jeff davidson
TVWBB Super Fan
Folks, I started this as a write-up for others looking to get their feet wet competing. It morphed into something much more personal, it's obviously too long, I'm not sure when I'll have time to edit it so decided to post it as is. Hopefully there are enough tips for the first timer to make the long read worthwhile.
======
After judging fifteen kcbs contests and comparing what was coming off my WSM to what I was judging, I decided it was time to try my hand at competition. I thought my Q was as good as anything I’d tasted at competitions and better than most. With the benefit of hindsight, I see the fallacy of that thought, but more on that later.
My favorite BBQ festival, The Blues, Views and BBQ festival seemed like a good bet for a first contest. It’s a family event with emphasis on local organizations, good food and live, world-class blues. Additionally, it’s a KCBS amateur backyard contest, allowing me to ease into the world of competitive BBQ without having to compete against “professional” bbq teams. The judging categories were KCBS-rules ribs and chicken, chef’s choice and dessert. I convinced my precocious 12yo daughter Becky to join the team by promising to name it after her. So it was that team BBeckyQ was born.
There’s a ton of good information here about competing for the first time. One of the best tips is to practice cooking as if it was the day of the competition. The schedule for our competition was arrival at 7:00am, chicken turn-in at 2:00, ribs at 2:30, Chef’s choice at 3:00 and dessert at 3:30. Unfortunately, my weekends consist of driving three kids to play practice, tennis, fencing, tutors and friends, making it tough to kick back and spend 8.5 hours cooking BBQ . I decided to cook one or two entries each weekend and we’d give the whole thing a try on the weekend before the contest.
About a month before the competition I started experimenting with different recipes. In terms of rib recipes, I was undecided between BRITU, trying to follow Harry Soo’s advice posted in this forum or a Mike Mill’s recipe. I’ve had a lot of success with the BRITU and Mike Mill’s methods but Harry Soo’s recipe calls for higher heat and foiling, which reduces cook time and might just allow me to use a more forgiving St. Louis cut. In the end we tried every variation and completely by accident found a hybrid approach with baby backs produced great results in 4.5 hours.
I was primarily concerned with avoiding rubbery skin for my chicken recipe. A recipe for boneless thighs received rave reviews from friends and family. Everyone that tried it declared it the best BBQ chicken they’d ever had so we were set there. Chef’s choice is a tough category. I toyed with all sorts of ideas but ended up choosing salmon. My daughter Becky decided to make a chocolate swirl cheesecake on the kettle and we had good results with our test cooks.
I’d reserved the Saturday before the competition to do an entire practice run of all four dishes but forgot I’d entered a child and parent tennis tournament with my eldest son. By the time we got home it was too late to start cooking and after five matches in one day, I was beat. Instead I wrote down a step-by-step schedule of the entire day. The schedule proved to be an indispensable tool and I’d strongly recommend it to anyone thinking about competing.
I made a point of leaving work early on the day before the competition. I’d put together a comprehensive packing and shopping list based on a list KCBS publishes. One stop at BJs for ribs and another at our local grocery store for everything else and we were set. Up until this point, I was planning to pack my WSM and Performer into our minivan but decided it would be easier to take the WSM, an OTG kettle and a folding table. This turned out to be a great decision as it was much easier to pack and we really needed the space a dedicated folding table afforded. In fact, if I were to do this again, I’d bring at least one more table. I started packing our car at 10:30pm thinking it would take about an hour. At 1:30am I crawled into bed and then immediately remembered three more critical items to pack. Not trusting myself to remember in the morning, I got up and packed the three items. Headed back to bed and 10 minutes later, got up and packed three more forgotten items. Crept back into bed and sure enough, I was up ten minutes later packing more stuff.
Four hours later my alarm went off. I woke my daughter, packed the meat in the cooler, wolfed down a quick breakfast and off we went. An hour later, at 8:30am, we pulled into our 10x10 site and started unpacking. A quick look around revealed that we were the 20th of 21 teams to arrive. Everyone else was setup with smoke coming out of their cookers. I wasn’t worried as my schedule showed I had an hour before the ribs needed to be on the WSM. Still, I unpacked the WSM first, fired up the chimney, added charcoal and wood to the ring and then unpacked the rest of the car. After a KCBS rep inspected the meat, I cut the ribs out of cryovac, removed the membrane, flipped the ribs over to trim the fat and was greeted by two of the nicest racks I’ve ever purchased at BJs. I really didn’t have to do much trimming, just applied rub and got them on the smoker at 9:30am.
