Crazy times in Florida

Boy, its been a crazy past few days!!!  Quilt show this Thursday then Friday/Saturday a BBQ competition, followed by lots of sleep and craziness when I went back to work!!  Where do I even start???

Thursday was the Jacksonville Quilt Show and it was pretty fun.  I was there about 5 hours, looking at quilts and of course, all the products for sale.  I will post pictures of some of my favorite quilts and talk more about the quilt show in the next few posts.

Friday and Saturday was the BBQ cookoff finale - we felt we had our best cook yet.  We ended up coming in 4th overall, and was barely 2 points from 3rd place.  Not bad at all!!!  We are taking a break from BBQ for awhile; besides we are getting a new smoker made so even if we wanted to cook we can't right now. 

So we will be going "pro" and will start entering pro competitions, probably after the holidays.  More to come on that.....

Work.....ah, work.  The ultimate in crazy......either I'm swamped or have nothing going on.  I have just started the "I'm Swamped" cycle which will last for the forseeable future.  Oh well, at least I have a job, for which I am thankful :)

Hope you're week has been good so far!
Vanessa

Time's A-Wastin'

Yes time *is* a-wasting!! 

I'm confirmed for one craft show on November 15th and am applying for a 2-day show for the following weekend.  Nice huh?  Another one that I applied to I never heard back from; I was going to contact them until I realized it was for next weekend (October 4th) and there is NO WAY I'll be ready in time.  So I'm gonna skip that one and look for a different one.

So I've started working on my items and I already feel like I'm way behind.  On top of that, I need to make 3 casserole carriers before next weekend.  I started on one and thought, oh I can just freehand quilt it instead of doing straight lines.  Well my optimism got the best of me, and let's just say I've been ripping out stitches for the past two days :(  I won't even bother to embarass myself with a picture of it; yes its that bad.  Oh well live and learn.  But I promised to post pics of the finished product when I'm done!

Also in the mix of the craft show craziness, we are also practicing for the Grand Finale BBQ Cookoff next weekend (September 26th-27th).  Here is a picture of a whole brisket fresh out of the smoker:

 

And here it is all sliced and ready for dinner LOL And yes, someone has already noticed the lack of vegetables on my plate.  In my defense I was planning on having fresh cut fruit for dessert, but ended up crashing not too long after eating dinner.  Smoking BBQ all day in the hot sun is hard work, folks.  LOL  Mmmm look at that smoke ring!

 

 

And here's the ribs.  We cooked them a little too long so they started pulling off the bones.  We've noticed a definite decrease in size in ribs so we are going to need to plan accordingly.  But they turned out very good so I'm not gonna complain.

Sounds like we are going to practice again this weekend.  I'm thinking that after the Grand Finale we are going to take a little break from BBQ-ing.  I least I sure hope we do, because I think I need a break from BBQ in general.  Which is funny because I really do love BBQ but like anything else, too much of a good thing and all that.....

So tonight will be ripping out more stitches (yay) and just keep plugging away at my craft show inventory.

Hope you're having a great week!
Vanessa

Back Home - What a Week!

Wow - this past week has been a lot of fun - busy and a blur all at the same time!

So to catch up - as you know I was on vacation at Disney World.  After Space Mountain we spent the rest of the day/evening enjoying Disney.  Here are some more pictures for your viewing pleasure:

Under the Sea ride

Big Thunder Mountain:

Cinderella Castle:

Parade:

 

Epcot at night

 

So the day after Disney it was my birthday!  Woo hoo!  Unfortunately it rained pretty hard off and on all day, so didn't do a whole lot.  Ran some errands, tried to pick up the smoker (wasn't ready yet), puttered around some more then went to Clarks Fish Camp for dinner.  I went there last year and had a lot of fun - its a seafood place on the river but the entire inside is decorated with stuffed animals.  No, not the cute Care Bear type.  I'm talking Lions, Tigers, and Bears.....OH MY!  LOL Check out the link if you're curious.  Nothing like eating dinner and having tons of eyes staring at you HAHAHA

 

Had a couple more days off from work, so as always went running errands, picked up the smoker (it was in the shop because a warming box was being added to it), and just tried to get geared up to go back to work. Yay. 

 

Otherwise, we have another BBQ competition this coming weekend - Chicken, Ribs and Pork Butt.  Its gonna be hot and rainy all weekend so not looking forward to that part but it will be fun to see all the familiar faces at the contest again, and catch up with them since we didn't have a competition in June.

Next up - the Jacksonville Quilt Show is coming in September!  WOO HOO!!  I plan on saving my pennies so that I can snag all sorts of great deals!  I went last year for the first time and although I missed not having my friends Amy and Kathy there, I still had fun.  This years theme is "Its Not All Black and White" - sound interesting!!!  There will definitely be a TON of pictures when I go, trust me :)

Finally.....I found another pattern that I have put on my "To Do" list - its a Debbie Mumm project called "By The Sea Wallhanging".  Go check it out - isn't it adorable???

