Cookout with Katie’s Friends and Watching Joaquin…

Well the weather here in North Carolina has taken a turn for the worse but at least we had some fun recently at Katie’s house. Katie has a new boyfriend and a lot of her friends were wanting to meet him. Her friends were also wanting to meet her nomadic parents who travel all over the USA.  So she set up a party at her house and bought a bunch of ribs.

Now Katie doesn’t know how to cook ribs but knew that I did so her master plan was to buy a bunch of ribs and have me cook them up. Fortunately Katie has a large gas grill which would do the trick but a smoker would have been much better. I have learned how to convert my Coleman propane grill into a smoker so I planned to do something similar to her gas grill.

The day before the party Sharon and I drove down to her house to spend the weekend. Once we got there I got out my favorite homemade rub and spread the spice blend all over the six racks of ribs. After they were completely rubbed down I covered them up with plastic wrap and put them back in the  refrigerator overnight. The next day around lunchtime I unwrapped the ribs and placed them bone side down on the grill.

She has a four burner grill so I lit only one burner and placed to “smoke bombs” over the lit burner. The smoke bombs are tin foil pouches filled with pieces of mesquite wood that have been soaked overnight in water. The pouches have holes poked all through the top to let smoke escape to impart the mesquite smoke flavor on the ribs. Then I closed the lid to make sure the temperature never got above the 250-275F range.

Six hours later we had some pretty tasty and lightly smoked ribs that fell right off the bone when we were eating them. Katie’s boyfriend, Brooks, was grilling some chicken wings while I was fixing the ribs. All of Katie’s friends brought sides so there was enough food to feed an army!

The party was success and a great time. It was good getting to know Katie’s boyfriend while we were grilling. It was also fun getting to meet all of her friends. We have heard a lot about each of them over the last few years so it was finally nice to put faces with names. Katie has a nice network of friends and her new boyfriend seems to be quite a good fit for Katie.

We had planned to leave on Tuesday but there was lots of rain in the forecast. So we have added a more days here and will watch the weather. It looks like hurricane Joaquin may play havoc with our current plans but we will sit tight and re-evaluate that day by day…