Consulting our schedule, it was time for my daughter to start mixing the cheesecake. While she was mixing I took the opportunity to introduce myself to the teams around us and check out the hardware. While I didn’t see any of the big log burners one sees at professional competitions, there were quite a few big smokers and big green eggs. In fact, one team had four(!) big green eggs. Our neighboring team had a big vertical smoker cooking what looked like six rack of ribs and about 30 thighs. At this point, I admit to getting a little nervous about competing against all the expensive hardware with our lowly WSM and OTG kettle but reminded myself that many people have won with WSMs. Additionally, I had the benefit of understanding what KCBS judges look for when tasting bbq.
I circled back around to Becky and found her frantically rifling through our cooler. Turns out we’d left the cream cheese home. This was our first serious mistake. There was no way we could get to the store and back, make the cheesecake and get the four hours we needed for cooling. We considered another dessert but in the end, decided to nip on over to the closest grocery store for some cream cheese. We were back by 10:15, in time for the 10:30 cook’s meeting, but our dessert was at serious risk.
After the cook’s meeting, I started in earnest on the chicken while Becky got the cheesecake going on the kettle. My first step was to de-bone and scrape fat off the skin of 12 thighs. After the third thigh, my back really started to ache from hunching over our table. I had noticed a lot of tables were elevated with PVC pipe and now I understood why. I finished prepping the chicken at 12:30, the cheesecake looked good, so we took it off the kettle and carefully jammed it in the cooler.
The chicken cooking hewed perfectly to our schedule but I was starting to worry about the ribs. My recipe called for a 4.5 hour cook but I had a five hour window. I wasn’t sure if I should pull the ribs early or let them cook an extra 30 minutes. At 1:00pm we foiled the ribs, prepped the salmon, lined our turn-in box with lettuce and parsley and continued to cook the chicken. It was at this point that I realized it might be nice to have another person or two on our team. We hadn’t had a break since 11:30am and our neighbors were lounging around, soaking up the sun and chatting.
In no time at all, it was 1:45, our turn-in box was prepped and the chicken looked perfect. We could turn-in between 1:55 and 2:05, so our plan was to start walking the chicken over exactly at 2:00. At 1:55 I sauced the chicken and started arranging it in the box. Unfortunately, we hadn’t practiced this at home and I didn’t leave room for all the chicken. Every time I moved a piece, it would leave sauce on the parsley, making for a messy looking parsley bed. I finally got everything arranged at 2:01. My daughter was telling me to just close up the box and walk it over but I used a paper towel to clean up as much of the sauce as I could. It looked ok, but I decided a final spritz of water would make it look better. I picked up the water bottle, sprayed the box once, twice and the entire top of the water bottle fell off and dumped about ¼-1/2 cup of water all over 3 pieces of chicken! The sauce had washed off some of the chicken and some of the parsley was, believe it or not, floating. We brushed on a little more sauce, my watch said 2:03, so we grabbed paper towels and tried to blot up the water while we walked over but it was just a terrible mess. On the way back to our site, one of our fellow competitors asked if we were happy with our chicken. My daughter and I looked at each other, started laughing and couldn’t stop for a good minute. I guess we were both picturing the looks of horror on the judge’s faces when they opened up our box.
We got back to our site around 2:10, pulled the ribs out of foil, sauced and put them back on the kettle for 10 minutes. When I pulled the ribs they looked perfect but they were cutting too easily. I tried one and the extra 30 minutes of cooking left one rack overdone and the other downright mushy. However, the fat was perfectly rendered, the taste was there and the overdone rack wasn’t falling off the bone. We plated and turned in the ribs with no drama, though we had another laughing fit when I used the water bottle.
The salmon had gone on the WSM when I foiled the ribs and it was looking really nice. I pulled it at 2:50, cut six slices from the center and tried one of the leftover pieces. The rub we concocted has a little salt and a lot of brown and cane sugar. I should have tasted something a little sweet but it was salty. Really, really salty. I quickly came to the conclusion that we accidentally substituted salt for sugar in the recipe. In hindsight, I never taste rub after it’s been mixed and maybe that wouldn’t be a bad idea for quality control.
