If Memorial Day is the biggest grilling day of the year, then 4th of July has to be the second biggest grilling day of the year. I’d like to say that I did grill out, but technically I did not. I smoked a 7 lb pork shoulder instead. This was the first time I smoked a pork shoulder. I also made my rub again (with a minor tweak) and created a pork injection and BBQ sauce from scratch. The minor tweak to my rub was simply making my own brown sugar, which is insanely easy (its just sugar and molasses) but it made a huge difference in the flavor profile of the rub.
We tried to make two sauces actually. We followed the recipe in Myron Mixon‘s “Everyday Barbeque” book and it turned out to be more like a pizza sauce then a BBQ sauce. I looked up the reviews of the book online and discovered that everyone that tried the recipe thought the same thing. We were completely unable to salvage the sauce and ended up giving it to a friend who would use it as a pasta sauce/marinade for non-BBQ dishes. Despite the terrible BBQ sauce recipe, the book has been quite useful and definitely contributed to the success of this smoked pork shoulder. The other sauce we made turned out to be really good. We looked for a recipe that was suppose to be close to Sweet Baby Ray’s sauce but we decided to alter the recipe, of course, because I wanted to make it my own instead of somebody else’s recipe.
I smoked the pork for about 10 hours; although in hindsight I probably should have gone another hour or two as the meat didn’t pull apart as easily as I would have liked. After I took it off the grill I wrapped it in some foil with more fresh brown sugar, butter and agave. I then wrapped it again in a heavy wool blanket in a cooler and let it rest there for 45 minutes to an hour.
I took a few pictures to document the progress and end result …
Issue 120: It’s already Independence Day, where has this year gone. The days are already growing shorter and we are already a third of the way through the summer. Gaming is definitely one way to spend those hot summer days. Granted going outside is good for the ole belly, but there’s nothing good about heat stroke. Plan your day-star activities carefully. 
So I finally got around to logging into the game after the 6.2 patch launched this past Tuesday to check out the new content. So far I think the docks and naval missions are pretty well done. The UI elements and quest mechanics are pretty smooth and intuitive (though I do hope 
Back in January of this year I told folks on Facebook that I was going to participate in the Walk-to-Mordor Nerd Fitness challenge. I can’t remember how I originally found out about this challenge. I feel like I read about it on someone else’s feed and searched for it on Google. I found most of the logistics from a blog site called