Oooh, I’ve never tried apricot wood. (Adds to bucket list).
My fuel level indicator was just a spring/weight based system with green/red paint lines. I never bothered to use it because I found trying to get the tank hung up on the catcher-hook, at the same time as the regulator/tank were rotated correctly to get the door to stay closed (so that the hose didn’t interfere with the door), to be a pain. So I just jiggle the tank before I start a long cook, and if it seems kind of low, temporarily swap out for the newer refilled tank. For short cooks I don’t worry because I’m out there enough to quickly figure out if it runs out.
The rotisserie burner use depends on one particular daughter and whether the in-laws are coming over. My daughter #2 LOVES rotisseried chicken so summers and winter break when she’s home from college, I use it a quite a lot. Before she left for college I probably used it 1-2 times a month, and when she’s home from college, it’s similar. She just left for an engineering internship in another city, and in 2 weeks when she comes back home for a weekend I plan to do a brined rotisserie chicken, more or less “in her honor”.
My in-laws also really love the brined rotisseried pork loin roasts and chicken, so if they’re coming here instead of us going there (we usually do weekly dinners at their house) I’ll rotisserie something. They also have friends from the next state over who visit about once a quarter for a week or so, and when they’re visiting we have all of them over for dinner at least once. The husband of the couple is a retired old engineer who loves pork loin roasts and the first time he had mine, he said he had to steal my recipe and method because “This is the first time ever I had roast pork loin that didn’t even need gravy!”. Apparently he cooks them too dry. Not to mention, I had to work really hard to convince my in-laws at first (30 years or so ago) that a “bit of pink” was fine for pork. They’d been cooking stuff to 170°F for decades. What finally convinced them was when I pulled my MIL’s 1960’s version of the Becker Family’s Joy Of Cooking and pointed out that even then, the Beckers said 150°F-ish pork was fine.
I think I’ve posted that reply on CH before, maybe 5 years ago? I found it as a text doc on my computer when I saw your question, so I just copied it and tried to update for today (obviously missing the inflationary effect on the Summit pricing, as noted in my “Oh, Crap!” edit about cost). Unfortunately I didn’t keep any other CH posts, and was unaware when it got shut down in March (I’d stopped posting a couple years earlier because of a flap I got into with one of the mods, an assistant prof at an obscure small college). So I didn’t get the chance to archive any of my posts there, not that they were a big deal anyway. I did look at the Wayback but it’s kind of a PITA to deal with so I just gave up.
But anyway between my first post here and this one, you can see that it’s obvious that the men in my family are well-known for being unable to tell even the simplest of stories without excruciating detail! We’re famous for that.
