Pigs for the Hungry
May 18th, 2012A couple weeks ago, we had a lot of fun cooking for Open House at Cold Springs Garden Center, the other company Marlin owns with my Dad. The event lasted two days, Friday and Saturday. We served homemade donuts and coffee in the mornings. Around 10:30 we started giving away grilled sausage sandwiches and barbecue samples.
In this post, I want to share some of the memories from those two days and entice you with ribs, wings, chicken, and Amish-made sausage from Lancaster County, PA.
We grilled the sausages on a BBQ42 Chicken Cooker. For samples, we grilled party wings with the sausage and smoked ribs (how growling delicious!) and split chicken breasts on my Meadow Creek SQ36 Smoker.
Don’t look. O)
You don’t like wings? You can’t possibly be serious!
Getting more better by the minute.
Smoke and salt; meat and Meadow Creek. What more can I say?
Us boys cookin’ up storms.
Marlin cooking the sandwich toppings on the Meadow Creek BBQ26S with a griddle.
Me loading the BBQ42 Grill with more sausages. The grate hinges in the back and latches on the other edge. It swivels in the middle, so you can flip the whole rack of meat with one hand.
You’ve got to give people plenty of water and soda.
Good ole’ popcorn snacks.
It was very busy and lots of people showed up. At one point I counted about 35 vehicles in the parking lot.
The food stand where we served donuts and barbecue.
The open house was a great success. Hundreds of people showed up and we gave away lots of free food. Plant sales were high too. We served around 300 sausages plus 16 racks of ribs, 12 split bone-in breasts, and several small batches of wings.
I was able to easily cook most of the meat myself thanks to Meadow Creek’s BBQ42 Charcoal Grill (Chicken Cooker) and SQ36 Offset Smoker. In fact, I had hardly ever used the chicken cooker before. That’s usually Marlin’s department.
You know how I’ve been telling the world how easy it is to cook perfectly done meat on the chicken cooker with no previous experience? Well, here was the opportunity to test my own claims and it passed with smoking colors. Marlin was busy as a beheaded chicken that first morning and I was sorta pushed into running the BBQ42 with very little experience. Turns out it was very easy to crank out large quantities of perfectly done grillecue.
Meadow Creek smokes!
If you enjoyed the pictures, please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you.
Have fun,
Lavern
Tags: Barbequed Food, BBQ42 Chicken Cooker, cooking for crowds, open house, sq36 bbq smoker
May 19th, 2012 at 7:47 pm
I cant get over how mouth watering your pictures always seem to be!! Ive tried a bunch of your recipes and have loved everyone of them! In the process of saving up to buy a Cooker/smoker combo! Great job as always!
May 21st, 2012 at 6:20 am
Nick, thanks for letting me know! It’s what keeps me going. 🙂
May 19th, 2012 at 8:09 pm
I just cooked for a B’day party for a friend. Cooked 50 leg quarters and had 35 people (Someone cheated…..there wasn’t any chicken left. I was also cooking a case of 8 butts and 4 slabs of ribs for my daughter to take home with her at the same time. I’ve had the 250 smoker/w the 42″ chicken cooker for about a year now and love it. I had it paid for in 7 months just piddling. You have the best cookers I’ve ever seen. They are fool proof!
Charlie
May 21st, 2012 at 6:28 am
Charlie, wow thanks for sharing your experience here. Sounds like you are really cookin’! 🙂
May 20th, 2012 at 6:49 am
I just wanted to say that I enjoy getting your emails. I am a big BBQ and BBQ smoker fan. I keep up with guys like Stumps Smokers (I actually owned one), Lang smokers and such. I am actually making my own offset reverse flow smoker at home because I can’t really afford one right now. But I will tell you that if I could afford it, I would buy a Meadow Creek offset. There are two things about you guys that stick out to me. First, you are not ashamed to proclaim that your business is run with Godly ethics. I believe we should always do our work as unto the Lord. And second, your pits are built with quality and attention to detail. I am a welder by trade and pay attention to things like, straightness of cuts, undercuts on welds, things of that nature. Compared to a Lang, (going by the pictures) you guys pit a lot more thought and attention to detail in your product. It’s hard to find a company anymore here in the states that care about those things anymore. Keep it up. God will bless your business. If I get where I have the finances, I’ll be down there to pick up one of those trailer mounted 120’s!! God bless.
May 21st, 2012 at 6:27 am
Phil, thanks for sharing that. It means a lot to hear you say that. Let us know if/when you are ready to purchase and we’ll get you set up.
May 20th, 2012 at 8:18 am
Laverne was good hearing from you again. The pic’s of the BBQ were awesome. I just recently relocated back to panhandle of florida and my buddy and i fired the smoker up this weekend it was also great time. We have a competition team called Poverty Hill Smokers and we have been doing really good in competitions our next one is smokin on the swannee and we have been looking for a sponsor for our team and I would like for you to consider this it would be greatly appreciated and also we wouldnt let you down. Please contact me no matter what I always enjoy hearing from ya’ll. Thank you Kenny McCollough
May 21st, 2012 at 6:29 am
Kenny, I don’t think we are interested in that right now, but I’ll try to keep that in mind and there may be someone reading this who is a good fit.
May 20th, 2012 at 11:17 am
Looks like some really good food ! I’ll bet everyone enjoyed it.
May 21st, 2012 at 6:30 am
Yes, it turned out really good.
May 20th, 2012 at 2:17 pm
Looks great making me hungry. Where at in Lancaster did you get the sausage ? was it good ? I go to lancaster about once a month.
June 12th, 2012 at 8:37 pm
Sorry for the delay in answering. King’s Meats. The only local place to buy it retail is at Green Dragon Farmer’s Market. They have someone there every Friday. Their Green Dragon Market phone number is 717-738-6087. Make sure to leave a message if no answer. They also ship some and the cost for shipping is usually around $1.29 a pound.
Let us know if you have any other questions.
Lavern
May 21st, 2012 at 3:53 am
Awesome looking event, reminds me of home.
loving that chicken cooker, i’ll probably be looking to pick up one or two this summer.
May 21st, 2012 at 6:25 am
Patrick, thanks for the kind words. Let us know when you’re ready. 😉
May 24th, 2012 at 2:59 pm
Lavern, Thanks for all the mouth watering pics. I’m a member of the local Lions Chapter and we’re interested in picking up your BBQ 144 BBQ pit trailer. The only question that I have for you is if this unit would be compliant with the DOT in Pa. We currently cook our chicken basically the same way as your cookers do but were not mobile, also yours look a bit more pleasing on the eye to a hungry crowd’s appetite. Apprence and presentation is 90% of the job and from what we’ve seen on all of the pics that you sent us and the ones on your web site we would automatically increase on our sales. Before we get this mobile unit we want you to do some custom work to it for us. In case we get caught in some bad weather and also to save heat along with cooking a little faster. We would want all four of the bays to have lids on them. By doing this we feel that we’d get a more of a smoky flavor and we might even use a little less charcoal. With the purchase of this size were going have to do some more fund raisers unless you’d like to donate one to a fine non-profit origination like ourselves. LOL Thanks for all info and God Bless to all of you and your families. It’s nice to see the quality craftsmanship still made in USA.
May 29th, 2012 at 8:56 am
Dan, thanks for asking. I’m not sure about the DOT in PA, but I’ll have Marlin answer your questions via email. We can do lids and Marlin will send you a price. Thanks! Lavern