Dining, Recipes

Smokin Saturday Brisket

Today is brisket day. While we were slowed down in getting a fire going, we finally got it down right after 2 hours of playing with the fire. The new Weber kettle is on the task for its first smoking assignment.

I had a 3.5 pound brisket that had thawed out overnight, which I then liberally coated in brown sugar, paprika, salt, and pepper. Sitting beneath it on the grill was a pan of apple juice.

With the cover slightly cracked to let the coals breathe…we were set for the 4 hour journey to brisket nirvana…

Dining, Recipes

Vinegar-brined Turkey pt 2

The turkey brined in vinegar for 14 hours bottom side first then another 12 hours breast side. On the morning before roasting, I also brined in a soy-water solution, which in my opinion didn’t really accomplish much. I then stuffed the cavity with garlic cloves and roasted the bird in the oven at 375 for 3 hours.

Suffice to say, the turkey turned out palatable, not out-of-this-world good. Next time I am going to stick to a salt brine for 18-24 hours, depending on the size of the turkey. Or even an apple juice/cider brine.

As for the rest of the Thanksgiving meal, it turned out that a roux is a great ally for thickening gravies and creamed corn. Two tablespoons of butter and two tablespoons of flour makes the fixins work out every time. Well, in the case of the creamed corn, perhaps a little too well, since the additional milk made the side dish incredibly thick.

Oh…and when will I learn that chopped turkey innards just don’t taste well in gravy? I had the fiance chop them up really fine but I still couldn’t appreciate the taste of it. At least adding a chile garlic sauce spiced up the gravy, giving it a good bite.

Mental note for next year: apparently the fiance doesn’t like garlic or cheese in his mashed potatoes. Not even rosemary! Nothing but plain, bland potatoes. Yuck.

Dining, Recipes

Vinegar-brined Turkey pt 1

My 12-pounder brined breast up in the fridge for the past 14 hours. I turned it breast-down for the next 12-14 hours. The vinegar brine I’m risking this year is an apple-cider vinegar brine, with chopped garlic, garlic powder, black powder and a little salt. It is generally the same brine I use for frying chicken. The difference here is that I’m roasting the turkey, instead of frying it, which will impart a different flavor to the meat altogether.

I’m concerned that the salt content of this brine will not be enough. I’m pondering putting the turkey in a second brine of just plain salt-sugar water. Depending on what I marinade the exterior with (leaning towards soy-sweet chile sauce), I may leave out the sugar.

I’m also thinking about stuffing the turkey cavity with garlic cloves, which I plan to use in mashed potatoes. I just have to make sure that the turkey is completely dried of vinegar brine so that the garlic won’t flavor the potatoes with vinegar.

Now what to do with those turkey innards…?

Technical

Getting Fail2Ban to work

My first clue that Fail2Ban wasn’t working right: it wasn’t showing up in iptables -L.
Chain INPUT (policy ACCEPT)
target prot opt source destination
fail2ban-ssh tcp -- anywhere anywhere tcp dpt:ssh
Chain fail2ban-ssh (1 references)
target prot opt source destination
RETURN all -- anywhere anywhere

My second clue: Fail2Ban wasn’t displaying the configuration I thought it had loaded. For example, my list of “ignoreips” wasn’t showing up when I tried to view it. Or it didn’t return the maxretry settings I had configured.

I tracked it down back to jail.local and determined that the SSH parser wasn’t actually enabled. So I uncommented the line and enabled it to “true”.
[ssh-iptables]
#enabled = false
enabled = true
filter = sshd

I also had to change it to look at the SSH log, which in CentOS is in /var/log/secure
logpath = /var/log/secure

Reloaded the config and checked the status of the daemon.
fail2ban-client reload
fail2ban-client status

Running properly, Fail2Ban creates a jail named ssh-iptables.

The only disappointment is that Fail2Ban does not ban retroactively. It only reviews new entries to determine bannable IPs.

The Fail2Ban command list helped me troubleshoot Fail2Ban. Running in interactive mode helped a great deal.