New Respect for Competition Cooks!

Practice Cook - 

We set up at 5 pm on Sunday and finished around 3 pm on Monday. This is a LOT more work than I thought. We learned a lot about all the things we don't know about competition cooking and have a deep respect for those who do this on a regular basis!

So here I am, sitting around watching the Olympics. As usual, watching other people exercise makes me hungry. Then I start thinking back to a fine summer day last year.

I had just received my WSM from Amazon.com and wanted to put something on the grill quick. So we pulled a locally raised chicken out of the freezer and thawed it out. After it was cooked my wife pulled it apart and made awesome chicken salad sammies.

So my mind is now fixed on those beautiful sandwiches and I crave them as much as Madonna craves being relevant.

No sammies for now - but the pictures will hold me over until I fire the smoker up tomorrow!

Onions

celery
salt
pepper
eggs
mayo
blue cheese dressing
smoked chicken.

Add each to suit your tastes!

Thus spake Monty, and why not?

My desire is to combat my own tendency to rush through life without considering the beauty of what is around me. So, food is a metaphorical battle ground where I have chosen to slow down and appreciate life to the fullest, and this is the place for me to pontificate without doing too much harm.

Our garden is producing in abundance and our kitchen remodel is finally finished. Life can't be all bad, can it? My wife and I have been "forced" by the remodel to eat outside with our kids every evening on a picnic bench. Meals degenerate into play time and then I load the monkeys into a trailer and pull them around town behind a lawn mower. 

Tonight we were eating hamburgers in the yard when we realized we have a perfectly good table in the kitchen - and an island with bar stools, for that matter. We stayed outside...

Here's a basic rib rub - I'm taking this slow so that I don't hurt myself on the first blog!

1/2 cup brown sugar

1/2 cup seasoned salt

2 T Ancho chili powder

1 T Black pepper

1 t curry powder

1 t onion powder

1 t garlic powder

1 t cumin