The first step was purchasing a smoker.  I swear barbecue will bring the most celebrated chef buckling to his knees in frustration and humility.  If Thomas Keller himself tried to cook barbecue, he would be forever shattered by a bunch of 400-pound men, standing around a smoker, Buds in hand, who have never even heard of the French Laundry.  It took me four years of cooking, experimenting, and generally forcing my kids to eat really bad barbecue until I could produce something worth eating. They have no problem voicing their opinions—I can’t slip anything past those little devils! 

The problem lies in the fact there is really no good information out there on how to cook competition-quality barbecue.  The top teams keep all their secrets locked up like the Coca-Cola recipe.  Yes, sure, go to a billion blogs and team home pages for barbecue and the information is so general and vague you would be lucky enough to make just edible barbecue, let alone competition-quality.  You’re probably thinking that I’m going to spill the beans and give away two notebooks worth of notes and recipes.  Ha!  Not in your life. I worked way too hard to just give that stuff away.  And that’s the point really: The process of learning how to cook competition-quality barbecue is like earning a Doctorate degree; no one can really just read the dissertation you wrote and have the same amount of knowledge as it took to acquire the info.  It’s a process, a pilgrimage that makes cooking at the James Beard House seem like cooking family meal in your restaurant. 

The competitions are a hoot too.  Staying up all night through the twilight zone tending your smoker along with dozens of others teams tending theirs—everyone with a common goal of producing fat-dripping, tender, tasty meat.  A thick haze of sweet smelling smoke lingers overhead, creating a mystic feel to the sea of campers, pop-up tents and smokers.  The whole deal is about as ungreen as can be—a true holocaust for vegans.  My girlfriend and team partner (the only person who agreed to form a team with me) once thought we should ask advice from a neighboring team headed by a 500-pound man covered with enough hair to practically conceal his wife beater T-shirt.  How could we go wrong?  This guy looked like he invented barbecue!  He talked like it too—telling us all about the competitions and awards he’d won.  “Wow, what luck!” we thought “and right next door to us, too.”  We presented our sauces to him and he stuck his swollen, sausage-like fingers in each sauce, and then sucked the sauce off each finger as if he were tasting a rare wine.  He then spent several minutes wistfully staring off into the sky before speaking.  We looked up at him in awe, hanging on every piece of advice that could potentially catapult us into BBQ nirvana.  He said “I taste cinnamon.”  We sort of looked at each other, puzzled, and said, “No…”  Then he said “Nutmeg?”  “No,” we replied.  On and on it went with not much accuracy on his part.  But we had already drunk the Kool Aid and this gorilla of a man was a barbecue god to us and whatever he did or said was gold.  On the other side of us was a skinny man who looked more like a high school math teacher than a barbecue guru.  We exchanged pleasantries but didn’t think it was worth asking this seemingly out of place man words of barbecue wisdom.  Dang, if we didn’t beat the ape in the overall score, but the professor won first place in ribs!

Well it’s a tough decision, and I need to organize my socks and clean the kitty litter box—OK, you’ve twisted my arm. I’ll go. 

The food show in Ocean City has become a bit of a spring rite of passage, or more accurately, a short “Spring Break” for restaurateurs on the Eastern Shore, all of us hoping and wishing for better weather—and some customers. It’s a a reward for surviving the long winter, which is not unlike James Stewart overseeing the run on his Savings and Loan bank. 

The trip to Ocean City is a breeze without the beach traffic and hopes are high for having a good time on the backs of all those distributors..and maybe I’ll see a new product or two. But on the way to the convention center I made a tragic mistake: feeling full of bravado, I bet my girlfriend that whomever loses our impromptu put-put golf game would have to drink a shot of tequila from the other’s shoe—but only after an hour’s worth of sweaty dancing. That was dumb. It turns out that my girlfriend had way too much practice playing put-put as a kid and scored six holes in one. What is this candid camera? 

I hoped my loss was forgotten as we entered the convention center, viewing an ocean of booths peddling everything from ice cream creations to every imaginable breaded and deep-fried product you could think of. My favorite was the most earnest sales women I’ve ever met taking scissors to the corner of a clear plastic bag.  “Just snip the corner and squeeze out the guacamole!  How easy is that!” she told us. What?  How easy is it to scope out an avocado, add lemon juice, olive oil and salt. Avocados are one of the world’s most perfect foods.

A couple of laps around the convention center eating samples reminds me of those giant buffets you get so excited about in the beginning. All that food—it all looks so good. You’re so hungry! You feel so gleeful about the whole experience at first, but it quickly turns to indifference, and finally, to downright revulsion as you head out the door with your stomach stretched out like a Roman emperor at a toga party.  The food is also so much about convenience—not my thing.  And lets face the facts, convenience means chemicals.  You can’t have guacamole survive ten years in a plastic bag without intervention! 

Next year, all bets are off. And, oh, yes, let’s just say the tequila tasted a bit more “mature” than at other times.

The reality is any other patient with similar vital stats is given a box full of weight loss pamphlets and a directory to every gym within 100 miles. And it’s true my occupation is eating, and making food taste better, etc. And I’m passionate about good food. But good food does not mean cutting ridiculous corners like ordering a skinny latte that tastes and looks like dishwater. Real full cream butter and whipping cream bring out the best in mashed potatoes; wouldn’t have them any other way!

But every once in a while I look down at my belly sort of wishing I had the ol’ six pack. Thankfully those thoughts are fleeting and easily forgotten especially when eating pizza (one of my favorite foods—more on that in a later post).

Lately I’ve been doubly burdened with a girlfriend who has an overactive thyroid (sometimes my dyslexia kicks in and call it an over active hemorrhoid—-eeeeeh!!!) Her appetite is so insatiable that even I have trouble keeping up! That’s scary. So as she maintains a bikini body I feel like I should be trading in my board shorts for those cloth sumo wrestling diapers. Great—just in time for summer…