Sunday at the Royal

Saturday night while Dad was cozied up in the zero gravity chair, I was really tired and basically ready to crash myself... So I came up with a new method of firewatching... I make sure the coal base was adequate and the fire was burning clean, I threw on a nice big hickory log, and I set my temperature probe alarm to sound off when the temperature dropped below 225. Then I grabbed a blanket and laid in the grass with my alarm. Sure enough, 45 minutes later the alarm went off. I threw another log on and laid down again. For some reason the alarm didn't work the second time but Dad woke up and stoked up the fire again. I then took the chance for a real nap in the chair, under 2 blankets with a nice pillow... Slept until 6:30 AM, then it was time to trim chicken. My chicken trimming for a contest is brutal... I mean the process is brutal. It's a 2 hour job for 24 thighs. By the end I had 18 thighs to cook, I also had a couple of bone-in breasts brining for this event.
At 8:30, the chicken was trimmed and rubbed, and Jacy & Gord showed up. Gord started taking apart camp right away, packing up the lights and everything else we wouldn't need again. Jacy still had three presentation boxes to get ready (garnish) so she started that right away.
The food on Sunday was really about as good as I can make it... All 4 meats hit the tenderness target, and the taste was bang on. THe chicken was good, although I thought the sauce was a bit light in texture and color... The ribs fell victim to some sloppy knife work, I just couldn't help nicking bones while slicing. Fortunately presentation is only worth about 1/7 of the score in KCBS rules, but of course every point still counts. The pork was good, and the brisket was pretty tasty too. I used a different sauce on Sunday for brisket and we thought it was much better. My burnt ends Sunday were excellent, It's the first time I ever turned in BE's in a brisket box , but judging by the scores I don't think they helped.

Getting pork ready for the presentation box...



We had enough time after the last category to sit down for a beer, tear down camp, and walk to the awards. We learned a very important lesson when we watched Dr. BBQ walk past us... Bring a soft cooler to the awards! They were close to 2 hours long! They announced the miscellaneous categories - vegetables, beans, potatoes, dessert. Then they announced the sausage winners. FINALLY, on to the main 4 meats. While they announced the top 20 teams in each category, we didn't hear our name. So we crossed our fingers for a decent overall result.

Ribs

After the awards ceremony, we searched around for a printout of the results, they handed out FAR fewer copies than there were teams looking for them. After 10 minutes I found the PNWBA gang as they were reading through it. We finished 248th overall - I have to say it was a little bit humbling. We are certainly not in the same class as the winners down there and never expected to finish near the top but we did expect to finish a bit higher than that. HOWEVER we did come ahead of some big name teams, we could certainly have finished worse, and we had an awesome time. There are so many good points, the finish just isn't that important. We will just have to do some more research next time!


Once we walked back to our spot, we said some quick good byes and headed out. We hit the interstate right away. Since we left in good time, we decided to pull over for some local flavor in a town North of K.C. for supper: St Joseph, MO. While it was a nice town, it was odd to see NO PEOPLE on the streets and everything closed. This was 6:30 PM on Sunday. The restaurant that sounded good on the GPS had been shut down. There were a few chain restaurants but we decided to skip those and head back to the interstate. W pulled off to a truck stop diner and proceeded to wolf down some terrible food. We exited quickly and drove up to Sioux City, IA, arriving in the rain at about 11:30. I showered, everyone else crashed right away for a well deserved sleep.