Welcome to all things BBQ

I got into the BBQ craze thanks to my husband and one of his friends. We used to drive for Q runs into South Central LA at a time when it wasn't considered the safest things for people to do - but the BBQ was great. Watching BBQ contests, trying out new eateries, and grilling have become a part of our family.

A year ago we saw a BBQ episode on Food Network's "Good Eats" where the host made his own smoker. Being a bit into Q ourselves, we decided to turn our patio into a smoked BBQ factory. I chronicled our efforts at Squidoo and found that there are a lot of BBQ fans out there who like to tinker with their own smokers. As an update to that article, we used the smoker a few more times. We never managed to get the temperature high enough to cook the meat - possibly the hotplate we selected or the large size of our pots or both were to blame. Meat was smoked using different types of wood and different size chips then moved to the oven to cook. Given our setup, the smaller wood chips produced a more thorough smokey flavor in the meat but required frequent checks to load more chips (they were small enough to burn up quickly, producing lots of smoke and lots of flavor through-out the meat).