Salmon turn-in went without a hitch, but I was starting to feel down. All that practice, prep, cost; it was clearly coming to naught in terms of a positive outcome. Also, we’d not had any sort of real break since 11:00, my back hurt and I was starting to feel the effects of four hours of sleep. It was one thing to make BBQ on the WSM on the weekends and write-off an occasional mistake but quite another to produce perfect BBQ on a tight schedule. We had 15 minutes, so I sat down and spent some time watching the other teams. Everyone was having fun, eating leftovers, kids were laughing and running around and playing tag. I started to relax, felt the sun on my face and I noticed the blues bands had started playing. How had I missed that? I looked over at my 12yo daughter, cleaning our table while chatting with two adults. When did she get to be so pretty, smart and poised? I work long hours in NYC, had I somehow missed that too? Becky looked over at me, laughed and squirted me with the water bottle. Sitting in that chair, I realized we were sharing an experience neither of us would ever forget.
At 3:20 we pulled the cheesecake and it was a work of art. The fudge Becky had swirled into the batter had formed abstract patterns of flowers on top of the cake. Unfortunately, the cake was not thoroughly chilled. I cut the first piece, it was clear it would be a difficult transfer to the turn-in box and we’d lose the effect of the flowers. I suggested to Becky we cut it into slices and leave it on the springform pan but she asked “you mean we can’t try it?”. Cheesecake is one of her favorite desserts, she’d worked hard all day, did the entire prep and cooking of the cheesecake so I left it up to her. In the end, we sliced it up and put the pieces on a separate plate rather than the turn-in box. The cake was delicious but the center was still a little soft so it was tough to get it looking good.
We had an hour and half until the awards ceremony. Our first stop was the local library for a bio break and a good wash. Becky and I walked around the festival for a while amiably chatting about school, friends and life. We walked back to our site at 4:30, got a good start on packing and then headed to the awards ceremony.
The first award was for chicken and we were thrilled when our neighbors with the big vertical smoker took home a trophy for 3rd. They were friendly, considerate, we seemed to have a similar background (my guess is they were engineers or wall st. software developers) and I was happy to see them do so well. After the competition we received our scores and as expected, the presentation scores were terrible but we did garner some 8 and 9s for taste and tenderness. I’d like to think those were the pieces that weren’t doused with water.
Next up were the rib awards. If I’d scored the ribs they’d have received an 8 for appearance and taste, 7 for tenderness. I routinely score ribs all 8 or 9s, I knew we didn’t have a real chance so no one was more surprised when they called us up for the 2nd place trophy. I looked at Becky, she raised her eyebrows and off we went for our trophy. Our neighbors clapped and yelled the loudest for us, a really nice gesture. After the awards ceremony, I tried a couple of ribs from the mushy rack and something magical had occurred. They’d firmed up to the point where they had perfect bite. Maybe the ribs in the turn-in box had gone through the same transformation.
Chef’s choice was a disaster for us, the fish was perfectly cooked but way too salty. We scored next to last. I did have some hope for Becky’s dessert, we didn’t get a call but the cheesecake actually placed fifth. Becky looked over the scores and figured out she’d have taken home a trophy if the presentation scores were a little better. She seemed a little upset, I put an arm around her shoulder and as we walked back to our site I struggled for the right thing to say. I’m sorry to admit I just couldn’t find the right words to make her feel better.
When we got home we were exhausted, we made a quick dinner of leftover ribs and went off to bed. After I thought she’d fallen asleep, I took the trophy up to Becky's room and placed it on her night table. Turns out she was awake and told me I’d cooked the ribs and she didn’t want the trophy. If she’d won the cheesecake trophy, she’d have taken it. The words I’d been searching for finally came to me. I told her that eating cheesecake is more important than winning trophies. She smiled, turned over and went to sleep. She’s only twelve, but I think she understands my meaning. And the trophy is still sitting on her night table. And the water bottle is still sitting on mine.
jeff davidson, sep 29, 2011
============================
Interview with Becky
How old are you?
12
Why did you decide to join bbq contest?
I enjoy cooking, I compete a lot in Destination Imagination and tennis, so I do enjoy competition
What do you enjoy cooking?
Baking and making desserts
What was your first impression of the bbq contest?
Everyone seemed so much more prepared, they had big BBQs and fancy stuff
What was your favorite part of the day?
Cooking my cheesecake and I enjoyed walking around the fair
What was the most memorable part of the day?
When the top of the water bottle fell off!
What did you think of the other people that were there?
I didn’t talk to a lot of them but the ones I met were really nice. Some people scared me.
