Another BBQ season, in the books.  And believe it or not, it ended on a high note for once.  My weekend kicked off on Thursday when I met up with a few team members down at our site for the American Royal BBQ.  We did a little light setup work and then spent the better part of the night sitting around a fire on Brown’s sweet junk-yard minivan seats.  Now that’s good entertainment there.

Friday started off with an unplanned flurry of activity.  Sometime during the night the team adjacent to us had taken an ill-advised joyride on one the volunteer golf carts and had been rather rudely asked to leave the grounds by the KCPD.  Unfortunately their camper butted right up to ours, and we had to tear down our entire site so they had room to get their truck in.  We felt kind of bad for them, as they were pretty nice guys and rather entertaining characters.  But, being opportunists, we also saw the upside of the situation;  We moved our camper over onto their spot, giving us a lot more party space, and commandeered their port-a-jon for the rest of the weekend.  The rest of our team showed up over the day and we got set up in record time.  Our party went off pretty much without a hitch, and I think everybody had a good time.  My Mom and sister came down for a bit, and several friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.  Overall my least favorite night of the event was a rather enjoyable fiesta.

Saturday doesn’t really bear re-telling.  Not many guys come down, it’s mostly just spent cleaning up the overwhelming amount of trash from the night before and going over our pre-game strategy for the BBQ.  (The trash takes about 12 hours and we spend about 10 minutes on our game plan.)  Right about midnight we got down to the cooking business.  The pork and the brisket went on at 1:00 Sunday morning, and then the rest of the night was spent in the trailer watching movies and stepping outside to check on things every now and then.  It was a good year for team Triple Fat Back, I would say down-right respectable even.  Out of 475 teams, our results were:

Chicken  – 125th
Ribs – 165th
Pork – 259th
Brisket – 74th
Overall – 105th

We turned in beans and sausage too, but those results haven’t been posted yet.  Although I put most of my effort into the brisket, I must say I got quite a kick out of our chicken finish.  Our chicken chef, Zim, was hurt and wasn’t able to make it down to cook this year, so that job defaulted to Martin and I.  A few hours before it was due, we decided it was probably time to think about what we wanted to do.  We spent about twenty minutes cutting it up like we wanted, then walked around sampling all the spices the rest of the guys were using.  We settled on the rib team’s dry rub, sprinkled it on, threw the bird on the smoker, and let it be.  Then shortly before turn-in, we decided the pork team’s mop was rather tasty, so we slathered some of it on too.  Lo and behold, this somewhat half-hearted effort ended up scoring pretty well.  Our best brisket finish ever came with some comedy too.  We always put together some elaborate concoction of multiple sauces, spices, and various other super-secret ingredients for our BBQ sauce.  Alas, this year we had inadvertently used all the sauce at the party on Friday and didn’t have anything left.  We ended up walking over to the Expo center and buying some unknown bottle from the last vendor that was still set up, and just poured it on straight from the jar.  Hmmmm, considering our finish, maybe we should stick with this “less is more” strategy in the future.

After the turn-ins, Donette came and got me and I spent the rest of the day on the couch.  Well, after I spent about 30 minutes standing in the driveway while she took a pressure-washer and some steel wool to my filthy carcass.  You might notice that nowhere in the synopsis above is any mention of going home.  Nope, I spent the whole four days down there this year.  The weather was great and the time was passing quickly, and I just never got around to it.  They have showers at the site, but the people who used them generally reported feeling cleaner before, so I stayed away from that option.  Oh well, it’s just a little grime.  I’ll try and get some pictures of the weekend posted some time this week.  I didn’t take many but I do have a few.