Tuesday, May 27, 2008

This weekend was a blur.




The Great American Barbeque Festival is in the books. We were so busy those three days that our collective heads are still spinning. The best part is we were able to see a lot of good friends and meet many new ones. We're still recovering from the weekend. Between back to back contests, the World Brisket Open, sponsorship responsibilities, a party in our site and the weather, we had an action packed weekend.

The highlight was making the World Brisket Open finals. There were 112 entries. We've competed in that event all three years. This was our first year to crack the top ten. That was way cool. It was an honor to be associated with the other nine teams in the finals. Congrats to Extreme Pork for finishing fourth overall and to Habitual Smokers on the win. That was awesome. I thought Habitual Mike was going to snap the globe off of that huge WBO Championship trophy he was waving around in the air above his head. It was a bit dicey there for a few minutes.

Competition wise we're a little beat up and bruised. We finished 26th out of 61 teams in the Invitational with no calls and 21st out of 225 teams in the open with a 6th place call in Ribs. That's just the way the ball bounces some times. I said in a BBQ Forum post recently, we just have to pick ourselves up, dust off and head to the next one. The level of competition is better than ever before because teams are doing what it takes to make themselves better cooks, like attending competition cooking classes (<---- shameless plug).

I want to congratulate all the winners from this weekend on well deserved finishes. The competition was tough and the winners all worked hard. Also, congrats to the GAB. The volunteers were great this past weekend. They really bought into Chairperson Kim Kobe's "teams first" attitude and it showed. And speaking of competition cooking classes, this weekend is the Kansas City Old School versus High Tech competition cooking class. Johnny Trigg has wanted to host a class here in KC since we started. He finally gets what he wants. We only have two seats left and we're both very excited to be teaching at the White-Waitzman barn on the Zimmerman's Kill Creek Farm. If you'd like to be in one of those seats, please get in touch with me as soon as possible.

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