One Minute Monday...almost

Last weekend Chris and I drove four hours from home, stayed up too late cooking, slept outside and froze our butts off (temps dipped in the low 50's! It's August, right?) and tried like hell to make everything we cooked perfect for a discriminating set of judges. No, we didn't cook in a BBQ contest. We cooked for a party of almost 150 people at my Dad's shop in rural North Bend, NE.

We had an absolute blast. We cooked a 135lb whole hog, a few racks of ribs, sausage, chicken and mess of stuffed jalepanos. We had as much fun cooking for this crowd as we do cooking a contest. The occasion was a combination preharvest party and my sister (S)Melissa's engagment party.

I'll have pictures up soon. I don't get a chance to cook for groups of of this size where I know almost everyone there, so this was a pretty cool experience for me. Competition cooking is still my favorite reason to light up the smoker, but this was a pretty cool experience.

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One Minute Monday...a few minutes late

I am typing this just a few minutes into Tuesday morning...so this is technically not titled correctly. But who really cares? Me neither.

We arrived back from Bristol, TN and the Prilosec OTC BBQ Shootout Series around 5am on Sunday morning. Sunday was spent resting and cleaning up and we were back to work on Monday. As for the results, I'll go into more detail in a later post, but there were 9 teams and we finished 7th. I would be lying if I said that finish didn't burn me up a little bit, but there were some other parts of the scoring that did take the sting out of it...again, more on that later.

As for the trip - we had a blast. Pictures can be found here: BBQ Shootout Photos

One Minute Monday

This week we are heading out east to Bristol, Tn for the Prilosec OTC BBQ Shootout. This should be a blast and we have been looking forward to it for some time. Since this is an invitation only event, we will recieve no KCBS Team of the Year points, which is really not that big of a deal - but by the end of the year we will have cooked in 4 events that will not count for TOY. I do like to see how we stack up, but when we only cook 14 or 15 contests, using up resources on 4 that will not count toward the end of the year standings really adds up.

One Minute Monday

In a few weeks my sister is having an engagment party. We are supposed to cook a whole hog for it. I am really looking forward to it but I am not sure if I know exactly what to exect. Hogs we have cooked have all been a lot smaller like 50-80lbs. Looks like we'll be getting one close to 200. Give me a shout if you know how long this will take to cook!