Meal No. 2622: Texas Slow-Cooker Pulled Pork Barbecue

For the duration of the coronavirus pandemic thus far, the Roediger House has engaged in a pretty full shut-down. There've been no guests over to the house with the exception of a couple of driveway visits (with camp chairs appropriately distanced) with the RoHo regulars. Last Wednesday was the first approximation of a social affair in months, when a family of five came over to do a driveway hang and eat barbecue and slaw and shoot hoops at the too-little-used basketball goal. The weather was just awesome: still sunny but we were in the shade of the rear trees, and the breezes were great. And the food wasn't so bad either: Texas pulled pork barbecue with sweet and tangy barbecue sauce, along with a big ol' batch of coleslaw based on my mother's approach. I donned my mask and a pair of food service gloves to serve up each plate according to order or preference. Some folks enjoyed their barbecue as a sandwich, and some with the coleslaw on top. But I do like to just have a pile of barbecue and a pile of slaw, bouncing back and forth between each. It was a delightful evening.

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Pulled Pork based somewhat on "Slow Cooker Texas Pulled Pork," from cmccreight on AllRecipes.com.

Barbecue Sauce adapted from "Sweet and Tangy Barbecue Sauce" from the recipe for "Indoor Pulled Pork," by Bryan Roof. In Cook's Illustrated, January & February 2010 (No. 102), p. 6-7.

Sweet Southern Coleslaw based on recipe from Allison M. Jones.

Tiller Stealer

Back in the spring of 2012, I bought a tiller since I was finally ready to start giving the landscaping around the Roediger House some serious attention:

I definitely put it to good use for those first few years of active yard management. Then, in August of 2015, in between my travels, I came across a strange pile of clay and dirt on the front steps coming up from the street:

Soon thereafter, I happened to give this area in my side yard a double-take:

It is noteworthy for what is absent: that's where the tiller had been sitting for months, under a cover. Guess whoever took it just went down the front steps with it! The day after discovering this, I went around to the two downtown pawn shops but had no luck in finding it again. I reckon it could have gone anywhere. And since it happened when I was on the road and therefore I didn't discover it immediately, my outdoor security cameras had already begun taping over the footage on the DVR that would have clued me in to what happened.

That tiller has joined a wheelbarrow, an extension ladder, and a basketball goal that folks have helped themselves to from my yard!

Cookie-Making Binge Continues

More cookies this past week, like the white-chocolate macadamia nut version below...

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"Premier White Chocolate and Macadamia Pieces Cookies," from Hershey's Mauna Loa. Found online at http://www.maunaloa.com/recipes/cookies.asp.

Full Moon of December 2012

In the days between Christmas and New Year's this year, there was one mostly clear night that was also the time of the full moon. I managed to grab shots of it coming up over the city skyline (around 7 in the evening) and then as it was setting in the west behind the house around 5 or 5:30 am. Here's a sampling, and also another couple of shots of this year's limited Christmas decorations.

WFU Class of 2007 Mini-Reunion

Photo: Monica R. Winter via Facebook

Today, former WFU grad student and Roediger House regular Bradley Phillis married the love of his life, Lauren Wilson. This happy occasion brought to town some of his close friends from his days at Wake Forest, and it made me very happy for the RoHo to be their gathering spot for part of the weekend.

All of them who were around this weekend have been to the house since the renovation and addition work was completed, but in their student days, our gatherings usually took place in the front of the house, in the North Parlour. The kitchen area was where we spent most of our time this weekend, though, except for a bit of basketball time and an evening out drinking at Rec Billiards.

Bradley and Lauren took off for their Shenandoah Valley honeymoon, but WFU social studies alums Julie, Tim, and Trevor were here for dinner tonight. We even did a partial recreation of the Class of 2007 picture we took as they finished up their programs five years ago, on the night of our Dessert & Decaf gathering:

Bradley's brother Ben stood in for Bradley (Ben graduated from Wake Forest's social studies education masters program this past summer).

Meal No. 628: Brendan's Moroccan Bistro Chicken.
Dinner was courtesy of a recipe shared by a student I taught a lot longer ago than this crew: Brendan Shanley, who was a 7th grade student of mine in 1995-1996. It's sort of an invented meal of his and so I gave it an invented name: Brendan's Moroccan Bistro Chicken. It was served over Israeli couscous with pine nuts and parsley, baby lima beans, and huge sweet potatoes.

It was a great night and a lot of fun. And the recycling clean-up the next morning attested to how we greased the skids with some liquid lubrication:

Labor Day 2012 Basketball Tourney

Now that I've got a basketball goal again, the Roediger House could finally host a ramshackle thrown-together casual basketball tourney for only the second time. And with this year's affair under our belt, we can safely say that we've had to do it in the rain every single time there's been one of these.

