The Comforts of Home

The house is clean, I’m back to focusing on the company’s work, which I love to do. The rented chairs are gone, the tree that got hit by lightning on Friday is gone, the stump to be ground tomorrow.

There is at least one more night’s worth of leftover barbecue, and a good amount of potato salad.

And tonight I’m here to tell you that when the last bite of it has been eaten, the memory of the way people ate and laughed and enjoyed themselves Saturday in the sunlight and twilight of our back yard will warm our winter.

And today I found a surprise on YouTube that will make me happy for years: a video taken by our friend, Roseann Treloar, of Paul Caluori and Steve Kaplan playing “If I Only Had a Brain,” their first song at the party.

It’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ow7jxb6n6Fo, and it makes me smile.

Roseann took my favorite photo of me, at the Salute to Meat a few years ago.

My favorite photo of myself, taken by Roseann Treloar.

The guy on the right is my friend, Michael Schroeder, who lives three states away and who nine years ago suggested that I throw the party that became The Salute to Meat.

Mike and his wife, Janet, have been at every Salute since then but is unable to make today’s and so I thought this would be a good time to tell you, and remember myself, the source of the idea that has given me such extraordinary enjoyment for all these years.

“You enjoy cooking meat so much you should make a party around it,” he said one day. “Cook a course of everything you like to smoke.” It started out with just four or five courses for 20 people, and now it’s just about everything I can think of that will go on the smoker, for maybe 80 people today.

Just not Mike and Janet.

There are friends you see every day, and there are those you see only once or twice a year. But their physical absence doesn’t make them any less one’s friend, nor does it diminish the everlasting impact of their friendship.

Whoever comes to today’s party and enjoys himself can thank my wife, Janet, and me, but they should also thank my friend, Mike Schroeder.

The fire under my briskets almost went out last night; total operator error. I went to bed thinking that I had plenty of fresh lump charcoal under them. This turned out to be not exactly true, as I discovered at 3:30 this morning.

The fire, which was supposed to be at 225 degrees, was down to 129. The briskets had cooled a little, too.

My BBQ Guru had raged against the dying of the light, but it can’t reload a smoker, so that’s what I did and then, thinking that I’d missed at least a couple of hours of prime smoking time, I ran up the temperature on the fresh load to 275 degrees and went back to bed. It took me a while to get back to sleep.

When I awoke at 6:30 the briskets were done, about five hours early. So I quickly liberated them from the Egg and wrapped them in two layers of heavy-duty aluminum foil and then in bath towels and put them in a picnic cooler, where they will spend the day. They will be safe, since proper food handling says they can stay four hours under 140 degrees, but I’ll reheat them in a low oven to 165 before serving.

They look pretty good, though, and seem tender enough. I didn’t have the presence of mind to either taste or photograph them, so that’ll have to wait until showtime.

Now my wife is prepping the beans and after that I’ll butterfly and marinate the lamb, which can now go on the Egg pretty much anytime. Then I’ll prep the ribs and cut the steaks and then hit the grocery store for the last items, including ice for the drinks coolers.

Reinforcements come to start helping at about noon. We’ll be very glad to see them.

I remember when I was young, the wire editor at the Cape Cod Times, an afternoon newspaper at the time, and it subscribed to the New York Times News Service. I’d rip the copy off the printer when I’d come in at 5 a.m. and read back, and several hours earlier there would be a note: “This is good night from the New York Times News Service.”

It meant that there was nothing more to come that night, that if you were putting your newspaper to bed, you could stand down as far as they were concerned. They had seen, and told you, all there was to tell — for today.

Tomorrow there would be more, but nothing more tonight, a comforting thing. This was before the 24-hour news cycle, before the cable and TV networks needed to get everyone wound up all the time. Thirty years ago we spent fewer of our hours on red alert, I think. Today we are all tense nearly all the time with the immediate and insurmountable problems of our world and our work.

Today my wife and I have have exchanged some of that anxiety to get wound up in a pretty pleasant way about our party tomorrow. It’s a big one for us, the biggest we’ve ever held, an event for which we enjoy planning almost an entire year. The problems it presents are more or less minor and generally logistical. It takes some planning to run 10 courses of slow-cooked barbecue on basically one Big Green Egg smoker, and for my wife to create the party she loves for our friends.

This year, in addition, there is the complication of the tree that collapsed in our front yard today and will have to be dealt with tomorrow, even as 80 or so guests arrive. And there was the freezer in the basement that gave up the ghost while we were on vacation with perhaps 100 pounds of meat inside, whose corpse we discovered upon returning home just three weeks ago. It was disgusting, believe me; a crime scene so obnoxious that the stout and wonderful men who took it to the curb gagged and struggled as they hauled it up the stairs.

There are the 30 pounds of brisket that smoke slowly now, overnight, that I hope our guests will enjoy tomorrow evening. I’ve never cooked that much at once, and even as I hope to sleep our chance for beef calamity is high because those briskets are fatty and if they drip beyond the pan underneath onto the hot coals, the flames that ensue will turn them acrid and inedible.

But these are small things. Tomorrow we will awaken and be busy — frantic at times, and “Never again!” I will probably swear to my lovely, understanding wife sometime in the early afternoon, forgetting it completely by early evening.

But now we have done as much as we can until morning.

And so, this is good night.

Shortly after the briskets went on the Egg we caught a pretty big thunderstorm. Lots of thunder and lightning, and what we thought was a thunderclap actually was most of the big tree in our front yard falling across the sidewalk, grazing my car. The car is usually in the garage but for the last couple of days has been on the street as we’ve used the garage to stage the tables and chairs for The Salute.

Our lovely neighbor, Suzanne, called her landscaper, who says he’ll be by tomorrow early afternoon to at least cut up and haul away the part of the tree that fell. We’ll have to deal with the stump later.

I pulled the car away; no visible damage. Lucky.

Meanwhile, the brisket soldiers on; no flareups yet. I’m hoping for good luck through the night.

It always starts with the pulled pork.

Two, 9-pound boneless pork shoulders from Costco, rubbed and ready to go on the Big Green Egg. I will shape them properly when they go on, for even cooking.

There’s 18 pounds of boneless shoulder on the Egg, with a full load of Rockwood lump and a chunk of hickory the size of a small child’s arm. There are two of them, on top of each other on what’s called an adjustable rig, a contraption that allows tiered cooking on the BGE.

There is a book, and a movie from it, called “God is My Copilot,” but this weekend my copilot is the BBQ Guru CyberQ, a device that allows me to keep the Egg’s temperature, and my sanity, constant.

It is a little computer with a web server that plugs in outside and runs a small fan that attaches to the draft door at the bottom of the Egg. With the help of a temperature probe that attaches to the grill inside the Egg, it will adjust the draft so as to keep a constant 225 degrees. Additional probes go in the meat to tell me how they’re doing. The web server lets me monitor the temperatures on my computer or my phone.

This thing alone has given me the ability to have fun at my parties when I’m smoking something on the Egg, and to sleep when I’m cooking something overnight. It even has a ramp feature that lowers the temperature when the meat temp gets close to done.

Of course, it’s cheating. I don’t care. I want my party, and I want to sleep. I have enough stress in my life.

I put the shoulders on the Egg at 5:30, not quite two hours ago. The temp on them is already over 100 degrees, but I know they have at least 10 hours left in them, and probably close to 14. I never wrap them, or brisket either, to get them through the stall, and it can be several hours long.

Time to think of something else for a while.