Smoking Meats, Visit To Tech Castle, Bouquet Restaurant

Smoking Meats

I am just hooked on using my smoker as much as I possibly can. I am now working on pork tenderloins, not the smaller ones, the larger ones you get from Kroger for like $8.00 that always pile up there. I am really good at chopped pork shoulder, I’ve made a lot of chicken wings, but I’ve never tackled one of these before. I used to just roast them in the oven and then shred them up and put barbecue sauce on them. They are kind of fickle and easy to overcook as there isn’t a ton of fat on it and it’s white meat. Instead, I planned on smoking this and slicing it up like a holiday meal and it did turn out really good. I used apple wood on it, which is fairly faint, but it had plenty of smoke taste. I find not everyone likes smoke flavor as much as I do so apple is kind of the best wood for me to use. I also only smoke blast it twice when it is just in the smoker so it doesn’t get too bitter.

Visit To Tech Castle

I brought my Chromebook down here to get the keyboard replaced. I’ve tried everything to fix this thing. I accidentally dropped it while reading something at bed and two keys knocked off. They were broken so I had to find a replacement. The only thing I could find was a full keyboard from E-bay so I purchased that and tried to swap the keys out myself. The first thing I noticed was the keyboard mount was slightly different, and so now I was at my wit’s end. After learning a lot about keys and how they fit onto a keyboard I decided this wasn’t worth my time anymore. I googled and found Tech Castle in Covington and wow I wish I knew about this place earlier.

This is a really interesting business. It is locally owned which is great but it’s just not a tech fix it shop. They’ve expanded this business to be a major refurbisher of Microsoft products. They currently inhabit an old toy store and kept the castle that we all loved as kids which used to be at Johnny’s Toy Store, which is now long since defunct. Anyway, they were able to swap out my keyboard fairly quickly and inexpensively. I really wish I knew about them when I had my other Windows laptop. That machine kept flashing out on me. I tried replacing the hard drive with an SSD which made it really, really fast. I tried replacing the internal battery which stored the BIOS but that didn’t help either. It was a nice computer that I bought when I went back to school in 2011 and might’ve been a decent streamer but I just couldn’t figure it out so I pitched it after stripping the SSD back out and making that an external hard drive.

Bouquet Restaurant

We had a nice date night at Bouquet. The duck was really good and we enjoyed our meal there. This is always a hard reservation to get it, unless you get it inside. Most of the demand is to be on street eating for some reason. The food was really good, the service a little slow, but that might’ve been more staffing than anything, like most anything else honestly. It’s incredible how much the pandemic has affected the service industry. Restaurants in particular don’t seem like they are able to operate in this new environment without significantly raising prices and diners themselves willing to tip a higher percentage of their bill than before. In fact, it’s almost made it a little too frustrating to eat out because service is such a big part of it.

Speaking of which I bought a Frisch’s mug to add to my home collection. Anyone who eats out often knows the lamentations of being a fan of Frisch’s since their management changed. The mug is cool though.