two. ate.

So...yesterday, we decided to have a large shindig and our first barbecue for 2003.

A while back, I bought a New Braunfels Bandera barbecue/smoker. It's a beast of a rig with a separate fire box and chimney-like smoking chamber. I don't use it nearly enough partly because I figure that as long as I'm burning wood, I should at least fill the thing to the brim with meat. The Bandera can hold one hell of a lot of meat and we can't possibly consume that much in a week. However, if people are coming over to help us consume then I'm happy to fill it.

Most of the stuff I ("we" actually with Jan, tom and Carol) did was pretty standard.

Here's what meat went into the Bandera:
- a 12 lb beef brisket
- three pork shoulders (about 3-4 lbs each)
- eight racks of ribs (about 24 lbs total with trim and ends)
- four whole chickens (2-3 lbs each)
- a bunch homemade sausage (2-3 lbs total)

The brisket, the pork shoulders and four racks of the ribs were dry rubbed. The other half of the ribs just salt and pepper. The chickens were brined with a brine-beer-garlic mixture. The sausages were simply oiled. I got up at 5 am to start the fire. The brisket and pork shoulders were first to go in. The ribs went in at 7 am. Chicken at 9:30 am. Sausage at 2 pm. The brisket was pulled last nearly 11 hours later at 5:30 pm. The rest of the meat was out by then and resting in an unheated oven.

The brisket was fantastic. The 11 hours of slow cooking was worth it. The pork shoulders were a close second an were served "pulled" Carolina-style. The chicken also came out very well. The ribs suffered from being a bit to close to the heat source (pecan wood) and were a bit too cooked. That resulted in some pretty tasty "burnt" ends that a handful of people "found" on the kitchen counter. Some of the ribs were pulled early in the day, wrapped in foil or parchment and placed in an empty ice chest. We hit them with some glaze to break down the slightly singed surface. That actually did a lot to smooth out the taste. The sausage (brats, italians, polish) were decent as well.

The apps and sides were:
- vegetables with a dijon-sour cream-dill dip
- a cheese tray (6 cheeses including Cotswold--my favorite--plus purple seedless grapes, cashews and crispbreads)
- smoked-barbecue'd beans (in the smoker at 10 am, out at 3 pm)
- a lentil salad with a dijon vinegarette
- a huge green salad with red onions, cherry tomatoes and Tom's "lazy" vinegarette
- lots of French bread

Pretty standard stuff--lots of cutting and mixing and arranging. The beans were the absolute hit of the night. They are cooked in the smoker so they soak up lots of flavor from both the smoke and the sweetish-hot sauce mixture that they are mixed with. The resultant deep maroon pot o' pleasure was all but licked clean early on in the evening.

For dessert:
- a fairly gigantic peach cobbler with sweet dough crust

This was fun to make (as all cobblers are) and the peaches, for being early in the season, were decent. The sweet dough is a variant of Queen Ida's version with a bit more egg and a bit less flour. That results in a softer dough although I should have pulled it 10 minutes earlier than I did to get that barely-cooked, pasta consistency, cobbler dough. It still turned out well. After cutting up 12 cups of peaches, it damn well better have...

There's not much else to say except that getting up at 5 am gives one a new appreciation for cooking a huge meal for 30+ of your friends. At 2 pm, I was starting to panic a bit as things were not going quickly as I had wanted them to. Then Tom and Carol showed up and they were very helpful in getting a lot of the extra stuff taken care of--that was very, very cool of them. We ended up having almost everything done at 4 pm--right on time.

Lots of our friends came over and we had a rockin' good time. Jan and Carol set up the patio to fit 30 people (we actually had 34). It was a bit cold so the patio heater we rented ended up being one of the best things we used. Lots of wine and mojitos (Jan set up a small mojito bar) were consumed and we were left with a tankload of beer and soft drinks. Note for next time: less beer, more wine.

My personal goal was to start drinking (as soon as the food was plated) and get sloppy drunk by 7 pm but I actually started around 8:30 and decided that I wanted to stay lucid to enjoy the party.