Hey Dorothy are we in Kansas any more?

Paola Kansas August 28th and 29th 2009.

The title is a legit title to this Blog entry. The weather that last few weeks has been incredible for this time of year. Hopefully we do not pay for it this winter!

This was the first time Sticks N Chicks BBQ competed at Paola, but what an exprience. Located on the town square of Paola Kansas about 30 minutes south of Kanas City. This is an annual event that brings there town to a halt. It's the 20th annual Paola Roots and Blues festival and this town knows how to put on a party. The festival is an annual event that brings some of the biggest names to play Blues music, and perform on the massive stage they have set up. It's a small town feel with a rock star atmosphere. Over the last couple of years they have brought John Lee Hooker, Kenny Wayne Sheppard and this year they brought in Marc Broussard and The Robert Cray Band. Friday night we ventured up and watched Marc Broussard, and I will say, never seeing him or knowing who he is, that man can play guitar. Fun to watch and as I type this I still can not believe how many people where in the town square hanging out. Should have taken a picture!

One of the things that I always take in at a contest is where we have to set up our camp in relation to where we turn in our bbq. The set up for us at this contest, was somewhat of a hike. We were, I think 3-4 blocks away from turn in. PLEASE KEEP THIS IN MIND, trust me it will make sense later. In the picture to the left, if you click on it and blow it up you will see the blue canopy in the distance. That is the roof of the stage. 50' this side of it was the entrance to where we went in to turn our stuff in. The walk from the entrance was about to the middle of the square.

Mike and Karen were kind enough to bring there RV down for us to stay in and again it never fails, we had a TON of people stop by and ask what are you guys cooking in, and we tell them trash cans. They look at the RV and look at the cans and shake there heads. I will admit I do think its funny. Thank you Mike and Karen for letting us stay in your RV, I will speak for all of us, it is a treat.

Saturday morning we woke up around 5:30am to get briskets and the pork butts rubbed down. Now real quick I have to paint a picture. You can see the banners hanging and please take note of the spot between the BBQ Brethern sign and the Budweiser banner, there is a small opening between the two. At 5:45am, mind you I am a little tired, maybe a little hungover, and basically not awake, I am working on the the pork butts and all of a sudden out of nowhere this dude pops in between the signs and says " Whats up"! Scared the hell out of me. He started telling me his life story and I basically tried to ignore his drunk ass and finally he left. Man he scared the crap of me! So 10 minutes goes by and what do you know the Paola PD stop by our camp looking for a white male, black ball cap and gray tee shirt. Guess what, it's the man that made me poop my pants. I told them that I saw him but did not know where he went. Turns out the drunkard started knocking on peoples doors at 6am and running off. Not sure if they caught him hope they did.

The morning moves along really nice. Remember we are cooking at high heat in a short period of time and keeping track of "when we turn or it will burn" we have to have several timers in place to keep track of what gets turned and what gets flipped.

The fun part of the morning always comes right before your first turn in. I get nervous becasue this is the time you have to pay attention to what you are doing. You want it to be a well oiled machine but any hicups and your have to know how to recover. So this beautiful morning things get a little crazy. We ran into a space issue because we decided to this contest on only 3 cans and no Fast Eddy! So chicken needs to get on and we cook chicken in lets say, X number of minutes. Well we are about 10 minutes behind and when we should have put them on. Matt our chicken Biatch is concerned, as am I.




Take note of the clocks above because the chicken is still on the UDS. Do these guys look concerned? There not. I am that's why I am taking pictures!




Chicken turn in at this and most contests takes place between 11:55 and 12:05. Well as you can see our chicken is still cooking. One thing to remember is chicken has to be cooked to 165 degrees or you will get sick. We got the chicken up to temp and we were ready to turn it in. Please take note that earlier in this blog I mentioned where our camp was, well we had to run to get it turned in. We made it but barely.

Overall this contest was a blast but as with any contest we learned a ton. Overall we finished 29th out of 63. Chicken we finished 10th and this call was AWESOME! We were not in the $$$ but we did get a call. Ribs we finished 27th out of 63 teams. Pork we finished 55th (Guess what we are trying a new recipe the next contest). Finally we finished 41st in brisket.

Our next contest is http://www.crosspointsbbq.com September 11th and 12th.

Back to Back baby!

This past weekend we competed in the Olathe Kansas Wheels "N" Squeels contest. This was a first time event for the organizers and can I say they hit a home run with this contest. I can not put into words how organized this contest was. These people acted like they have run this contest for the last 100 years. The contest was held at the Olathe Bible Church in Olathe Kansas. They had 48 teams competing and they seriosuly had room for 500 teams. The church is located on a huge piece of property and come to find out, the reason nothing was bulit on the majority of this land is because of gas lines that run under ground. Sounds like a great place to have a BBQ contest doesn't it :)

We all arrived Friday and it was hot. Friday night after we got everything ready for the competition we hung out with family and friends. The highlight of the weekend was being able to stay in Mike 40' RV. That thing is a beauty and it turns alot of heads when people see us staying in that but cooking on trash cans. Trust me several people asked what the hell we were doing!