What was your least favorite part of the day?
Right before turn-in there was a lot of pressure
Were you surprised when they called our name for ribs?
Yes, happy and surprised.
======
After judging fifteen kcbs contests and comparing what was coming off my WSM to what I was judging, I decided it was time to try my hand at competition. I thought my Q was as good as anything I’d tasted at competitions and better than most. With the benefit of hindsight, I see the fallacy of that thought, but more on that later.
My favorite BBQ festival, The Blues, Views and BBQ festival seemed like a good bet for a first contest. It’s a family event with emphasis on local organizations, good food and live, world-class blues. Additionally, it’s a KCBS amateur backyard contest, allowing me to ease into the world of competitive BBQ without having to compete against “professional” bbq teams. The judging categories were KCBS-rules ribs and chicken, chef’s choice and dessert. I convinced my precocious 12yo daughter Becky to join the team by promising to name it after her. So it was that team BBeckyQ was born.
There’s a ton of good information here about competing for the first time. One of the best tips is to practice cooking as if it was the day of the competition. The schedule for our competition was arrival at 7:00am, chicken turn-in at 2:00, ribs at 2:30, Chef’s choice at 3:00 and dessert at 3:30. Unfortunately, my weekends consist of driving three kids to play practice, tennis, fencing, tutors and friends, making it tough to kick back and spend 8.5 hours cooking BBQ . I decided to cook one or two entries each weekend and we’d give the whole thing a try on the weekend before the contest.
About a month before the competition I started experimenting with different recipes. In terms of rib recipes, I was undecided between BRITU, trying to follow Harry Soo’s advice posted in this forum or a Mike Mill’s recipe. I’ve had a lot of success with the BRITU and Mike Mill’s methods but Harry Soo’s recipe calls for higher heat and foiling, which reduces cook time and might just allow me to use a more forgiving St. Louis cut. In the end we tried every variation and completely by accident found a hybrid approach with baby backs produced great results in 4.5 hours.
I was primarily concerned with avoiding rubbery skin for my chicken recipe. A recipe for boneless thighs received rave reviews from friends and family. Everyone that tried it declared it the best BBQ chicken they’d ever had so we were set there. Chef’s choice is a tough category. I toyed with all sorts of ideas but ended up choosing salmon. My daughter Becky decided to make a chocolate swirl cheesecake on the kettle and we had good results with our test cooks.
I’d reserved the Saturday before the competition to do an entire practice run of all four dishes but forgot I’d entered a child and parent tennis tournament with my eldest son. By the time we got home it was too late to start cooking and after five matches in one day, I was beat. Instead I wrote down a step-by-step schedule of the entire day. The schedule proved to be an indispensable tool and I’d strongly recommend it to anyone thinking about competing.
I made a point of leaving work early on the day before the competition. I’d put together a comprehensive packing and shopping list based on a list KCBS publishes. One stop at BJs for ribs and another at our local grocery store for everything else and we were set. Up until this point, I was planning to pack my WSM and Performer into our minivan but decided it would be easier to take the WSM, an OTG kettle and a folding table. This turned out to be a great decision as it was much easier to pack and we really needed the space a dedicated folding table afforded. In fact, if I were to do this again, I’d bring at least one more table. I started packing our car at 10:30pm thinking it would take about an hour. At 1:30am I crawled into bed and then immediately remembered three more critical items to pack. Not trusting myself to remember in the morning, I got up and packed the three items. Headed back to bed and 10 minutes later, got up and packed three more forgotten items. Crept back into bed and sure enough, I was up ten minutes later packing more stuff.
Four hours later my alarm went off. I woke my daughter, packed the meat in the cooler, wolfed down a quick breakfast and off we went. An hour later, at 8:30am, we pulled into our 10x10 site and started unpacking. A quick look around revealed that we were the 20th of 21 teams to arrive. Everyone else was setup with smoke coming out of their cookers. I wasn’t worried as my schedule showed I had an hour before the ribs needed to be on the WSM. Still, I unpacked the WSM first, fired up the chimney, added charcoal and wood to the ring and then unpacked the rest of the car. After a KCBS rep inspected the meat, I cut the ribs out of cryovac, removed the membrane, flipped the ribs over to trim the fat and was greeted by two of the nicest racks I’ve ever purchased at BJs. I really didn’t have to do much trimming, just applied rub and got them on the smoker at 9:30am.