Anyway: with the weather creating enormous uncertainty, and after initially canceling it at the last minute, things cleared enough to still put some players on the court and some fans in the stands.

Some pictures, for those who couldn't be present:

Twin City Taps & A Birthday Dinner

What a busy Saturday.

Today was the second annual Twin City Taps Craft Beer Festival, sponsored by the North Carolina Brewers Guild. (Apparently, North Carolina has the greatest number of craft breweries in the American South.) Last year it was particularly delightful, because it was held just down from the house at BB&T Ballpark, home of the Winston-Salem Dash, AND good friend and former student Byron Hoover was also on hand for it.

Not sure what all was going on, but I get the feeling this year's Twin City Taps was not as well-organized. Apparently, they didn't take care of all the permitting that they needed to, and so the festival was held at Ziggy's. That by itself is not a bad thing; it's still walking distance, albeit just a bit farther. And the day was still a good one, even though we were rained on for about 20 minutes.

Just not the same as being at the ballpark, as I'm sure you can understand.

A pretty fun crew took in the Twin City Taps today, including fellow UNC alum Steve Zorn, who was also celebrating his birthday. Steve graduated a year ahead of me from Chapel Hill, worked in DC for almost 20 years, and moved back to Winston-Salem to be closer to his aging parents, who live down in Asheboro.

Steve had a lot to do with getting the Roediger House nominated for recognition from Preserve Historic Forsyth.

After hitting most of the brewers' tents a second time, we strolled back home in time to beat the rain that hit late afternoon. But we'd already begun some outside basketball time, and we just kept on playing.

To ease any late afternoon hunger, I'd already made some southwestern dip to serve with tortilla chips:

Dinner was ribeye steaks, baked sweet potatoes, and salad with homemade blue cheese dressing.

This was Meal No. 567 in the kitchen, since the completion of the addition and renovation project.

All this activity seemed to take its toll on Cyprus.

Basketball Goal: Finished!

Although the instructions suggest that "Three Adults Are Required to Complete Assembly," let me assure you that on a sweltering hot summer day with lots of sweaty hands, we were lucky to get the basketball goal up properly with four of us laboring.

But it is finished and has already been tested with some loose shot-taking and a couple of games of Two-Bounce.

Weekend Basketball Goal Update

All outdoor work has been suspended this weekend, because trying to do stuff in this heat would just be stupid. The Accu-Weather forecast from this morning:

Glad I got outside and did the watering at about 5:30 a.m. today.

And while I know it is not an accurate measure of the temperature, my truck sure thought it was hot yesterday afternoon around 3 o'clock:

Being inside, though, gave me a good excuse to do preliminary assembly on the basketball goal. I attached the handle and the spring mechanism, that can be used to raise and lower it. Then I started working on the backboard and rim and discovered much to my dismay that a critical part was missing. You know, the kind of part where they say something like this in the assembly instructions: "WARNING: The glass backboard will break if the Rim Impact Spacer [L] is not installed as shown in this step, resulting in injury or property damage."

I could find no Rim Impact Spacer in the wild array of parts. A quick call to the company with 20 minutes left in their customer service hours (thank goodness for Mountain Time) on a Friday afternoon put things in motion for the missing piece to arrive by the middle of next week.

So the dinner and goal-raising planned for tomorrow night will just be dinner for my erstwhile conscripts/volunteers.

In the meantime, I'm pretty pleased with how the base is setting up, and as of tomorrow we'll have reached the five-day "curing" period that was recommended. The hole is all filled in now, although I'll need to add a bit more dirt on top to get it more even, as it settles.

Basketball Goal Saga: Hole and Base

As noted a couple of days ago in a blog post, when I decided I was going to make installation of the new basketball goal a do-it-yourself project, I didn't anticipate running into huge slabs of buried granite. The one that was most in my way was a stubborn challenge, but yesterday the words my father loved to use kept running through my head: "When you don't have education, you have to use your common sense."

Or maybe I didn't use my common sense. But I did use some rope, some boards, and my Toyota Tundra. So removing that huge piece of granite ended up being a solo job after all.

Couldn't leave it in the driveway, though, so I set up some 2 x 4 boards as skids and, with pickaxe in hand, pulled it bit by bit back up against the rear retaining wall.

With that out of the way, I could now dig the hole for the concrete base down to the recommended depth. (I went a little further, almost 40 inches deep.)

Then it was off to Lowe's to get 20 bags of Quikrete:

Starting mid-afternoon and working straight through until almost dark, I mixed (by hand, in my wheelbarrow) eighteen 80-lb bags of concrete, one by painstaking one, in order to fill the hole and set the base.

When the job was finished, it was dark enough I had to use the flash to capture the base plate set in the mortar.

Update: Here's the next-day shot with the concrete well on its way to drying. The base needs to cure for about five days, and so by Sunday or Monday I hope to assemble the goal and then mount it.