Background: our hero mikey has volunteered to cook (22) racks of ribs for his workplace...50 large, hungry, rednecks (his words). His rig is running too low (150°) and he can't get it up to temp fast enough. Time is running out. When last we heard from him, he was standing over his cooker with a cutting torch, threatening it to behave:
"Good grief, this was rough! But, what
doesn't kill me makes me stronger!
Not only did the pit misbehave once, it never really got up to the temp
I like to cook ribs at. I used up my half hour cushion, paged the guy
to tell him i'd be at the gate by 10:45, and started pulling slabs
off at 10:00.
The ribs weren't tender enough, and I had ominous visions of large burly
men ripping flesh from bones with their teeth. My flesh. My bones.
I know that the meat would continue to cook if I could keep it hot in
transit, so I used a trick I learned from dr. bbq: heat the cooler
with hot water before putting the meat in.
The most done slabs came off first, got sliced, and were packed neatly
into foil pans by my youngest, who was pressed into service when she
mistakenly wandered outside to see why Dad was acting like he'd washed
a bottle of Vivarin down with a pot of espresso.
These went into the warming box on the smoker to stay warm. At least
one thing did what it was supposed to!
I fibrillated madly between the firebox and temp gauge, badly wanting
to bleep with something, but knowing if I did, things would only get
worse.
At 10:20 I pulled the rest of the slabs, sliced, packed, foiled, and
all of 'em went into the cooler. (Oh God, PLEASE)crank the truck,
instructed #2 child how to hold the throttle just so, dash into the
house for the ID badge to get into the bleeping workplace, and strapped
the cooler down 'cause we're gonna FLY! out the driveway skillful merge
with highway traffic hammer down it's 10:29 and sixteen minutes to the
gate if all (count 'em) seventeen lights go green and Smokey's napping.
Dinosaur squeezins are pouring into all four holes of a monster Holley
at a rate that'd make an Emir smile, top the next hill, wha...?
Construction.
The kind where a disinterested Billy Bob leans on the sign that says STOP
on your side and you really have to GO!
You know what a Type "A" personality is? At this particular moment,
I'm
a Triple-A. No way am I gonna make the 11:00 feeding. I'm dead, or at least
badly hurt.
After forever, ol Billy Bob turns the sign around. Well, since I'm already
dead, the pressure's off. What the heck, just go with the flow for a
while, see what happens.
Made the gate at 10:54. Had a little secret smile when the guy I was
cooking for tried to lift that big ol' cooler with 22 slabs by himself.
Swapped the cooler and sauce from my truck to his, hopped in, handed a
half-slab offering to the guardian of the portal, and made tracks to the
shop around back where the feed was to take place. Waited two minutes
for an 18-wheeler to back his big self out of the way, lost another one
at the one-lane standoff section of the access road, and hung on as my
patron backed up a loading ramp into the shop.
We drug the cooler out of the truck, nearly jogged to the table with it,
popped the top, and had pans of steaming ribs on the table at 10:58.
I eased off to the side, glancing about to be sure that all hands held
plates, not knives, and the secretary's nickle-plated-38 containing purse
(this IS the Deep South, y'all) was nowhere in sight.
I started to relax when the chatter ceased and the eating got serious.
When they went back for seconds, I was darn near at ease. And when they
told the contractor to forget that place he bought ribs from last year,
all was well with the world.
I just have one leeetle question:
Some of you do this for a LIVING?"
Here's a surprising one from Dylan Rousan (aka: Q.N.E. tyme). By day, he's the outrageous "class clown" so I was really startled by this sincere nostalgic memory ....
"I lived in Missouri till I was about 7 then
moved to Arizona to live with my older sister who raised me. I only have one
memory of Missouri though, but it is a very vivid one.
Its summer and we are in our back yard and every one in the world it seems is
there. The women are at tables laughing and preparing food and there are kids
playing everywhere. But down the hill, where we aren't allowed to go, are the
men. They have taken my swingset and removed the seats to the swings so only the
chains dangle. They put this over a whole in the ground that is filled with
burning logs. They have huge chunks of meat wrapped in chicken wire (I'm
guessing here) and they hook them to the chains and poke them with this pole
every once in awhile to keep them gently moving back and forth. The main guy
(the Pitmaster) grabs the meat, when someone hooks the chain and pulls it over
to him, and he unhooks it and
dumps it in a wash bucket full of stuff (the mop) and then turns it over and
hooks it back up and lets it go.
I watch them all day as they play horseshoes and drink beer and poke that meat.
I thought they were so cool. Soon after that is when I moved to Arizona so I
think I hold on to that memory because it was the last really happy time I had
there before my life changed so much.
But to this day I associate a good time and family being together with BBQ. And
if I'm somewhere and I catch a whiff of que in the air it always takes me back,
if only for a second, to that summer day in Missouri.
Well that's my BBQ story. And some day I'm gonna get me a swingset and I'm gonna
que me a chunk of meat just like those guys did.
Dylan "