Last weekend was the big American Royal BBQ that I’ve been looking forward to so much.\u00a0 And, I must say, it lived up to my anticipation nicely.\u00a0 The event was at Kemper Arena downtown, and we all headed down there Thursday night.\u00a0 We got all set up and then just sat around playing cards the rest of the night, until it was time to put on our first round of food at 2:00 Friday morning.\u00a0 Martin, Schmidt and I stayed down there at the site, and everybody else bailed home for a little quality sleep.<\/p>\n
Friday is considered the big “party” day at the event.\u00a0 We spent quite a bit of time getting ready, as well as trying to stay dry since it rained off and on all afternoon.\u00a0 We were lucky enough to be located right under a highway overpass, so we hunkered down there when the rain got too bad.\u00a0 (The overpass was good for the rain… not so good when we were sleeping.)\u00a0 The party started up around 6:00, and we had a rather impressive crowd show up.\u00a0 We went through 35 lbs. of brisket, a couple of slabs of ribs, several pounds of chicken wings, a pork tenderloin, and a bunch of sides in the space of about an hour.\u00a0 Next year I guess we need more food.\u00a0 (Well, there was ham left over, but that’s another story.\u00a0 And we had a “situation” with the pork butts; they didn’t get done in time for the party.)\u00a0 It was a heck of a good time but actually quite a bit of work.\u00a0 The weather wasn’t very good either… It got downright COLD and the wind kicked up pretty strong.\u00a0 I got my competition brisket on about 10:00 that night and then tried to “mingle” a bit, but by midnight I was falling asleep in my chair.\u00a0 So, I went to bed.\u00a0 The party was pretty well broken up by then anyway.<\/p>\n
Saturday morning we got up around 6:00 and got back to work.\u00a0 I was more than a little dismayed to hear that after I had gone to bed my smoker had spiked up to 350 degrees, and nobody could get it cooled down.\u00a0 BUMMER!!!\u00a0 For the most part I sat on a hay bale and sulked the rest of the afternoon.\u00a0 My brisket for the party came out very well, if I do say so my darn self, and I was counting on this one to come out the same.\u00a0 But there wasn’t much to do about it at that point but wait it out; not like you can start over.\u00a0 At least the weather had taken a turn for the better; not a cloud in the sky and I’d say it was mid-60’s or so.<\/p>\n
We had progressively placed higher and higher aspirations on our entries since the contest started, and I think everybody was starting to feel a little pressure.\u00a0 Our goal when we started planning this event was to not get disqualified.\u00a0 Then we raised the bar a bit and decided we didn’t want to come in last place.\u00a0 By Saturday afternoon we had kicked it up yet another notch and decided we didn’t want to come in the last 10 places.\u00a0 Considering there were 475 teams, it would truly take an effort to do that badly, but we were a bit nervous all the same.\u00a0 As it turned out, we did fairly respectably.\u00a0 My brisket did lousy, but coulda been worse.\u00a0 I didn’t like it either so I couldn’t complain too much.\u00a0 I would blame the smoker issue, but Joe and Bob used the same fire and did rather well with their pork.\u00a0 Martin’s ribs did about as well as my brisket… coulda been better, but coulda been a lot worse too.\u00a0 The best finish on our team was Todd’s chicken.\u00a0 Yes, Todd, whose cooking experience consists of toaster pastries.\u00a0 Toaster pastries done in the microwave, not a toaster.\u00a0 What can you do, the world is not always a fair place.\u00a0 Not to sound like a sore loser though; It WAS some darn good hen.<\/p>\n
We wrapped up around 3:30, and I went home and slept for about 16 hours.\u00a0 My project for the week is to somehow get the barbecue smell out of my car.\u00a0 Overall, I consider the event an enormous success, and can’t wait to do it again next year.\u00a0 I’ve already started researching smoker modifications to prevent a repeat of the blast-furnace situation, and I’ve got a few good ideas.\u00a0 Todd, Munkirs and I met down at the Brooksider Sunday afternoon for a little post-event recap, and came up with a list of things to improve on for next year.\u00a0 Mostly the list consists of more food, more smokers (or a bigger smoker,) and a few key re-configurations to our booth.\u00a0 There’s a few pictures<\/a> of the event posted, check ’em out.\u00a0 (I don’t know how they ended up under the “vacation” section… I need to clean that up a bit.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last weekend was the big American Royal BBQ that I’ve been looking forward to so much.\u00a0 And, I must say, it lived up to my anticipation nicely.\u00a0 The event was at Kemper Arena downtown, and we all headed down there Thursday night.\u00a0 We got all set up and then just sat around playing cards the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1207,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/1207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pkenagy.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}