The Kids Are Engaged!

There's a plethora of international flotsam and jetsam on weddings this week, but the most important nuptial news I've received of late is that Kara and Drew, a.k.a. The Kids, are engaged! The night after my farewell breakfast with them, my phone buzzed in with a text from Kara that they were engaged, and that text was followed by texts from Drew telling me how he proposed. I read the texts with wet eyes and renewed faith in happy endings....or beginnings in this case. Congratulations, Kara and Drew!

This most welcome news created a happy mood that carried on to the following day. The mood was helped by the overdue return of warm rays that have been denied by the quilt of gray our city's been sporting for some time. The morning was not without its bracing bad news we watched the southern U.S. tornado statistics were rolling in. We said our silent prayers for the suffering and stepped out into the warmth in literal fashion with a two mile walk along the rolling river in Parkville. The day's caloric intake consisted of oatmeal and spinach salad so that we could take advantage of the fair temps and fire up the grill for the real deal tonight. I chose a High Country BBQ Beans recipe from the Cook Like A Man cookbook and the Deen Brothers BBQ Chicken recipe from their first cookbook. Why, just stirring the simmering beans from the Cook Like A Man cookbook generated a fresh patch of chest hair. I liked cooking this recipe, actually, as it was a bit casual in its instructions. The recipe suggested a several hour simmer time and ours simmered for four hours. The combination of this BBQ bean dish and the chicken made for a meat-heavy meal but also a slew of leftovers for work lunches this week. Our handling of the chicken dish deviated from the recipe a bit as we baked the chicken for 45 minutes in the oven and then put them on the grill for another 15 minutes and they turned out scrumptiously. The bird was marinated and basted with rich, smoky and locally-made Smokehouse BBQ sauce out of Gladstone. I was digging my chicken so much and tearing through a wing so hungrily that one side of said wing smacked me in the cheek and left me with a stripe of barbecue sauce. The beans, however, were the highlight. Luscious, slightly spicy and layered with flavor, these masculine beans made us feel like burly men.

In the end, it was a Smackdown of Flavor tonight. I'm feeling like grabbin' a brew and turning on Spike TV. The recipe for the beans follow and these two dishes count as Cookbook Challenge #51 and 52.

P.S. The odd pic at left is of a drop of vanilla on vegetable oil before it was mixed up for a recipe featured in the next post....pretty cool, eh?