For the second year in a row I volunteered to smoke the pork butts & ribs for Pig-a-Palooza.  This is the big fund raiser for Jacob’s Ladder, an organization that provides scholarships to school children in our area to enable them pariticpate in music & band programs.  

We planned to cook 20 pork butts and 25 sides of ribs.  Ribs we served in 4-5 bone portions and we served nice big pulled pork sandwiches.  Additionally, we had a large grill to cook hamburgers & hotdogs on.

Friday night, I headed to the park at 10:30pm.  I had the cooker lit by 11:00 and we began rubbing the pork butts shortly after midnight.  We put half of the pork butts on at 1:00am, and the other half went on at 3:00am.  I managed to rack out for a couple of hours around 4:00am, but when you’re sleeping outside and it’s 90 degree weather you don’t sleep much.

We began pulling the membranes and trimming the baby back ribs at 9:30am.  We staggered the start times of 27 sides of ribs.  This allowed us to keep a steady stream of fresh ribs coming off the cooker throughout the afternoon.

There were lots of activities for the kids, music, and silent & oral auction items.  We had a great turnout despite a heat index of well over 100 degrees.

By the end of the day, we sold all of the BBQ that we had prepared.  I had great help from my friends and neighbors.  I can’t thank them enough for volunteering to help prepare and serve the food.  As I write this, I’m still pretty tired from working more than 20 hrs straight.  But I’m sure that I’ll be ready to do it again next year.

Here’s a link to a few more photos from Pig-a-Palooza 2011

Cheers,
Braddog 

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