Got up early saturday morning to start cooking and everything got put on in time. One of the traditions with BBQ contests is a good luck shot that is hosted by a team. The shot is usually "Gentlemens Jack" and it is usually done at 9:22 or 11:00. Why these times I do not know, but taking a shot of whiskey at that time of day is ROUGH! One of my good friends, Jerod Caton with www.Porkmepurple.com was kind enough to host this one. One thing that can happen that is sometimes uncontrolled is another team will pop in with more shots and guess what you better take them because as they always say, "its good luck" This happened to us witrh Paul from the www.Pickledpig.com ! The ironic thing is Paul was Grand Champion of this contest so maybe there is karma that will be coming our way :). By the way if you get a chance take a look at the Pickled Pigs website. It is incredible the amount of info he has on there.

After all the shots were done we were a little pressed for time with the chicken. Gee go figure! Thankfully cooking chicken on the trash cans can be easy. We have cooked chicken in as little as 27 minutes. This chicken was cooked more to tempt then time and it turned out pretty good.

The awards were at 3:00 PM and it was HOT! Temperature was close to 100 and thankfully the wind kept the temps managable. I think the highlite of the contest was after the awards presentation. Earlier saturday morning they had a chinook helicopter flew in for the public to tour. After the awards the organizers wanted to add a "Grand Finally" to this contest by having the chinook take off before everyone left the contest. This was freaking amazing. They took off and not only did they blow over an outhouse but they ruined a perfectly good KU EZ Up. You can see it before it blew over in the picture above.I will admit I felt bad for the team that lost that tent but when I saw it had the dirty bird on it I was like oh well! I do hope the organizers made it right for that team. As I walked by there camp and saw the damage I heard one of the guys from that camp say "this was an awesome contest until now," as he looked at the damage done by the chinook taking off. I have admit I had to agree with him.

We are off for the next 2 weeks and our next stop will be Paola Kansas August 28th and 29th.

Nothing is level in Laurie MO

Laurie Missouri, located in the heart of the Lake of the Ozarks was the next stop on our BBQ trail. Will and Christy had planned a family vacation for the same week as this BBQ contest so it only seemed perfect that we head down and meet them in Laurie for this contest. The contest his held in the camping ground for the city of Laurie. It is not level by any means. I wish I would have taken pictures to show how much some of the 5th wheels, trailers etc, were raised of the ground. Some of them when I saw them, I thought if support gives way we could have a disaster on my hands.

With Will and his family already down there, that left me, Matt and Mike to come down at the end of the week. Matt went down Thursday night and Mike came down with his family of Friday morning. I unfortunatley had to work and came down friday evening.

Friday night was spent hanging with friends and celebrating Andy Groneman's (www.smokeonwheels.com ). Andy and his wife Kim threw a huge shrimp boil and it was pretty damn good food. After the party we went back to our camp and just hung out talking to neighbors and then it was off to get some sleep for an early morning wake up call.

We got up and got the UDS'S (Ugly drum Smokers) up and running and up to temp in about 15 minutes. That's one of the beauties of cooking on the trash cans, they get hot and up to temp in a very short period of time. We got the butts and brisket seasoned and on the cans. Now this is were the fun begins. Cooking on cans in my opinion is alot of fun because there is no margin for error. You have to pay attention to what you are doing, if you don't you run the risk of turn that butt, brisket, chicken and ribs into a brand new door stop. You have to constantly run timers and spin and turn the meat to keep it from burning. We finally got the butts and brisket to the desired color we wanted and now it was time to wrap them and stick them in the Fast Eddy (http://www.cookshack.com/) for them to finish cooking. After there in the FE we focused our attention to chicken and ribs.



Everything got done in a timely manner. We were not up against the clock in any of our categories which was good because we had a Kids Q competiton taht we needed to help with. Kids Q to me is always a highlite of any contest. Its were the kids get to compete agains themselves and with the help of there parents get to cook whatever the category the contest pics and cook something up and get it turned in. Most of the time the contests have the kids cook hamburgers or hotdogs and sometimes they really throw it to the kids and make them cook chicken. Any team that says they like chicken is LIEING! Chicken is a hard category and to have the kids cook it is always a treat because they have no idea how hard it is to cook chicken. Anyways for this contest they had the choice of cooking hamburgers or hotdogs. We had cooking in our camp Will's daughter Kennedy, Matts son Andrew and daughter Hannah and Mike son Sammy. All the kids had 1 hour to cook and they had to get there stuff turned in no later then 10:05 am saturday morning. All the kids got there finshed product turned in on time and now Christy (Will's wife) could turn her attention to the dessert she was maiing for the open category. She got the dessert finished and turned in and now we had to wait for the awards to see how everyone did.

All of us felt good about everything we turned in. Nothing was out of line and we actually had what we call a "good problem." A "good problem" is when you cook 2 diffrent recipies for the same type of meat and you have no idea which one to turn in. This happened with our ribs. Mike cooked 3 racks with his recipe and Matt cooked 3 racks with his recipe. We all tasted and debated for a few minutes and then we finally came to a decision on which ribs we were turning in.

Overall we finished 18th out of 77 teams. Chicken we finished 24th out of 77. Ribs we finished 16th out of 77. Pork we finished 25th out of 77 and brisket we finished 29th out of 77. The highlite of the awards came when Will's daughter Kennedy finsihed 2nd overall in the Kids Q with her burger. The next highlite came with Christy (Will's) wife finishing 6th in the Open category. She turned in a ewie goowie brownie. The neat thing with her presentation was with each pice of brownie she gave the judges there was a little cup of milk for each judge to wash there brownie down with.

Looking back this contest, to me puts into perspective what BBQ is all about. Its about hanging with family, hanging out with friends and meeting new friends and cooking good BBQ. Our next contest is this weekend in Olathe Kansas, http://www.wheelsnsqueelsbbq.com/