Sharon, I did use the recipe and method in Charcuterie. I found that the last step, which is steaming the pastrami for a couple of hours, really helps cut the saltiness, the first batch I sliced and froze, and didn't steam. It was far too salty. David, Elery has a MasterBuilt electric smoker. It's in my garage, so he uses it year round. My garage is not heated, and the electronic display doesn't like it when it's under 35F or so, so we have to remove it, take it inside and warm it up, then put it back on. Thankfully, it's easy to do. We smoked the pastrami over cherry wood, the last one we did with apple. Why did we choose those types? Because I pruned the apple and cherry trees last spring and that's what we had. I think Jessica was referring to the deli because of my reference to pastrami... Annie

Annie, when you start using your walking stick try to switch arms to an equal amount of arm strokes on each side. I used a tall walking stick in my old neighborhood that had miles of trails. You will be surprised at how you can do some serious upper body toning with a light weight stick over time. If you donâÂÂt switch back and forth your upper muscles will become imbalanced and you will become noticeably more toned on one side. Also, try to gripe the stick in a way that disassociates your trapezoids for a nicer look. Unless you have a very long neck over developed trapes donâÂÂt look great on a women in my opinion. It gives more of a head sitting on shoulders look. If you practice with where you are griping you can tone your arms but also tone your back in a way that will give an illusion of a smaller waist. You can also go between using short strokes and very long strokes and use different muscle fibers. . And, of course you already know that you will burn many more calories this way. This post was edited by jterrilynn on Tue, Dec 23, 14 at 12:20

Your brisket was tough due to the cooking method. It is very important to realize that by cooking a beef brisket to 195 degrees F DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY MEAN A TENDER BRISKET. "How" you arrived at that final temperature is the whole secret. You must VERY slowly approach that final temperature by cooking it at about 225 degrees (never never any higher than 250 absolute max). This is what's called LOW AND SLOW smoking. "Magical" chemistry related things will happen to the fat and collagen when you cook it this way. Those very "flavorful" and "tenderizing" chemical reactions will not occur to any great extent by cooking it any other way. If you try to hurry the process along.....the magic will not happen. And believe me you don't want to miss the magic. IMO, brining a fresh brisket that is to be smoked is absolutely ridiculous. Brining will in no way shape or form produce a better tasting brisket than one that is cooked "Low and Slow". Low and slow means cooking at a low temperature around 225 degrees F for a long time. A good test to see if a brisket is done is to press your finger into the fattiest part of the meat. If it is soft and your finger doesn't have a problem penetrating, it's ready! In the future, take your brisket and season it literally JUST BEFORE you smoke it. Use Toni Chachere's Mo Spice seasoning mix if you can find it. It has less salt in it. DO NOT brine nor season your brisket the night before. There are very specific reasons for doing it this way. Smoke it with some chips (apple-wood is best) only for the first hour or so of the process. Keep the temperature in the cooking area around 225 until it is done. I cook mine to about 180 degrees then use the very reliable and accurate finger poking test. This very simple procedure will produce the most tender, the most juicy, and the most flavorful "beefy" tasting piece of meat that you have ever eaten. The external and internal fat whithin the brisket is "magically" broken down into a "sweet" tasting chemical sugar that only occurs at certain low temperatures. The fat that does not melt away will become "to die for" good tasting.....but, very unhealthy to eat too much of it. The converted fat residue that remains inside of the brisket muscle fibers will impart that wonderful beefy taste to the meat. And the collagen will have broken down to make the meat very tender. You simply CANNOT rush this process and try to hurry it up to arrive faster at the 190 desired end point. The brisket will be done when it passes the poke test. Again, the magic will not occur if you rush this process. FYI, an 8 pound brisket will take about 10 hours to get to that tender/juicy point. This is "extremely" easy to do in a temperature controlled "electric" smoker. However, it most certainly can be done on a BBQ pit. The real brisket experts over in Texas do it all the time. Sorry to hear that your brisket did not come out well. The cooks at Cook's Illustrated don't know much about cast iron pans either. Dan Semper Fi-cus

"Some folks really need to get off their high horses!!" If people would like to, volunteer for your local Goodwill or other agency. That'll knock most folks off their high horses very fast as they see that they'll accept anything and gladly. The worst of the worst gets thrown out. The reason is that they won't refuse anything for fear that word gets around that they're picky and people will stop giving. There's a little lesson. "Perhaps the onus is on the organization to whittle down the nature of the donations accepted then. " They do, in a sense. There's an old saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." It's both true and false. I volunteered for Goodwill around here for ages until it changed a lot in the area, and people really do donate some questionable things. Interestingly, we'd take it all, but the really questionable stuff went to the bulk store. You could get cloth by the pound, and so on, to do with whatever you wanted. People used it to make quilts, as cleaning cloths, to scrub a garage floor, shredded it for thread, and so on. Almost everything had a use, and at a quarter a pound (or less sometimes), there was somebody or some company willing to buy it for that. "Good" stuff--good being relative in the sense that it was single items people would buy for appreciable cash--went to individual stores where items sold well. This wasn't something I did much of (I wasn't good at it, they laughed at how bad I was actually, so I did the main sorting of good, bad, awful, but saw how it went). Books did not go to rural stores. They just don't sell well there. Sorry folks, but there it is. :-) Textbooks generally got sent to the poorer stores to try to fill in for the fact that schools just didn't have the same funding. Clothing styles and sizes were apportioned to the stores where they would sell well. Knicknacks would depend, as would glassware and kitchenware. And they're not above, in any sense, "regifting" their donations to others if another agency can use it better. However, if you walk in with a bag full of filthy T-shirts covered in grime? They're going to smile at you, accept them, and give you a receipt for your items, just like we did. Those filthy ancient T-shirts are worth $0.25 per pound to somebody after we clean them up.