Consulting our schedule, it was time for my daughter to start mixing the cheesecake. While she was mixing I took the opportunity to introduce myself to the teams around us and check out the hardware. While I didn’t see any of the big log burners one sees at professional competitions, there were quite a few big smokers and big green eggs. In fact, one team had four(!) big green eggs. Our neighboring team had a big vertical smoker cooking what looked like six rack of ribs and about 30 thighs. At this point, I admit to getting a little nervous about competing against all the expensive hardware with our lowly WSM and OTG kettle but reminded myself that many people have won with WSMs. Additionally, I had the benefit of understanding what KCBS judges look for when tasting bbq.
I circled back around to Becky and found her frantically rifling through our cooler. Turns out we’d left the cream cheese home. This was our first serious mistake. There was no way we could get to the store and back, make the cheesecake and get the four hours we needed for cooling. We considered another dessert but in the end, decided to nip on over to the closest grocery store for some cream cheese. We were back by 10:15, in time for the 10:30 cook’s meeting, but our dessert was at serious risk.
After the cook’s meeting, I started in earnest on the chicken while Becky got the cheesecake going on the kettle. My first step was to de-bone and scrape fat off the skin of 12 thighs. After the third thigh, my back really started to ache from hunching over our table. I had noticed a lot of tables were elevated with PVC pipe and now I understood why. I finished prepping the chicken at 12:30, the cheesecake looked good, so we took it off the kettle and carefully jammed it in the cooler.
The chicken cooking hewed perfectly to our schedule but I was starting to worry about the ribs. My recipe called for a 4.5 hour cook but I had a five hour window. I wasn’t sure if I should pull the ribs early or let them cook an extra 30 minutes. At 1:00pm we foiled the ribs, prepped the salmon, lined our turn-in box with lettuce and parsley and continued to cook the chicken. It was at this point that I realized it might be nice to have another person or two on our team. We hadn’t had a break since 11:30am and our neighbors were lounging around, soaking up the sun and chatting.
In no time at all, it was 1:45, our turn-in box was prepped and the chicken looked perfect. We could turn-in between 1:55 and 2:05, so our plan was to start walking the chicken over exactly at 2:00. At 1:55 I sauced the chicken and started arranging it in the box. Unfortunately, we hadn’t practiced this at home and I didn’t leave room for all the chicken. Every time I moved a piece, it would leave sauce on the parsley, making for a messy looking parsley bed. I finally got everything arranged at 2:01. My daughter was telling me to just close up the box and walk it over but I used a paper towel to clean up as much of the sauce as I could. It looked ok, but I decided a final spritz of water would make it look better. I picked up the water bottle, sprayed the box once, twice and the entire top of the water bottle fell off and dumped about ¼-1/2 cup of water all over 3 pieces of chicken! The sauce had washed off some of the chicken and some of the parsley was, believe it or not, floating. We brushed on a little more sauce, my watch said 2:03, so we grabbed paper towels and tried to blot up the water while we walked over but it was just a terrible mess. On the way back to our site, one of our fellow competitors asked if we were happy with our chicken. My daughter and I looked at each other, started laughing and couldn’t stop for a good minute. I guess we were both picturing the looks of horror on the judge’s faces when they opened up our box.
We got back to our site around 2:10, pulled the ribs out of foil, sauced and put them back on the kettle for 10 minutes. When I pulled the ribs they looked perfect but they were cutting too easily. I tried one and the extra 30 minutes of cooking left one rack overdone and the other downright mushy. However, the fat was perfectly rendered, the taste was there and the overdone rack wasn’t falling off the bone. We plated and turned in the ribs with no drama, though we had another laughing fit when I used the water bottle.
The salmon had gone on the WSM when I foiled the ribs and it was looking really nice. I pulled it at 2:50, cut six slices from the center and tried one of the leftover pieces. The rub we concocted has a little salt and a lot of brown and cane sugar. I should have tasted something a little sweet but it was salty. Really, really salty. I quickly came to the conclusion that we accidentally substituted salt for sugar in the recipe. In hindsight, I never taste rub after it’s been mixed and maybe that wouldn’t be a bad idea for quality control.
