I’ll have a couple of photos online tonight, so bear with me.

When I was on vacation in South Carolina, we ate at a great restaurant that served Gullah food (South Carolina Creole/Soul food).  I’d heard of this side dish, but it sounded horrible to me, but I thought I’d try it anyway: Tomato Pie.  I think I mentioned this once before, but I’ll share the recipe this time.  Actually, the woman that cooked it at the little place I first tried it had no qualms about telling me how to make it myself, so it’s really her recipe.

First, though, I’m still behind on some things, but the reason has been Woody, my dog.  I’ve been spending a lot of time with him just laying his head on my lap.  I may have more than a year with him, or something could happen at any time.  He is 14 years and 9 months old, and I’m trying to cherish the time I have with him now.

Anyway, on with the tomato pie…

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Finally, the results from the Taste of Grand Rapids competition!  This was our best showing yet.  I was told recently that we shouldn’t expect anything until at least 6 competitions, so I feel we’re really doing well.

The top 15 overall results were:
Grand Champion: CancerSucksChicago.com
Reserve Grand Champion: Bar-B-Quau
3. Hoosier Hogs
4. Big Moe’s BBQ
5. Bad Attitude BBQ
6. Tom & Josh’s Orgasmic Slabs
7. Down Home BBQ
8. Jerry King Midland TX
9. Motly Que Crew
10. Big Creek BBQ
11. Pork of the North
12. Doctor Porkenstein
13. All Day Smoke
14. Bucky McOinkum’s Barbecue
15. Donnie’s Bar-B-Que Smoke

Of course, I had to go to 15 to get us in the list!

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Our fourth competition is now over!  It was the Taste of Grand Rapids, in Michigan, on July 14 and 15, 2006.  In this entry, I’m going to have lots of photos, and some deconstruction of my impressions of how we did and how the competition was run.

Let’s start with the competition organization.  This was in some ways a horrible competition.  Some proof of this is the reaction of other competitors on the BBQ Forum and the BBQ-Brethren Forum.  Basically, I felt that the organizers treated the cooks as an afterthought, without a lot of thought into what the teams needed.

For instance, there was electricity brought in for the vendors, but not the competitors.  There were only a very few facilities for the teams, yet plenty if you wanted to go find them a quarter mile away.  The ice was as far from the cooks as it could be, and the organizers didn’t deliver it to the cooks until well into the afternoon on Friday, though many teams were there by 9:00 am.  The reps didn’t walk around to introduce themselves, nor did they come by Saturday morning for time checks with the teams.

Ok, that’s the negative… Now the positive…

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It’s been a hectic week for the last few days, and I’m trying to catch up. so I thought I’d get a quick post up for kind of an admin sort of clean up.

First of all, I sincerely apologize to everyone waiting for sauce; last week just hit me really hard, getting ready for a comp right after vacation (last time I’ll ever do that, I hope!), and some problems that turned out not to be too much to worry about with my dog.  I really missed having my wife at the competition in Grand Rapids, but I love her all the more for staying home to spend time with my almost-15 year old black lab.  Anyway, no excuses, but deep apologies, and I’ll be finishing up stuff tonight, and the sauce will be sent out in the next couple of days.

I’ll write more about this later, but our Grand Rapids results were our best yet.  The short version is:

Chicken - 40
Ribs - 20
Pork - 15
Brisket - 5!!!!

We came in 14th out of 57 teams!  And we can now honestly say that we have ‘award winning’ barbecue!  We couldn’t stop smiling after our first walk up!  it’s like being a tourist… You don’t want to look like a tourist, but you want to see everything.  When we got called up, we didn’t want to look like it was our first time up, but we couldn’t stop smiling!!!

Ed Tobian joined us for the weekend, from the eastern side of Michigan, and provided incredible help all weekend.  Along with that, we really worked ou the new smoker, along with Martin, the designer and builder of the Smokehouse (who also helped out immensely).  We found a few things to tweak about the smoker, but we got some great food off of the beast!

Pictures and more detail will be coming shortly!

It’s going to be a hot one in Grand Rapids this weekend!  But we’re on our way this afternoon to the Taste of Grand Rapids.  I hear rumors of 71 teams competing, which surprises me since the prize money is pretty low, there’s no running water or electricity.

The weather is going to be in the low 90s with a healthy (or unhealthy, I guess) amount of humidity thrown in.  We have some neck thingies that are supposed to help out by cooling down the blood in our necks or some such thing; we’ll see if they work or not!

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The Smokehouse is coming to life as I type!  We got our hands on it Sunday, and we were able to do a few things.  First, we figured out that it takes a bit of effort to get up to temp, but that was easily fixed.  We just put a lit chimney in the main chamber and let it bring everything up, then the firebox had no problem keeping the temp where we wanted it.

It’s still a bit crude in that it’s a prototype, but our using it will give us the tweaks we want to get it just about perfect. 

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It’s been REALLY hectic lately.  My wife and I were on vacation all last week, and now we have a competition coming up THIS WEEKEND!  We’re going to the Taste of Grand Rapids, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  We’ll be proudly displaying our Ohio State camp chairs, of course.

What’s different about this competition?  Well, a lot.  First of all, they provide no electricity, and no running water.  That’s going to be odd; those 2 things have been available at my other comps.  There’s going to be water, but not running water.

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