Okay it's been a couple of weekends without doing a cook due to other fun events like the Sawtell Chilli Festival. So, this weekend, I'm back with the usual chicken cook. I made the rub up the day before, using this and olive oil on the chicken and putting it back in the fridge.

Rub I used was:-

1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoon brown sugar
3 teaspoon oregano
1 teaspoon paprika
3 teaspoon garlic powder
2 teaspoon cumin

At 3:17pm, I fired up the pit and put the chicken on about 30 minutes later. Rangehood temperature was sitting pretty at 250F. It was a pretty cold and windy day, so I just went inside with my remote digital thermometer and started working on editing the Too Hot to Handle video (Sawtell video linked above).

At 4:50pm, probably a little later than I should have, I turned the chicken. One of the sides of the bird that was closest to the direct heat got a little singed but didn't affect the overall flavour. I also took this opportunity to put the veggies on. I did a couple of sweet potatoes with butter, crushed garlic and fresh rosemary. I did another one coated with Crowley's Hot Sauce - BBQ Onion, one of their new range I picked up in Sawtell.

I also went back to using pellets on this cook, some of the last lot of my mesquite pellets and boy did they smell good. Have I mentioned I think I'm addicted to the mesquite smell ?

Before 6pm, I had everything cooked lovely and we sat down for our Sunday night meal. The Crowley covered sweet potato only had a hint of the flavour and the heat, so it's definitely better to do it after the fact.

I was really looking forward to today's cook, because I finally got my hands on a leg of lamb to smoke. Lamb isn't big in the US smoking community, however, lamb is readily (and tasty) available in Australia. I'd lent my smoker box to a good friend of mine, who was starting to get into smoking, so for this cook, I make a ghetto or redneck engineered smoker box using the Samba wood chips and alfoil. I also put some rosemary in there too.

At 3:23pm the pit went on, with the meat going on about 30 minutes later. The internal temperature of the meat with 9C with the rangehood at 350F.

For the rub, I decided to get my mortar and pestle and crush up some rosemary, but do you know what, it doesn't actually crush that well, it just sorta gets squashed. Anyway, I put that and some of my leftover rub on the lamb.

This was my second time using wood chips and boy was it smokey. At 4:50pm, the lamb was looking great and internally was at 62C, whilst the rangehood was holding strong at 350F -- still a little hotter than I would have liked. I spent the rest of the afternoon re-watching episodes of Heroes on Netflix and listening to the Liquid Tones podcast on my new Jabra Bluetooth speaker.

At 5:26pm, the internal temperature was 77C, so I prepared to take it off the heat and let it rest. Before I got a chance to hook into the meat, my wife asked me not to have too much as we were eating the rest on bread rolls for lunch tomorrow at Seaworld. The lamb was so nice, that we had it for dinner that night, lunch the next day (Seaworld) and then dinner again. Even when it was cold the next day, it still tasted great. Another successful cook !