Friday night plans

This is definitely a first! Our charcuterie venture starts tonight with this pickling spice for the pastrami. Hubby exclaims a quotable: "We're going to smoke the crap out of these tomorrow." He took out chicken breasts, pork chops and a pork roast to smoke tomorrow, in addition to brining the beef tonight for the pastrami.

Tomorrow was originally scheduled as a brewing day but the temperature is supposed to hit 103 degrees - horrible forecast for brewing. So we plan on smoking all sorts of meat and then hanging out at our neighbor's pool to cool off. The pork roast should be ready to share.

We are bidding on ebay for a meat grinder and sausage stuffer. The sausage casing came in the mail earlier today. We are going full bore on this hobby! Sweet!