BBQ

I must be getting old because two of my favorite summertime hobbies are gardening and barbecuing.  It’s hard to get a real feel from the garden from this picture, but things have really taken off in the past two weeks.  Hopefully it will start producing in a couple more weeks.

I absolutely love to grill, and last year for Father’s Day, Holly gave me a BBQ cookbook.  It’s been a lot of fun trying some of the recipes for rubs and sauces in there.  The book also gives good instructions for smoking meat using a gas grill.  I soak wood chips in water for a few hours and then put them in a foil pouch that I poke holes in so the smoke can escape.  Then I just turn on the one burner and put the packet of wood chunks over the flame.  All the meat goes on the other side of the grill and cooks with indirect heat, like this:

I put a rub of dry spices on the ribs and let that cure for a few hours.  When the grill is ready, I put them on and used a mop sauce that consists of the rub and some vinegar.  Finally in the last ten minutes or so, I put some homemade BBQ sauce on them.  You don’t want to put it on too soon, or the sugar in the sauce will burn.  The finished product looked like this:

MMMMMMMMM!

I think I’d like to get an actual smoker some day.  I’ve never made a brisket, but that’s definitely on my list of something to try.  We keep trying different rub and sauce recipes.  The goal is to figure out what we like the best and tweak it into an original recipe.  Maybe some day I’ll enter a BBQ contest.