Congats MacDaddy.

Terry turned in wings........on his first ever entry at MIM..........placed 7th. 7TH!!!! Unreal! Congrats MacDaddy.

Kangaroo

On Sunday night after we loaded in our tent on the river at Memphis in May we were sitting at the Fox & Hound having dinner. Carey tells me if I care to to do the "exotic" category for MIM. Alligator, Caribou, Ostrich............that's all yesterdays news. Had to get something different and do something different. Somehow I found Kangaroo & Yak meat. I decided against the Yak meat. It shipped in on Wed. to Mom & Dads house there in Memphis. I decided to do a beef wellington version of Kangaroo.......Kangaroo Wellingtons. I called my buddy John McNeil to get his two cents. John was able to let me have some veal demi that he had made up. I wanted a wine sauce using a Shiraz/Syrah. He gave me instructions on a sauce using that demi as a base. It turned out unreal. Then he gave me his thoughts on the patte' filler. I found some wild mushrooms and made my patte' with shallots, herbs, butter, balsamic, lemon juice and I threw in just a few raisins with it..........beat those up in a food processor and WOW was that good! So John McCall & I spend most of the morning prepping this out to bring down to the tent to construct and cook it there. Turn in time is 2:30. We get there about 12:45.......walk in the tent and there is nowhere to cook this because everything is in use. Leave it to some ol' boys from Corinth, MS to come through for you. Tom Underwood from "Pigs-R-Us" came down to the tent to see if we had any celery. I asked Tom if he had some cook space......he said "hell yeah we'll fire one up for you". We fired up a small cooker he had on his trailer. While we were waiting for the coals to get the temp up to 425* to bake this thing in me, John & Robbie started constructing this Kangaroo Wellington. We put it in @2:05 which is almost not enough time to get the pastry around the meat baked so I added some more coals, opened the vents up a little and got that cooker to 450*. Now that's a little too hot but I had no choice cause I was runnin' out of time. As you can see the wellington to the left had already started to burn some. We got it out at 2:28. Robbie boxed it with some lettuce and all 3 of us started sprinting for the turn in tent. The way we were dressed we looked like the guys from that early 80's movie "Chariots of Fire" running to the tent. We made by about 15 seconds. We came in 22nd out of 70 odd teams. I was a little pissed at myself because I let us run out of time to do the presentation right. I am sure that the creativity and the taste was there to place top 3. Maybe I'm wrong but I felt really, really good about this. I think we got docked points for presentation and also I think that the pastry might have gotten soggy on top due to condensation in the Styrofoam box waiting its turn for the judges to taste it. Also @2:28 with 2 minutes to go and I cut it open the flakes from the pastry went all over the lettuce bed......looking like Harry Carey leaned down and shook some dandruff off over it. So I've learned a little lesson on turn in time and to make sure you give yourself enough of it! Thanks to John McNiel for the guidance and creative help and thanks to John McCall and Robbie Lundy for all the help that day......really appreciate it!

Random shots & ruminations

Thursday night was a big party...........There was an ice luge that Rip conducted which was very cool. Athens distributing donated Jim Beam Black, Voxx Vodka, etc. for Rip to pour down peoples head-holes on that ice luge. Friday afternoon we had a Bourbon tasting which was very cool & informative. Friday night the Lobel boys (Evan, Marc & company) grilled MASSIVE steaks. I'm talking about 3" thick prime strips & fillets that were dry aged 6 weeks. Lobels is one of the sponsors and without question the most prestegious butcher in the country, maybe the world. Check them out @www.lobels.com........ also, Mitch Gallant from WoodSmoke Provisions
is widely considered as having the best cold smoked fish in the country. Mitch fed us salmon, trout, oysters, crawfish.....it was unreal! The pics show you some of the times on friday night.

Progress baby......progress!

Man......I'm sitting here thinking as to "where do I start"? First off without sounding like a beta-male pantie waist I really met some great new friends during this last week. The entire team .....and listen, I mean entire (well except one guy with an Ole Miss hat on.......nothing to do with my family going to Mississippi State either....serious!) team was great. Dave, John, Terry, Robbie, Rip, Dresh, B. Ham, Evan, Dudley, Applegate, Mitch, Jessie, Mark, Frank.......I could go on for a while. Great human beings.......really great! Of course I am assuming you know that Carey and I were already friends and that my opinion of him is very high..... what a great guy he is! Carey/Dave directed the team to 17th in shoulder. Out of 75-odd teams.....coming from like 50th 4 years ago.....thats great! What you need to know is that competition "Q" is A LOT different from backyard or restaurant "Q". I dont have time nor do I feel like explaining right now the why/how..........but it is two different worlds. They really did a great job! I have so many blogs to catch up on so I'm going to leave it at this because I want to match the blogs with the pics.................but I have to say that I really didnt expect to really enjoy myself this time around because my last go around sucked ass. Nothing against John Willingham........because that was an "old" team, etc. but these boys were great. Everyone did their share......especially Terry, Dresh, Carey, John & Dave.....they worked their ass off. Great guys.........really great guys! The picture above is Carey spewing some of his legendary bullshit. Being my 1st year on the team I was pretty quiet on my bullshit ability. Those of you that know me well know that I was blessed with an incredible ability to add on 15-20% of fabrication to any story.........which we all know is the art of a true really good story teller. Carey is in my league and the picture above is Carey spewing pure fabrication from the P.A.. It was artistic! As you know I could not blog 3-4 times a day down there like I wanted to because of the lack of wi-fi...........so what I'm going to do is re-blog with all my pics over the next few days to catch you back up. I'm looking forward to getting back to the Joint tomorrow (Lord Willing). Again........in a non rectal pluggin kind of way..........I've really missed my guys.........Bo, Marteen, Raul (and now Emily)............looking forward to getting back to the pit and the kitchen!

Tennessean Article

Well we were blessed again with another article in the paper. The article ran on Monday when I was in Memphis. Here is the link:

http://tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070514/COUNTY090101/705140323/1356/COUNTY09

if you have trouble with the link its because I am a computer dumb-ass and cant do something as simple as linking an article. If you have this problem then just google "martins bbq+peg leg" and it should bring it up.