Yesterday I tried dipping my toes into the world of food smoking using the newly aquired Kamado bbq.

I started with chicken breasts - at around 120 degrees celsius for 3 hours.

So far so good - the chicken actually tasted very, very good (or at least I thought so - as the rest of the family are vegetarians I had no-one to be secondary taster (-; ).

Our old barbeque (a gas one a few year old) is already showing lots of rust and signs of falling apart - so earlier this year we started looking around for something slightly more robust.

And we came across a "new" breed of barbeques - the "kamados" - named (apparently) after Japanese indoor fireplaces.

And as these are hard to get in the UK we settled at the only one we could find - a "Kamado Joe". These are made of thick ceramic, and looks strangely like a world war 2 mine - less the explosives.

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As we are looking at doing some buildingwork on the house I have looked for outbuildings on the web - and came across these barbecue lodges - which may just fit into our garden....

Used in the Arctic by reindeer herders for hundreds of years, these arctic barbecue huts are ideal for any weather – chilly summer evenings or snowy winter days.

My main Christmas gift from the family was a Weather station - and decent Mac software for it.

So this is currently online from a few places on the Internet, and of course available from a webpage inside the house (and on my chumby)

The Lightsoft Weather Centre - or LWC as it's affectionately known is the key to getting this up and running on a Mac under OsX, and it looks like this :

(Click for larger image)