About Me

What's up? I'm Brandon "Cack" Fowler and thanks for checking out my site. You'll find everything from cooking to restaurant reviews to movie reviews to traveling stories and a whole lot of other randomness here. What you won't find here are: professional pictures, fancy plating, or anything else that really isn't that important. I wanted to have a place that normal people can maybe get some ideas to try for dinner from other normal people.

I've been cooking more than pizza rolls and hot pockets since around 2008. It started off with the basics: hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken, and steaks. In 2010 I started dating my now wife, Dawn, and she's an amazing cook, so I knew I had to step my game up.

I'm a big "be proud of where you come from" type person. I proud to be an American, and even more grateful to be from the South. What does that mean for you? That means that I realized I needed to learn how to BBQ.

I'd been a member of a sports message board since 2005, so I figured the only way to learn in today's world was to find a good message board. Luckily for me, I found the best outdoor cooking message board in the world, the BBQ Brethren. It's called the BBQ Brethren, but those guys and gals cook a whole lot more than just Q, so I'll call it an outdoor cooking message board.

I started looking for smokers on eBay and Craigslist, but one day Dawn and I were about to head out of town and our neighbor across the street came up to me as I was getting into the car. He hollered over because he saw that I had a motorcycle and asked if we needed any helmets or anything, because he was having a yard sale the next day. I said no, but as I looked up I saw this black box thing sitting on the side of the driveway. I then said "Is that a smoker? How much?" He says he's only used it twice and has a brand new water pan to go with it too, so I'm thinking he's about to jack the price up on me. Then he says "How about 25 bucks?" I ran inside, hitting Dawn with the door as she's coding out, and got some cash and went back across the street and picked up my new toy.

At the time I had the bright idea that I wanted to do BBQ competitions. I still would love to do some, but after helping and seeing/hearing how there's a lot of drama involved in the scoring ... I'm not spending that kind of money and time to get pissed off. Anyway, I created this blog to follow my growth from a complete beginner at BBQing to a competitor. Obviously, it hasn't stayed focused just on BBQ.

After 6 months or so I started looking for a new smoker. The little box smoker was good for training, but I was ready for more. I could have gone with a smoker that you could "set it and forget it", but I wanted to learn how to smoke the right way. I wanted a stick burner.

I started searching and fell in love with Jambo Pits and Lang Smokers. Every time I would mention them to Dawn she would say "you don't get some black until I get something shiny." The day I proposed, I had some of our friends meet us for dinner that night. While we were eating one of the guys turned and asked when we were going to have another cookout. I said "well since you asked..." and turned and looked at her. She looked at me and I looked back at him and said "it'll be here next week." She then looked back and her new sparkly diamond and said "I don't even care."

We're now happily married with a furbaby, Rhett, and don't seem to be slowing down any time soon.

Thanks again for stopping by, and for reading all that, if you'd like to follow me you can at One Nine 3 on Facebook and One Nine 3 on Pinterest (my wife made me do it).

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