How has your week been?
Vanessa

May BBQ Competition Results

Ahh....trying to recover from another long BBQ weekend.  You'd think that after doing one a month all year, then doing overnights the past couple months that I'd recover faster, but not quite yet LOL

So on Friday I left work and it was *pouring* rain; I was thinking 'oh great another cold and wet BBQ night'.  But by the time we got there it had stopped raining and didn't start up again until we were on our way home on Saturday afternoon....

After the cooks meeting, we started setting up.  We bought a new tent and once we started putting it up, I was essentially pushed out of the way because several of the other BBQ team guys came over to help and oooh and ahhh over the new tent:

Yes we got a double-wide tent LOL we didn't have to put up the sides/walls and left it open.  We had a TON of room which was nice.  We put the smoker, tables, and cooking stuff in the back half, and had a 'living area' in the front half, with tv trays tables and chairs galore.  I didn't think to take a picture (sorry) but will next time.

Anyway we had some friends hang out on Friday night; we smoked burgers, had some beer and had a great time visiting.  After they left we put on the brisket and let it cook all night:

YUM!!!!

I made the brisket marinade and the chicken sauce from scratch....still working on the brisket and chicken rubs, so this time around we used commerical ones.

Anyway, here are the pictures of both the chicken and the brisket:

After almost 3 hours of waiting, the results came in:

1st place - Chicken
10th place - Brisket

We are THRILLED with the first place finish (obviously!) but are *very* disappointed in the brisket finish.  Overall we came in 9th place.  I'm still waiting for the judges comments to see what they said about the brisket (and find out what they didn't like about it) so I can fix it for next time. 

After looking at these pictures again, I'm hungry LOL

Hope you had a great weekend!
Vanessa

March 2014 BBQ Results/Recap

What a weekend!

Friday started out a little overcast, but all was good.  Got home from work early, started packing up the truck, made the au jus and the BBQ sauce for the brisket and was running around like crazy people.  We also had to pick up our new banner, so Pitmaster Todd ran over to the printers to get it while I was getting everything else finished.

I think our banner turned out great:

 

Anyway, we were running late so we got to the BBQ cookoff with seconds to spare before the cooks meeting.  After the meeting we were given our meat (1 *very* large brisket!!) and started getting set up so we can prep the brisket.

 

About this time - it started to rain.  We knew it was going to rain, but what we *didn't* expect was the mini-typhoon that was going to hit.  We were DRENCHED!  They had to cancel Friday evenings festivities (live band, vendors, selling to the public, etc) because of the rain.  Luckily we were (somewhat) prepared and brought along side walls for the canopy and put two of them on the sides - the front was blocked by the truck and the back wall was open to give us access to the smoker.

 

Did I mentioned we were DRENCHED??!!  It was cold, it was rainy, and it was miserable.  Luckily we had some great, funny guys next to us that has us pretty entertained all night.  We were able to catch a quick catnap but again, we needed to watch the smoker and tend to the meat, so sleeping wasn't going to be top of the priority list.

 

Our meat got done WAY early - 7am - and turn in time wasn't until noon, so we wrapped it up and placed it in an empty cooler with towels to keep it warm.  What we didn't realize is that the meat would keep cooking....

 

Anyway, its still raining cats and dogs (on a side note - who came up with that saying anyway? lol) and we were still drenched.  We were told that the People's Choice and food sales were now cancelled because of the rain, and instead we were going to just have a big lunch inside the main building with all the teams and taste everyone's brisket.

 

Anyway at 10:30am we put the meat back on the smoker to warm it back up then took it off at 11:30 to slice it.  We noticed it was VERY VERY tender (read: it was falling apart) so was very hard to slice:

 

 

 

OMG the flavor was SOOO good, it was just way overdone.

 

Here's our turn-in box; we did a little of everything - slices, shredded and cubed:

 

 

 



After turn in, we ate some lunch, chatted with other BBQ-ers and some judges and started packing up when we were called back in for the results.

 

Unfortunately we came in 13th out of 22.  We were a bit disappointed (well, ok, a *lot* disappointed) but what can you do?  We congratulated some of the other teams, packed up our stuff and went home.  I crashed for 14 hours, was up for a couple of hours, then crashed for another 4 hours, and was pretty much dragging the rest of the day with a monster migraine.  Sunday I looked like death LOL

 

We also got the judges comments back Sunday afternoon:

 



Scores are on a scale of 1-10, and they judge based on Appearance, Tenderness and Taste.  Keep in mind its all subjective, of course, but after seeing the breakdown and comments we now know what we did wrong and will make the necessary adjustments:

• We smoked it on too high of a heat (next time we will use a lower temp)
• We cooked it too long (we will do better with time management so it won't be overcooked next time)
• We are NOT changing the au jus we used - for the life of us, we can't figure out why Judge #2 didn't like the taste but the other judges did.  In fact we offered samples to many of our BBQ neighbors and all of them raved.  Eh....to each their own
• We will mak sure we fill the box a lot fuller next time - ours looked a little skimpy, in hindsight

Sorry didn't mean to ramble on (and on and on LOL).  I hope you had a wondeful (and DRY!) weekend!
Vanessa :)

Crab Boil Adventures, Preparing the BBQ

This past weekend a bunch of us got together for a good, old fashioned crab boil.  Everyone seems to do them slightly different but here's a picture of mine:

Its nothing fancy by any means - crab legs, shrimp, corn on the cob, sausage, mushrooms and red potatoes but WOW, is it delicious!

