Transformer BBQ

Was it Bobby Flay covering the Royal that makes us want to go so badly?  Not really. As much as we love Bobby, it doesn’t take much to convince me that going to the Royal is something that I want to do and make happen this year!  I just added it to our ‘official’ (changes every other day) contest roster - so now I just need to do some organizing.  So why not go?  I have two tickets on American just waiting to be used.  And if I’m going to pay $15 for my bag - I’m jam packing it full of spices, sauce and utensils (can I bring knives?).  I think the only tough part might be finding a smoker, but I have a feeling we can make this work too.  Experiencing a 450+ team contest must be amazing - I’d like to go even if I wasn’t going to cook…but then again, if we are there, why not cook?  American Royal - here we come!

As excited as I am about bbq right now, I’m actually also feeling very nervous about judging my first event tomorrow at Peter’s Pond.  I’m not so much worried that the food will be way better than what we can make, because of course there will be a lot of that…I’m actually freaked out that I have to judge 5 categories, 6 samples each for a grand total of 30 different items.  That is completely overwhelming and I wish I didn’t eat anything today - I’m going to need to be hungry.  I’m sure it will be great, can’t wait to try some tasty food.  And, of course I’m looking forward to hanging out with good friends…

As soon as we start to get ancy, we sign up for extra contests…which is what happened with Grilling on The Bay.  We were already headed to Connecticut on Sunday for a baby shower (Sheila from Q Haven), we were sort of thinking Brooklyn was right around the corner and why not go?  So we took it easy and made it as relaxing as we could.  We also have a lot of wedding stuff going on lately so this was a nice escape from all of that!  The contest was in a great location, however, the turnout was not very high.  Only six teams made the trip - apparently a number of teams did not show up at all.  We thought we cooked some pretty good food and took 1st in two categories. Our big flaw of the weekend was not cooking ribs for the ‘pork’ category.  We did chops which were good, but could never stack up to delicious ribs.  Lesson learned. Anyway, it was a great time, Brendan I worked together better than ever and we had fun too.  Congrats to Clint/Smoke in Da Eye who rocked the event as grand champion.  Enough with the grilling for us, we are excited to get in some BBQ’ing!