Six Months Later...

A little more than six months after the hurricanes, we still have reminders of the carnage around us.  Our son, Russ, is about to move back into his home as the contractors will finish up shortly, remodeling his home following a large tree falling through his roof.  We still look around at broken branches ("widow makers") high up in our live oak trees - reminders of the storm.  We are blessed, though.  Many people lost their homes and livelihoods.  

This weekend we wanted to incinerate a big reminder of Laura and Delta that we walk by every single day on the way to the barn.  The "burn pile."  After the storm, we hauled all the branches, limbs, and assorted sticks to the pasture and stacked them in a big, long windrow.  This weekend we started the fire to bid farewell to the one of the last remaining vestiges of tropical wrath still on our property.

Buckwheat the billy goat with his long goatee looks on, as does Belle, our livestock guardian dog.  We separated the long windrow into an individual pile.  Lighting the whole thing up would burn our pecan trees to the east and our newly planted tomatoes to the west.  As the fire consumed the branches, we would toss more on, being careful not to let it get too high.

It didn't take long until the entire pile was burned down to a mere fraction of its original size.  In the photo below, the pile originally stretched almost to the t-post in the foreground.  Now there is lots more room to walk, roll out hay bales, and much less hiding places for hens to lay their eggs.  These new hens are crafty.  We'll discover 'hidden nests' after searching around when we don't collect as many eggs in the nest boxes.

We weren't done with fires or smoke just yet.  As the fire smoldered and smoked, we were about to start another fire.  First, we seasoned up one of the briskets from one of our Jersey bulls with a rub we like.

I started my charcoal chimney fire starter (an easy way to start charcoal without lighter fluid).

Put the brisket on the smoker...

And watched and patiently waited for 6 hours while the brisket smoked at around 250 degrees.  Our Weber Smokey Mountain Smoker does a great job.  It requires monitoring, though, to ensure your temperature stays somewhere between 210 - 250 degrees.  This is easily accomplished by opening or closing the air vents and tossing a few more chunks of pecan or live oak wood in on occasion.

We used cut up chunks of pecan branches and live oak branches we lost in the storms to flavor the brisket.  It turned out delicious.