I think we ended up making 16 ears of corn, 8 lbs of crab legs, 2 1/2 links of sausage, a few pounds of shrimp, a large container of fresh mushrooms and a ton of potatoes.  There were 6 adults and 2 kids (both boys) and we managed to demolish almost all of it.  I think we crawled away from the table, we were so stuffed lol

In other news, we are preparing for our next amateur BBQ event this weekend.  We are having a banner printed with our team name, our associated BBQ memberships (the Florida BBQ Association and the Kansas City Barbeque Society) and location, which will will hang from our tent.  There will be plenty of pictures from this weekend, I promise!!  The meat this month is brisket, which is considered one of the hardest meats to cook.  If nothing else, it will be a great learning experience!

So what are your plans for this weekend?
Vanessa

Getting Ready for BBQ!

On Sunday we did a practice round of ribs in preparation of the cookoff this weekend - they turned out pretty good, if I do say so myself.  I didn't take any pictures of the practice ribs, but there will be plenty of pics from the cookoff this weekend :) 

In other news, I've been trying to decide what my next quilting project is going to be, and have decided to go ahead and *finally* make myself a king-sized quilt, using a pattern I bought last year and just fell in love with:

My LQS had a display of this pattern on the wall using batiks and I fell instantly in love with it!!!

 

 

 

As I might have mentioned before, I'm a *huge* batik fan and this just screamed "BUY ME"!  So I spent the better part of a year looking for the perfect batiks - I wanted to do mine in "beachy" colors - turquoises, tans, light blues, light greens, etc.  For a king sized bed you need something like 30-32 fat quarters, which doesn't sound bad until you have to start looking for the perfect ones :-/  On top of that, I want to make a matching valance for my bedroom window so I needed extra material for that.

 

It was a long, hard search - because as I'm buying FQ and then start laying them next to each other I was finding that some were too dark, some too light, some not the correct shade, etc.  Oh no......this requires me to go back out and buy more fabric.  Oh darn.  Whatever will I do? 

 

Now that I have the fabrics finally picked out, I can finally start cutting them into the pieces.  I'll post pictures of my progress :)

 

Hope you are having a wonderful day!!

Vanessa

 

 

M.I.A - Missing in Action and BBQ Time!

Hello fellow bloggers!  I'm so sorry I've been MIA lately - I've been neglectful of my blog and I have to apologize profusely! 

Anyway......lots to catch up on!!  One thing that has kept me busy is we've signed up as amateur bbq-ers in a year-long BBQ cookoff.  It will teach us how to eventually compete in a 'professional' level :)  We 'compete' once a  month again other BBQ-wanna-be's and get help from judges and BBQ pros.  Its a great learning experience, let me tell ya!

 

Our first attempt was stressful yet fun at the same time.  The first meat was chicken thighs which we'd never done before, so needless to say Google was our friend LOL  I'm telling ya, if its not on Google it doesn't exist *lol*

 

Here's some pics from the competition, including our smoker and our tent set up:

 

 

 

Our team name is "The Other BBQ Team" - orginal, I know :-/  LOL  Anyway, we had a cooks meeting at 6:30am then it was off to prep and cook the meat!  Only problem was that we *just* picked up the smoker that morning and didn't know how to use it!!!  Luckily the guy we got it from and our very kind smoker neighbor (thanks Leo!!) were kind enough to help us out.  We were *so* busy that - silly me - I didn't think to take pictures of our chicken!  DUH!!!

In all, there were a total of 20 BBQ teams.  The sponsor, Mack Daddy Smokers, held the competition at their store location.  They were raising money for the Walk of Hope Foundation, and the meat we cooked was split between the charity to sell to raise money, for the judging and for People's Choice taste testing. 

So for the People's Choice - the public was able to buy wristbands for $10 before the event ($15 day of) and could taste each vendor's food then vote for their favorite.  Unfortunately we didn't win but we had a lot of great comments; not bad for first-timers!!

At the end of the day, it was results time.  Lo and Behold, we placed 6th!!!!!  WOO HOO!  We later found out it was a VERY close race, so close that we were only 1 point from 1st place!  Talk about stoked!!!  :::happy dance:::

 

Next competition will be held on February 15th - and the meat this time is ribs.  My favorite!!!  YUM!  We practiced last weekend and will be practicing again this weekend.  (Oh darn, not ribs again????.......please note the sarcasm......)  I will definitely take more pictures next time.

 

So....I'm going to reach out to my fellow bloggers and followers and ask for help.  Can any of you suggest a Team Name for us?  We've talked at some point about wanting to do some catering locally so I'm looking for something clever, and right now my creativity is a standstill.  Suggestions would be great appreciated :)

 

I hope you have a wonderful day!!

Vanessa