I'm new. Just saying "hi" and introducing myself.
Found this board because I just bought a Big Easy Electric Smoker-Roaster (which arrived yesterday). In preparation for my new cooker, I did some researching online and wound up at a forum on the Char-Broil website. Further Googling of some of the terms and methods mentioned on that forum led me to this forum. So here I am.
I generally like to think of myself as halfway competent in the kitchen (or with outdoors cooking), though I've got a long ways to go before I'd consider myself very good.
I've made plenty of dumb mistakes preparing food, and I'm sure I'll make plenty more. Full disclosure: I somehow shot myself directly in the face with a can of cooking spray this morning. I was trying to quickly oil up my BEESR's cooking basket, and I got careless. I guess I was just so unaccustomed to spraying such an oddly shaped item, I started spraying it from all different angles and completely forgot that the oil mist would shoot right between the wires and come out on the other side of the basket. So, yeah. Kind of a pain to wipe cooking spray from a pair of glasses, by the way. I'm actually kind of surprised it took me this many years of cooking before I made that particular mistake. I'd have thought I'd have made that mistake in my first year or two of cooking.
Most of my experience with food preparation has been indoors. Tons of cooking and baking. Lots of roasting and broiling in the oven. Lots of lazy slow cooking in the crockpot. Occasional dabbling in homemade ice cream or homemade cheese or homemade yogurt.
I still have a good amount of experience cooking outdoors, mainly with propane grills. But I confess that I don't think I ever really properly learned what I was doing. I learned from my dad, and I've since realized he doesn't know much about cooking (which is why I sometimes fall back into bad habits/methods he taught me, resulting in things like overcooked food, too much seasoning, and grease fires). Somewhere around the age of 13, I became my dad's grilling assistant. Within months, that role morphed from being the "assistant" to just straight-up being entirely responsible for all outdoor cooking. (Incidentally, I had a similar experience with my mom and indoor cooking -- I'd become the resident chef in the kitchen somewhere in my teens, so I was responsible for indoor and outdoors cooking from a fairly early age in my family.)
In 2010, I think it was, my brother and I bought my dad a Weber smoker for Christmas. We'd always had pretty stellar briskets whenever we'd visited my mom's parents. My mom's parents made great briskets, as they took meat preparation very seriously. They have, like, an 8-foot tall homemade smoker they welded, and they have big piles of mesquite wood they haul in from some property they own somewhere, and they often brag about how they worked a disgruntled employee to get him to divulge the recipe for their favorite sauce from their favorite BBQ joint in Luling, TX, where they used to live. So they know they're doing with those briskets. Those briskets were always a highlight of trips to see family. So I finally broke down and got my dad a smoker so we could make our own briskets instead of only enjoying them on those rare trips.
I also own a Char-Broil Patio Bistro electric grill. I won it this summer in some kind of a sweepstakes at my local movie theater. The giveaway must've been sponsored by Coca-Cola, because the grill is bright red and has the Coca-Cola logo painted on it. I haven't broken that one in yet. (Haven't used it because winning that grill coincided with me cutting back on things like sausage and burgers as I've been eating a bit healthier for a few months -- I've actually lost 40-50 pounds since late August.)
So, I have a lots of experience in the kitchen. Lots of so-so experience on propane grills. Some brief experience with a Weber Smokey Mountain charcoal smoker in the years since buying it for my dad. And now I've come here to learn how to get good results from my Big Easy Electric Smoker-Roaster. Maybe I'll eventually get around to learning how to get results from that Patio Bistro deal, too.
