Grand Adventure

We’ve recently found a decent kegerator that will serve us well when we host big groups.  I can just see this alongside the outdoor kitchen at LaPine!

New Kegerator

We’ve taken the boat out, and although the fishing wasn’t good at all (2 fish in 3 outings) it was a fantastic time.  We took McKinley out with us to spend as much time with Bubba.  He’s been slowing down quite a bit this summer, reminding us of his mortality at a time when are close to living at Lapine full time.

We were worried he’d not handle things on the boat well, but as you can see he settled in just fine!

Arrived at the Lapine house yesterday afternoon and although I was tired a bit I was very excited.  Shelley did a magnificent job prepping the property, and all was set for me to have a great vacation this summer.

In the fall Shelley has a set of TV shows she watches, but in the summer things taper off for that part of her entertainment.  She’s gotten into watching the Food Network to replace her other shows.  She saw an episode from Bobby Flay (the king of BBQ) on making brisket.  My last attempt at a brisket was an abysmal failure (about a year ago) so I’ve been gunshy to try again.  The key to good BBQ is “low and slow”, meaning low heat and long time cooking.

Using his recipe as the baseline, we made a rub and prepped things last night.  Bobby recommends a smoker approach to brisket.  I have a superb propane smoker at LaPine, so we decided to use that.  The brisket (cut in half) marinated in the rub overnight for 12+ hours.  It will cook over indirect heat in my smoker 4 hours uncovered, with replacement of wood chips for that entire block.  Then it will cook for about more hours wrapped in aluminum foil.  You can find the recipe online at the Foodnetwork website.  Search for Bobby Flay, brisket, addict. 

I can’t wait to taste how it comes out!!

The game of lowball is an aquired taste, one I haven’t sampled (except for a part of a few 8 Game tournaments) in quite a while.

The trick, as it is with most poker games in tournament mode, is preflop/decision hand selection. As I’ve posted before it is basically looking for hands that will draw one to have 9 or less in the hand, or two cards for 8 or less. Tonight I’m doing quite well, but in spite of many times where I had two or less draws, then paired my 8 or less. Maddening.

At this point in the tournament the antes plus the blinds make it for a nice morsel to win a hand uncontested. Which encourages aggressive play. Several of the good players at my table recognize this (3 of the top 5 are sitting with me) so I must choose carefully those times I engage. It sure would be nice to get a decent pat hand to play out, but that hasn’t happened all night. At one point I was even in 3rd place (see below)

If I do fairly well I will update here on GA

Well, I got to a point where all I can do is wait for drawer slides to come in.  My dimensions were too small for the Big Box drawer slides to accommodate, so I had to order some on Rockler.com .  It also doesnt help that I mis-cut the first drawer, and that I would need a decent jig to route the edges correctly without a jittery look.  So…I’m waiting until I bring back my mini-router table from LaPine to finish out the project. 

While the grunt work of the project is done, I have the tougher precision tasks to tackle when I come back.  Oh well.

If all works correctly this will post with an embedded video for you to see the project in its current state. 

From Acer @ airport

Sadly, with the heat and me having the “2nd String” tools here in Texas (we thought we’d move right away, and weren’t sure we’d have a garage) I’ve not done many woodworking projects. Other than building the shelving in our on-post house garage I’ve tapered off. In an ironic way, I’m at an assignment where I have enough down time to do some detailed (and fun!) projects but I left my good tools at LaPine.

At this point a lot of my thinking is towards what I need at the the LaPine house. It makes little sense to do a project that is specific to the current house we live in, unless its a low overhead/easy one to pull off. One of the interesting design pieces of the LaPine house is the kitchen window opens up towards where we put the outdoor kitchen setup. Shell and I often communicate through that kitchen window, and constantly move “supplies” from the house to outside when we host large group meals. The outdoor kitchen has a decent amount of countertop space, but it still lacks adequate storage for all the things we pull off when grilling. Enter the BBQ Prep Stand idea I had about 4 months ago.

Many kitchens have the prep island setup, with the extension of countertop space and storage area. I wanted to replicate that capability for a grill area.

