Barbequed Food

In April we enjoyed our annual trip to Meadow Creek for the Dealer Day and public open house. It was nice to spend a day with Melvin and the dealers learning about the future of Meadow Creek and how we can better serve our customers. Besides, we got to hang around some smoke and great barbecue for a couple of days.

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In April I helped cook at the Cold Springs Garden Center Open House. Usually, we go more elaborate, but this year we decided to simplify and just grill hot dogs. I cooked them on a Meadow Creek BBQ36G Grill. It’s gas-fired and had the optional lid. I grilled 400 hot dogs on this thing during open house.

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Here in the United States, we celebrated Thanksgiving last Thursday. I cooked some sausage for breakfast and a ham and turkey breast for dinner. We had a really good day and a nice time with family.

I had bought a frozen turkey breast at Wal-Mart. It was an 8 pounder and I had given it a few days in the fridge to thaw. The ham was a pre-cooked spiral sliced ham. And I also picked up a couple pounds of ground sausage on sale at our local grocery store.

The night before Thanksgiving, I prepped and seasoned all the meat. I put it in glass pans, covered it with plastic wrap, and refrigerated it until the next morning.

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Last week we took a family vacation on the OBX, a thin ridge of left-over sand dunes off the east coast. It was so much fun relaxing and playing in the beach environment. Flip flops, “strangely” colored buildings, grit in your teeth, sea gulls, hanging out in the pool, eating crab cakes, swimming in the ocean, and playing in God’s big sandbox.

Another highlight was cooking some good food at the house. (As well as solidifying my hatred for lighter fluid and falling more in love with my electric charcoal lighter. ) I cooked a couple pans of Cheesy Squealin’s, a meatloaf, and two sausage fatties.

One morning my wife and I took a beach walk to enjoy the sunrise together. The walk—uh, I mean the sunrise, was just stunning. (Short video clip at the bottom of this post.)

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This spring we took a family vacation in my beloved Smoky Mountains for 5 nights. We had a lot of good times in the beautiful cabin where we stayed. A few of my highlights were eating picnics and hiking in a thunderstorm with soggy shoes.

Me being the barbecue dude, I took a variety of meats and my barbecue supplies. Upon arrival, I realized the only grill we have is one of those cool park grills. Hmm. This is really great for smoking those hens I brought.

Turns out, you can do a lot of cool stuff with a park grill and I want to show you how I used them to cook a few meals including a smoked meatloaf.

Here is a slideshow video I made from our trip:

I won’t get into the bears, amazing trails, and magnificent waterfalls right now, but I want to tell you a little about the fun time I had cooking. The most interesting part was fiddling with my converted park grill smoker.

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A 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.

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