Salmon turn-in went without a hitch, but I was starting to feel down. All that practice, prep, cost; it was clearly coming to naught in terms of a positive outcome. Also, we’d not had any sort of real break since 11:00, my back hurt and I was starting to feel the effects of four hours of sleep. It was one thing to make BBQ on the WSM on the weekends and write-off an occasional mistake but quite another to produce perfect BBQ on a tight schedule. We had 15 minutes, so I sat down and spent some time watching the other teams. Everyone was having fun, eating leftovers, kids were laughing and running around and playing tag. I started to relax, felt the sun on my face and I noticed the blues bands had started playing. How had I missed that? I looked over at my 12yo daughter, cleaning our table while chatting with two adults. When did she get to be so pretty, smart and poised? I work long hours in NYC, had I somehow missed that too? Becky looked over at me, laughed and squirted me with the water bottle. Sitting in that chair, I realized we were sharing an experience neither of us would ever forget.
At 3:20 we pulled the cheesecake and it was a work of art. The fudge Becky had swirled into the batter had formed abstract patterns of flowers on top of the cake. Unfortunately, the cake was not thoroughly chilled. I cut the first piece, it was clear it would be a difficult transfer to the turn-in box and we’d lose the effect of the flowers. I suggested to Becky we cut it into slices and leave it on the springform pan but she asked “you mean we can’t try it?”. Cheesecake is one of her favorite desserts, she’d worked hard all day, did the entire prep and cooking of the cheesecake so I left it up to her. In the end, we sliced it up and put the pieces on a separate plate rather than the turn-in box. The cake was delicious but the center was still a little soft so it was tough to get it looking good.
We had an hour and half until the awards ceremony. Our first stop was the local library for a bio break and a good wash. Becky and I walked around the festival for a while amiably chatting about school, friends and life. We walked back to our site at 4:30, got a good start on packing and then headed to the awards ceremony.
The first award was for chicken and we were thrilled when our neighbors with the big vertical smoker took home a trophy for 3rd. They were friendly, considerate, we seemed to have a similar background (my guess is they were engineers or wall st. software developers) and I was happy to see them do so well. After the competition we received our scores and as expected, the presentation scores were terrible but we did garner some 8 and 9s for taste and tenderness. I’d like to think those were the pieces that weren’t doused with water.
Next up were the rib awards. If I’d scored the ribs they’d have received an 8 for appearance and taste, 7 for tenderness. I routinely score ribs all 8 or 9s, I knew we didn’t have a real chance so no one was more surprised when they called us up for the 2nd place trophy. I looked at Becky, she raised her eyebrows and off we went for our trophy. Our neighbors clapped and yelled the loudest for us, a really nice gesture. After the awards ceremony, I tried a couple of ribs from the mushy rack and something magical had occurred. They’d firmed up to the point where they had perfect bite. Maybe the ribs in the turn-in box had gone through the same transformation.
Chef’s choice was a disaster for us, the fish was perfectly cooked but way too salty. We scored next to last. I did have some hope for Becky’s dessert, we didn’t get a call but the cheesecake actually placed fifth. Becky looked over the scores and figured out she’d have taken home a trophy if the presentation scores were a little better. She seemed a little upset, I put an arm around her shoulder and as we walked back to our site I struggled for the right thing to say. I’m sorry to admit I just couldn’t find the right words to make her feel better.
When we got home we were exhausted, we made a quick dinner of leftover ribs and went off to bed. After I thought she’d fallen asleep, I took the trophy up to Becky's room and placed it on her night table. Turns out she was awake and told me I’d cooked the ribs and she didn’t want the trophy. If she’d won the cheesecake trophy, she’d have taken it. The words I’d been searching for finally came to me. I told her that eating cheesecake is more important than winning trophies. She smiled, turned over and went to sleep. She’s only twelve, but I think she understands my meaning. And the trophy is still sitting on her night table. And the water bottle is still sitting on mine.
jeff davidson, sep 29, 2011
============================
Interview with Becky
How old are you?
12
Why did you decide to join bbq contest?
I enjoy cooking, I compete a lot in Destination Imagination and tennis, so I do enjoy competition
What do you enjoy cooking?
Baking and making desserts
What was your first impression of the bbq contest?
Everyone seemed so much more prepared, they had big BBQs and fancy stuff
What was your favorite part of the day?
Cooking my cheesecake and I enjoyed walking around the fair
What was the most memorable part of the day?
When the top of the water bottle fell off!
What did you think of the other people that were there?
I didn’t talk to a lot of them but the ones I met were really nice. Some people scared me.
What was your least favorite part of the day?
Right before turn-in there was a lot of pressure
Were you surprised when they called our name for ribs?
Yes, happy and surprised.
