This weekend was serious BBQ business. Huntsville’s Whistlestop Weekend.
Gerrit volunteered this weekend to help out a friend of his and his team, which honestly is a much better way to do Whistlestop. The thing about Whistlestop is that unless you know someone who has BBQ, it is actually hard to find food because everyone is there cooking for the competition. But since we had latched ourselves onto a team in a way, we had a place to be and food to eat. (And at the end of the weekend I had a stinky husband who hadn’t showered in two days and only had two hours of sleep.)
To be honest, I learned a lot this weekend (but not in the food related way you would expect). It was a weekend that made me more confident about rolling with the punches when toting Evelyn along to various events. We survived a disruption to our routine (which to be honest has terrified me for the past month-ish after all the hard work we did to get on a nap schedule), she ate lunch without being in a high chair and without getting food all over her, we managed to not get sun burnt for the most part, and she took a nap in my arms exactly when nap time needed to be (hallelujah).
Oh wait, though. You wanted to know about food since that was the whole point of the weekend and generally the point of this blog? Well I can tell you that the team’s brisket was pretty good as were the ribs. In fact, the ribs were good enough to win second place overall. Against professional BBQ competition people who travel around all year doing this kind of thing and have really expensive smokers (compared to the homemade 5 gallon ones the guys were cooking on). Really I had absolutely no stake in any of it, but seeing how excited they were about the whole thing was a bit infectious.
Enough so that now Gerrit is talking about how we could build a smoker of our own.
Hope everyone had as lovely a weekend as we did.