Some of the key design concepts going into the project are:
-Natural wood/notty pine style to match our overall them of a cabin in the woods. I’ve made a bookcase and storage shelf unit for the Pole Barn room in this manner. Both Shelley and I really like the natural wood look and try to acquire it and put into the LaPine house when we can. If you can’t have a real cabin in the woods, have all the doodads around the place that make it look woodsy!

-It needs to be sturdy enough to handle rolling pin + pizza dough operations. One of my new favorite recipes is pizza on the BBQ grill. With an additional prep area and two grills it will accommodate large groups. I routinely make pizzas here on the grill with our neighbors, who have school-age children and its a big hit. Don’t like pepperoni?? No problem, put the topping on the pizza YOU want. Want a healthier pizza? Use more veggies and a white sauce for the base. The variations are limitless.

-It needs both drawer and large space storage to accommodate the right utensils and herbs.

-It needs to be mobile as there will always be at least two grills on the back porch. And it can double as a food service platform for people eating/sitting at the outside tables.

Here are some photos of the project by phases

Its time to cover up the plywood with notty pine

And the top comes last…(of the frame building)

Just needs cabinet doors and drawers and is ready for staining

I stumbled onto a cool recipe from one of Shelley’s cooking magazines. It’s pizza on the grill, and it tastes as good as restaurant pizza.

The key is making your own dough. Truth be told, after I saw the recipe I decided our newest kitchen upgrade would be a Cuisinart stand mixer. It matches our food processor from them, and is very high quality as you might expect from Cuisinart. I did take a look at the KitchenAid models at the PX, but they seemed less sturdy, didn’t have a timer and the colors wouldn’t match some of our other appliances.

Due to copyright reasons I can’t post the recipe here on GA. But if you email me I can walk you through the process.

Making the dough with the stand mixer is ridiculously easy. While Shell was gone back to the NW visiting family and friends I must have made 5 or 6 batches of pizza dough. Then handed it out to colleagues at work to try. It’s a universal hit.

The recipe also has instructions for making your own pizza sauce. I didn’t want to dive into that just yet, so I bought some pizza sauce for the first test run. I also recalled that one of our favorite pizzas has a white sauce, which goes well with chicken. So I took a jar of alfredo sauce we had in the cupboard and tried that the second test run. I kept telling Shelley how good it was, and how much fun, so we decided to make pizza yesterday for lunch. Since the dough was already done it took about 15-20 mins per pizza. I had her build the first one, with the ingredients she wanted to put on it. Here’s the result:

Each dough ball makes a 12″ or so pizza crust. The flavor is very much like those wood fired brick oven pizzas you may have had. The grill marks and crispiness of the crust in some places, with softer crust in others is a nice balance of texture. Being the guy that I am, I had to whip out a more traditional pizza. I still have some of the original red sauce, but I added some of my homemade salsa to it so I could 1) extend how much I had, and 2) provide additional flavor. It didn’t disappoint.

If I am being honest, Shelley’s alfredo pizza was simply killer. Perfect blend of the amount of sauce, garlic powder, mushrooms, etc and perfectly spaced out to have each bite a treat. Poor McKinley normally scores a bunch of crusts when we order pizza delivery, but there isn’t much left after we have a slice of our’s from the grill!

I also delved into baking, but I will post the results of that later.

This week has been pretty good for me at the felt. When I have a good week it usually means I’m up $5 or more for that week. I play at what is called the “micro-stakes” level. Cash/ring games have blinds of 01/02, 02/05 up to .10/25 cents. Tournament buy-ins are capped somewhere under $5, for both Sit-n-Go’s and multitable tournaments. The minimum buy in for tournaments is a whopping .02 (see Link to read a posting I had about playing at that level…sheer aggression is the name of the game!).

I joined a friend’s poker club a couple of weeks ago, and endeavored to play a few games now and then. They play weekly on Tuesday nights. The primary negative is that they play at $20 and higher levels. My bankroll can absorb a few of those games, and I keep it separate from any budget money that we have. In other words, if I lose it life will go on. I’ve been able to sit on the virtual rail for some of the other club member’s games, and thought my skills would be enough to be at least competitive in their game. A key distinction is that this club plays live poker routinely together, but not much online. In the old days when internet poker first launched live players had a huge advantage over newbies online, and would rake in the money. I play about 3,000 hands of poker a month. And some online kids play exponentially more than that.

