Building on my previous smoking experience I decided my next step would be a little chicken. Eventually I'll move on to ribs, boston butt, etc., but I figured chicken would be pretty simple and I know how chicken should taste.

First I brined the chicken with some salt (duh!), sugar and cayenne pepper for an hour. I dried the chicken with a paper towel and sprinkled liberally with my favorite rub. I didn't have a lot of time since I started late, so I only let it sit for an hour. Boy did it smell good when I pulled it out.

And that's pretty much where that story ends and the depressing one starts. The smoker caught on fire. Luckily I had my fire extinguisher on hand so it didn't turn into anything. Here's what I've learned.

• Wood chips should be soaked. I've heard of that, and in fact it's what I did for the salmon, but I didn't see anywhere that it was required or even strongly encouraged so I figured I'd experiment a bit. Lesson learned, it doesn't work.
• Fire extinguisher good, cardy-board bad. I'm going to be on the watch for something non-flammable to put my next smoker in. I still want to do the terra cotta, but I've more or less given up hope of finding a lid.
• Don't leave it unattended. I actually had stepped into the kitched to grab the fire extinguisher when the fire started. I wasn't gone long which was good, but I should have been all ready before I started.
• No smokers on the table. It left a funky film, which was easily cleaned up, but I think my wife would have killed me if I had ruined the table.

Shortly after posting about the salmon I intended to smoke, I was whisked away to Cheyenne, Wyoming on business. I barely had enough time and foresight to toss the fish into the freezer. I was a little worried about refreezing it, but the other option was to chuck it in the trash so I figured I'd be at least no worse off. And luckily it was only slightly freezer burned. I just thawed it for 2 days in the fridge with a big weight (stone bread pan) to squish some more juice out.

Today I jury-rigged up a smoker out of a cardboard box and the pieces of the terra cotta smoker that I'm still trying to build. My wife was a bit worried about having a hot object in a cardboard conveyance, so I made sure to have the fire extinquisher around just in case. Not a bad idea anyway, I suppose. Thankfully, no fire.

Following AB's recipe I cooked it until it hit 150 degrees F. Well, to tell the truth it was getting late and I was getting impatience, so I cut it off at 143. Please don't call the food police. The fish had been sitting in there for over 5 hours, so I'm quite sure any nasties had been eradicated.

The texture was a lot like canned tuna, but the flavor was so much better. So much smokier, although curiously it seemed to oscillate between strong and mild. The outside layer had developed this especially tasty thick, somewhat cruchy skin. The BBQ ribs I had in Cheyenne last week had a similar layer and it was equally delicious then. I believe those ribs were also dry smoked so I'm quite looking forward to using that technique on a lot more munchables. I had a bit of my salmon on a sandwitch with some mayo and it was to die for.

Not sure when I might next try the salmon. I have a feeling that wild salmon is a rare catch around here. I'm thinking that I may try smoking some trout if the streams are especially nice to me this year. I'll try out a number of different rubs and woods (I used apple, btw).

I just ran into this problem, and it almost became a disaster but I luckily noticed the missing files in time, and I figured I should blog it so that nobody else repeats this mistake.

Did you know that the default behavior of 'find' is to not follow symlinks? Well I sure didn't. Yesterday I was tarring up a whole slew of files, some of which were in symlinked directories. Those ones were ignored. I ended up with about 2/3 of the number I expected, but for some reason I ignored my gut and continued on (never ignore your gut, especially if it's hungry!). By some saving grace I noticed the missing files just a few minutes ago and recovered.

So, the option is '-L' to follow symlinks. Remember that. 'find -L'. Perhaps a bash alias is in order...

I've heard one of the ways to increase your spam load is to post your email address on a website, and anecdotally I can vouch for that. For example, just recently I've started receiving spam addressed to message IDs of emails I posted to public mailing lists. So I decided to quantify that a little bit. To that end I have sprinkled some new email addresses around on my website and carefully noted where. Over the next few weeks, months, however long it takes, I'll watch the results and let you know.

Relational databases are powerful beasts. Rightly so they've replaced heirarchical databases for most types of data, directories being the notable exception. But things go wrong when someone who doesn't know jack squat about them is in charge. You'd like an example? Well, it just so happens that I have one. How convenient.

Head on over to americastestkitchen.com and take a look. See if you can find the error before you finish reading this post. Go ahead, I'll wait. Be careful if you sign up for an account as they'll seriously spam your email address. Make sure you uncheck the box that says "send me tons of crap", or whatever it was. Rotten liars. You know, they never did respond to my scathing email.

Anyway, their gimmick is simple. Recipes from the current episode are online, but previous episodes are only for subscribers to Cooks Illustrated magazine. Fair enough. How's it accomplished? Very poorly. A typical URL looks like this (trimmed for brevity): "/recipe.asp?recipeids=26&iSeason=6". The current season is 6, so any link to say "Season=4" will give you a "please pay us $$$ to access this content". Think about that for a second. What's to keep you from changing "4" to "6"? I'll tell you. Absolutely nothing. Try it out and you'll see.

The proper way to do this is to use a relational database (getting back to our topic) to link RecipeId #26 to Season #6. Since a recipe would only be in one season, you'd actually just need a single column added to the table. It doesn't get any simpler than that, and would prevent unauthorized access.

Well, until the incompetent webmasters over at America's Test Kitchen catch wind of this blog you may want to scoop up all their recipes. Considering the popularity of my site, I wouldn't worry about hurrying.