Family BBQ - I wish I would have known

This last weekend, my family threw together a last minute plan to celebrate the birthdays of my older brother (Brad :-), my grandmother, and two of my "nephews" (my cousin's boys).

I only found out about it Saturday, and the party was Sunday afternoon.

A good old family barbecue is one thing, but more and more people kept RSVP'ing. They brought a ton of great sides, but as is tradition in Texas, all the meat was left up to the hosts.

When I arrived, I learned that they had scrambled to meet the needs of a rather large party. They had purchased 28 ribeyes, about 50 thin pork chops, and about 3 dozen sausages. Sounds great, but our big smoker was out of commission, so we only had three tiny charcoal grills, and they were all over the place in terms of heat.

Yes, I know it can be done (and it did indeed get "done"). But my younger brother and I spent a good two hours trying to cook all that meat and still keep it warm for service. It turned out okay, although there was little consistency and a lot of the steaks/chops got overcooked/charred. We started calling them "pork chips" because some of them looked like badly overfried potato chips. :-)

What a contrast to my last party, where we had even less notice, but managed to have perfectly cooked ribs at exactly the right time!

If I had a bit of forewarning, I could have pre-cooked all the meat in the sous vide, delivered it in a warm beer cooler, and we could have knocked everything out in about 30 minutes, perfectly cooked and perfectly seared.

Still, we had a good time, and got the kids involved in the grilling, so it was still a success...

I'm just saying...