The reality is that online poker is an excellent way to learn how to play, and you are a quantum leap ahead of live-only players in # of hands seen. While the buy in level was steep I thought I’d jump in this week to the club’s game. One concern for me is that they all know each other, and I was worried that I’d be disadvantaged. Also, I didn’t want to have one of those outings where I crush the competition…it happens, even for a fish like me

I placed in the money.

I’m now ranked 4th, but probably will drop in the scoring as I don’t plan to play every week. Twenty bucks is still a lot of money. But it was cool to hit the money, as the payout essentially doubled my $20 buy in, making it the second largest winning in one game I’ve had ever playing poker. That is, until yesterday.

Yesterday I was unexpectedly released from work early, due to bad weather here. Shell had to run errands so I decided to play a MTT as I’d have about a 4 hour chunk. I went out early in two of them, one was a .10 buy in, 360 player tournament (those are fun, but the other players can be holding any two cards at any point). The second tournament was a $2.20 buy in, with 180 players. I fizzled out early there too.

I decided to play one more $2.20. After 4 hands into that tournament, we had a power outage at the house. Arrghh! It took my computer forever to reboot, of course. The saving grace was that the tournament launched at :48 past the hour, and Pokerstars has breaks at :55 hourly for multitable tournaments. By the time I got logged back in there was 1 minute left in the break and I was down about 250 in chips of 1500 to start the tournament. Not insurmountable, but still very annoying.

Here’s the very cool thing: I won the whole tournament. Yep, my first win for a tournament > 18 players in size.

Between that win and the club game placing earlier this week I added about a third more money into my bankroll. For me, more important than the money, is that I finally won a large tournament. I’ve come close several times, crapping out at the final table for various reasons usually for pushing a mediocre hand too hard. This time I was patient when I hit that point. I led in chip stacks at the start of the final table, and only lost that lead once in heads up play.

To get there though I had to win a couple of coin-tosses in terms of odds, and I had one pretty sizeable “suckout”. Note: a suckout is where a hand wins that shouldn’t because the odds are greatly against it to win again the other player’s hand. I had A-4 of Diamonds, and the villian had A-Jack of spades. He had been playing real loosely so when he reraised me (something he did often to others at the table) I shoved…and there was my teeny hand against his. The only way for me to win was to chop with his hand by the board pairing up or presenting us both with a straight, 3 diamonds hitting giving me the nut flush, or a four hitting. I hit a four and he didn’t get a Jack, or three spades (but had two spades on the flop…scary next two cards for me).

When heads up, I got hurt by a bad beat from my opponent, and expected it to decimate me. Despite wading through 178 other players this guy wasn’t going to go down without me playing as well as I can. One other element for tournaments of this size is that you need to have some good cards at key points. After the bad beat, I hit a card rush. Then regained my chip lead of 2:1 of his stack. I won the tournament on a hand of A-T suited against his A-Q offsuit by hitting a T on the turn. He made a comment in the chat window btw, of how he fell to my bad beat. But in terms of heads up, AT v AQ suited or unsuited is pretty even. Plus with me having such a large chip lead I could afford to push a hand like that and lose.

Its nice to have the tournament win monkey off of my back!

Brady and I are members of an online poker club hosted by Pokerstars Link. Earlier today he, I and another member of the club, Alan, squared off in the inaugural tournament for the club. Yep, three amigos hitting the felt hard.

Alan is member of the home game crowd Shelley and I will occasionally play with here. He bowed out in 3rd place, leaving Brady and I heads up. You can see my cards in the image below. A snapshot of McKinley from LaPine is my image, and Brady uses a tiger’s eye. Cool stuff.

Your intrepid hero (that’s me) had an initial chip lead but quickly fell behind due to the craftiness of the villian. Booooo….Hissss

But, it was a tremendously fun time. Since it was play money ($300 buy in, winner take all) it really was all about bragging rights. Alas, my favorite Sister’s Husband now has that over me!