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Major Chane of Some Sort Coming

Blogger has decided to urinate on their users and are removing a very basic function. This will prevent us from continuing to use Blogger as our Whizlog service. We would no longer be able to have a Whizlog that looks like a Whizlog and that we are not prepared to do. So we shall be investigating other options and will let you know on our website what will happen to Whizlog. Sorry, but you know how it is when a service gets gobbled up, digested and then expelled by Google. Blogger is sorry, so we are sorry. Uh, huh.....

Oh dear, it's been a while again.....

We really don't keep up with this blogging stuff very well, do we? We suppose it is to do with the fact that we spend so much time keeping the web site up to date with new features. Oh well, if you haven't been watching, we added a number of lovely little gorgeous little things to the website.

1) The Event Calendar and 'Fest Map. A list of events that are related to ceramic cookers, and an online interactive map showing the location of all the ceramic 'Fests that we come across. Interesting how every last one of them is an Eggfest. The map really drives home how wide-spread this phenomenon has become.

2) We've added two cold smoking articles, one using "SmokeCones" and the other showing how to build a cold smoke generator using a paint can, dryer hose, elbow and pipe clamp. There's more to come, but we'll get there when we get there.

3) Now's the time to start following The Naked Whiz on Twitter. We'll be doing a live Twitaganza from the first ever Carolina Eggfest on May 8. You won't want to miss a single exciting post, lol!

4) How here's something to excite you. We finally scrapped using scraps of paper to make lists of things to do for the website and started using the "Tasks" function of Outlook to track and prioritize all these damn projects. We've got a number of charcoals to review, recipes to document, tests to perform, and on and on. Now we have no excuse for forgetting!

- TNW

Lunch from Celtic Wolf Again

Just a quick blog update today to say that we had another lunch from Celtic Spirit BBQ. We had a Cuban sandwich made with smoke ham, pulled pork and home made cuban bread, all from Pete's Big Green Egg ceramic charcoal cookers. The sandwich size was generous and the sandwich was just plain superb. The sides were some very very tasty potato salad and some slaw. Dessert was some bread pudding to die for. All this for $7.95 and we were all stuffed and happy.

We're telling you, folks. If you live close enough to have Pete deliver lunch, you need to take advantage of this. It's time for our nap now....

- TNW

Big Green Egg Announces New Firebox Design

Did we miss it, or has there really been nothing posted anywhere about a new firebox design? Our dealer just showed us an announcement from BGE about a new firebox design that is being phased in as old inventories are depleted. What we saw was a bad copy of the announcement, but from the picture on the announcement it looks like what they did was something like if you took an existing firebox and made a vertical saw cut down the back of the box. This would presumably allow expansion and contraction and prevent breakage.

There was no word of a similar change to the firering, but then we've always thought that firering breakage was pretty rare, based on the number of posts on the Big Green Egg forum.

So, it should be very interesting to see how the new firebox does in the field. We're sure we have all wondered about how bad the warantee expense must be to BGE to replace broken fireboxes. Here's to hoping that they have solved the problem.

- TNW

Update: Reports are that some dealers have already received shipments that include the new firebox.

Review of aFire Coconut Charcoal Posted

Well, we finally posted the review of aFire Coconut Charcoal. We felt that a word of explanation was in order. It took forever because we thought of a few new things to test, because we wanted to verify or disprove the claims on the box, and because we have been waiting for a response from the owner of aFire regarding a very serious issue with the charcoal

The box we purchased was almost 2 pounds underweight. We asked a dealer to weigh a couple of boxes and both boxes they weighed were also significantly underweight. We waited 2 weeks for the owner to respond, but we finally gave up. If the owner does respond, depending on the nature of the response, we may change our final rating. But as expensive as this charcoal is, getting 11% less charcoal than is advertised is just not acceptable.

So you can read the review (it's one of our most in-depth reviews ever) and view the results. You should obviously base your buying decision on the price and the performance. But for now, we can't give an acceptable rating as things stand.

- TNW

Lunch in Central North Carolina Just Got A Whole Lot Better

We try to keep this blog related to BBQ, ceramic charcoal cookers and charcoal, but we don't think we're getting too far adrift by blogging today about a fledgling lunch business that is starting up in central North Carolina. Yep, you know him as Celtic Wolf and his business/website is Celtic Spirit BBQ. You'll find it at www.celticspiritbbq.com, funny enough!

Celtic Spirit is delivering quality lunches, all cooked/baked/smoked on their stable of Big Green Egg ceramic cookers. Last week we hosted a trial run before the official opening with a smoked turkey sandwich on ciabatta bread with potato salad and cranberry sauce. The smoked turkey was spot on, moist and with a nice amount of smoke flavor from the charcoal fire.

But that was a dry run. Today we hosted the real deal with Celtic Spirit BBQ delivering 8 lunches to our official place of business. On the menu was an Italian chicken sandwhich with aioli, potato salad, and fennel slaw. Comments from the 8 customers ran from "Excellent!" to "...best slaw I've ever had!" to "Great value for money." This particular lunch was delivered to our door for $6.95. All eight customers are looking forward to our next lunch from Celtic Spirit BBQ.

The food really is a cut above most anything you would expect to get if you went out to lunch. The portions were good, the flavor was great and the cook is really putting something special out in the way of his selection of items. If you are looking for something different and better than your usual lunch, especially if you would like to serve something above the rest at a meeting you are hosting, you should give Celtic Spirit BBQ a try. Check out his weekly menu to see what's in store. You won't be sorry you did.

- TNW