Reverse Visiting Day

This weekend marked a festive weekend for the Jewish religion - Shabbos Nachamu. On this weekend throngs of families go to the Catskill mountains for a weekend retreat. This weekend also marked visiting day for sleepaway camps which would mean a perfect storm of heavy traffic for the ride home. Thankfully a group of smart minded parents decided to get a van to bring our boys back here instead of us driving and contending with the traffic. This would also mean that a huge BBQ would be in order to welcome our son back home, even for a few hours.

The days festivities started at 8:30 AM when I cleaned out and started the smoker.

I used the minion method of lighting a handful of charcoal and leaving a bunch of unlit charcoal in the bottom to carry the 8-10 hours I wanted for this smoke.

The first thing to go on were the 10 pounds of ribs that I had picked up on a special order on Thursday night.

For the ribs I made my regular Dry Rub plus the addition of brown sugar when I added it to the ribs to help with the bark formation.

For the first part of the smoke I went with pecan and cherry wood.

3.5 hours into the smoke I brushed on some of my favorite BBQ sauce and double wrapped them in heavy duty aluminum foil. I then placed them on the lower rack of the smoker and added the chicken that I had used the same rub (without the brown sugar) and placed that on the top rack. The chicken I smoked for 3 hours with apple wood.

While this was going on, I got busy with the grilling part of the BBQ. In the kitchen I prepared 16 spiral hot dogs and the hamburgers.

When the ribs came off, they were literally falling off the bone

As for my son, I think he appreciated the BBQ and coming home for a short visit

But the thing about BBQ, when its done from the heart, it wants to be shared with friends because that is what true BBQ is all about.