Recipes, Occasional Thoughts & Bier

Definitely a low-key holiday...my Sweetie and I are cooking, but it's pretty simple. I found some Stone Smoked Porter BBQ sauce in the People's Republic yesterday evening when I was buying a replacement for my pepper grinder that finally gave up the ghost. So today I'm going for BBQ wild-caught salmon with the smoked porter sauce and baked beans with yet another BBQ/chile sauce that I make myself from recipes from Mustard's Grill in Napa, one of the world's great lunch restaurants (get the tuna sandwich). My Sweetie is contributing Southwestern Potato Salad from a Bobby Flay recipe...it's her favorite.

Beerwise, I'm going for Prost Brewery's Altfrankisches Dunkel Bier...I've really gotten into Franconian beer since my visit to Germany last month. It goes perfectly in my Zwick'l Kellerbier ceramic mug that was a gift from the execs at Steiner Optics. I'm hoping I can lay my hands on a Steiner 1-5X Military when they begin trickling into the U.S. to go along with the mug. It's definitely on the short list for an Africa scope.

I'll be shooting the Rocky Mountain Region Raid cowboy match this weekend. I really only wanted to shoot the Wild Bunch side match, but the best-laid plans, etc. I loaded cowboy .357s yesterday, so I'm good to go for the match, except for the finger I got stuck in the Dillon while I was trying to clear a primer misfeed. Note to self...remove finger before pulling down lever...LOL!

We also got out on our mountain bikes today for an hour ride "around the neighborhood." The neighborhood around the Secret Hidden Bunker, however, is dirt roads, short steep climbs and quick drops...a darn good workout! My Sweetie had some hip problems last summer, which blew out our biking time. She has a new Trek Mamba 29'er she just got fitted by Andy Pruitt and his team, and she wanted to give it a try. I rode my old Gary Fisher 29'er, which has been a workhorse...the Mamba is more or less the Trek version of my old Gary Fisher, since Gary Fisher sold to Trek.

I'm hoping to spend a little time with the long-range rifle, an FNH TSR-XP in .308 with a 24-inch barrel. I'm going to put a Bushnell 8-32X on it until I decide on a final scope choice. Iain Harrison (yes, we are ALL our IMDB page!) has been teaching long distance shooting and I'll be with him soon filming RAPID FIRE season 2...hoping to talk him into some private lessons. It's obvious from my pathetic 3-Gun performance that I need to just be able to make the occasional long-range shot, but I need to really understand how the whole machine works. Iain is a great instructor, and I think he can help enormously.

Have a great holiday weekend!