know, that is the first time I’ve had fried green tomatoes. They were good! I wouldn’t say I now crave them as some claim to, but they were pretty tasty. Several recipes I read called specifically for Roma tomatoes; supposedly their lower water content makes them fry better. Since that’s the kind of tomatoes we have by the bushel, I thought I was in luck. Well, in practice, I don’t think they’re good at all for the recipe. Too small. I was pretty tired of flipping those little dollar size discs by the time I was finished. Matter of fact I threw several away, too much hassle. I’d try it again, maybe with a different variety. We got out of the house for a bit Sunday. Headed over to a friend’s house and took advantage of their pool, which felt great because it is HOT out here. We brought burgers and corn over for a bbq, but decided it was just entirely too scorching outside and ended up cooking it all in the kitchen.

Kind of fell down on the pics last week. Hey, I didn’t have any subject matter. I did put a camera on one of the hummingbird feeders, which has turned in some great videos, but I still can’t figure out how to post video on here.

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What a drag THAT weekend was. Worst thing about a bad weekend is, it just keeps rolling into the next week, which is obviously going to suck because… Well, because it’s not the weekend, and that’s my rut for the foreseeable future. Things started going bad Thursday evening. We agreed to watch a puppy, Dallas, who was being fostered for the rescue where we got Quinn & Nacho. The word “puppy” should have been a red flag right off the bat. We fell for the ol’ “He’s pretty easy for a puppy” line though. Fully housetrained, sleeps most of time… What could go wrong? Well, the “housetrained” rumor failed about 30 minutes into the stay, and several times thereafter. Not the end of the world. Our two little brats had quite a time adjusting to the new house too, in that respect, so not like it’s the first time the floor got peed on. He had a major case of puppy-biting though, which was annoying and even a bit painful. Puppies have sharp little teeth! Nothing was safe; Arms, fingers and toes, ankles, calves… He’d just latch on out of the blue. And the chewing… If you turned your back for (literally) a second, there was going to be damage involved. Couch, power cords, table legs… Everything was fair game. Probably the worst part though was that Quinny & Nacho just hated him. Now, I’ll admit I had no expectations of Nacho interacting. Heck, I’m not entirely sure she likes Quinn, but she tolerates him at least. If this beast got anywhere near her, which was quite often, she would just erupt in that shrill ear-splitting yapping that the little ones are so good at. Quinn, on the other hand, was a real disappointment. I genuinely expected him to have a ball with the puppy. Yeah, not so much. I don’t know if it was because Dallas was so big, or if it was his rather “in your face” approach, or maybe Quinn just didn’t like him. Hey, you can’t be best buddies with everybody you meet, an adage I’ve become quite familiar with. He didn’t just ignore him though, he would go after him quite ferociously, or as ferocious as a 12 pound dog can be anyway. I have no doubts that if he wasn’t 3 times smaller than Dallas, there would have been injury involved. I thought he actually did hurt him a few times, but it turned out to just be his feelings for the most part. Ol’ Dallas was a slow learner though, he wasn’t giving up. Just kept running at both of them in that big goofy puppy way, over and over and over, always with the same result. I kept expecting him to realize he had a considerable size advantage and turn the tables, but luckily he never figured that out. Oh well, I guess we survived. Maybe I should hold that assessment until after I get through this week.

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Whoa, did I miss three weeks? Geez, what happened there. Guess I got caught up in the excitement. We’ve had visitors, we took a little vacation, we left the house a few times… It’s just mayhem out west! Our KC friends the Martins came out for a week. We all went up to the Celebrity Golf Tournament in Tahoe, which is always a good time. It would probably be even more fun if I liked golf and recognized any of the “celebrities,” but it was a great time all the same. I knew a few, like Patrick Mahomes & Travis Kelce, and Brett Saberhagen always plays in it. For the most part I recognize names but not faces. Golf tourney aside, we had some great meals too, and just general fun.

Before Martin flew out, he threw out the idea that we should try cooking a brisket from Snake River Farms. Hey, I’m game. I’ve heard of them before, but never took the plunge on buying one. The only bad news was, all they had in stock was the 20-pound behemoths when I got around to ordering. Oh well. He smuggled some good KC bbq rub out here with him, and we threw it on my smoker at 5:00 in the morning. Now, the last time I used this cooker was a full year ago. We had a big party and invited everybody up for a house warming of sorts. It went “OK” but honestly I just wasn’t happy with the ‘que. I didn’t think it got enough smoke, I had a bit of trouble with the heat, and was just a bit bummed about the whole thing. This brisket turned it all around. It was just great, and now I can’t wait to fire up the smoker again and try some more stuff. I think the biggest issue was the fancy lump charcoal I’ve been using. It just doesn’t work well in this smoker, I’ve decided. Too big. I bought some regular briquettes, and didn’t stuff it so full, and it ran like a champ. Cooked that whole 20 pound slab of beef on about 1/2 a bag of charcoal. This is excitement in my world.

As for this past weekend, it wasn’t bad either. No bbq and Tahoe, but I can’t hold that pace very long anyway. We went out to a few wineries with some friends on Saturday, and Sunday we tried out a new Mexican restaurant, which was fantastic. Service was a little sketchy, but I don’t get too bent out of shape about that, I’m there for the feed. After dinner we went home and played pool and darts all night, which was fun. While we played games, I ran back and forth upstairs and kept an eye on my exciting beef tallow project. “Uhhhh, your what?” So when I trimmed out the aforementioned brisket, I threw all the fat in a bag and tossed it in the freezer. That’s what I usually do so it doesn’t get all smelly in the trash, then I throw it out on trash day. Well, by our estimation when we got done trimming, there was about $40 worth of trash in that bag. I just couldn’t quite shake that thought out of my cheapskate mind. A little light reading turned up the tallow idea, so I tossed it all in a stock pot and got to renderin’. I guess it came out good? Not entirely sure what it was supposed to turn out like, but it looks good to me. Or as good as five cups of fat can look anyway. I have no earthly idea what I’m going to do with it, but I gave it a try at least. (Chicken fried steak is on the short list.)

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