Not sure why we had these in our freezer, but the day before I defrosted them, rubbed them down with some DL Jardine Steak Seasoning and got them out today. As I'm on holidays, I plan to do as much BBQ as possible. The weather is hot and there's not much else to do, so at 12pm, I fired up the chimney with charcoal and dumped more of it in the ProQ basket. 20 minutes later and they were ready.

At 12:30pm, the steaks went on with an onion. 15 minutes into the cook, I adjusted vents to 1/2 open on 2 of them and 1 fully open. The rangehood temperature was up to 300F and the chunk of cherry wood had just started to smoke.

An hour later and the meat was well and truly cooked and smoked. So, I shut the smoker down and it was time to eat. Okay, the round steak was a little tough but nice and smokey flavoured. I had a thought, this meat would be great for jerky. Might have to try that.

Yes, I'm boring. I'm a parent and in my 40s, so what do we do for New Years ? I smoke a chicken of course. As I was out of charcoal, my son and I went for a bike ride to Bunnings. There I picked up their last bag of charcoal, that was going cheap as the bag was ripped a little. I thought, no worries, little did I realise that taking that 10kg bag home on the bike was going to be challenging to say the least. I also picked up 100 firelighters for $6 ... bargain !

Anyway, when I got home, I then used some leftover rub from the Christmas cooks and some plum wood chunks for the smoke source.


At 3:45pm, in the arvo, the pit went on with the chicken on about 20 minutes later with an internal temperature of 12C and 200F on the rangehood. It was smelling great as I kicked back eating a zooper dooper whilst listening back to The Chill Factor mix from this morning.

At 5:05pm, the rangehood was sitting on 300F and the internal temperature was 60C.

At 6:05pm, it's internal temperature was 83C, time to take it off and rest. We then got stuck into the chicken about 30 minutes later. A rather chilled night for the last day of 2015.