Recently in Events Category

I'll be doing an ALL PORK! dinner at The Depanneur on Saturday February 18th, at 7:30 pm.  3 starters, 3 mains and 3 Deserts, all made with our favorite animal the noble pig.
Tickets are $40, and seating is very limited. More Details here
 
Menu:
First Course - Pork Cheek 3 ways:
Served on mixed bitter greens with a home made smoked apple balsamic drizzle
Braised Pork Cheek
Guanciale Carbonarra on an edible spiced Chinese soup spoon
Guanciale Brushetta on brioche

Second Course - Pork Sliders 3 ways:
Served with Slaw and Mac 'n Cheese
BBQ Competition Style
North Carolina (vinegary)
South Carolina (mustard)

Third Course - Bacon Dessert Trio:
Piggy Cupcakes
Candied Bacon Cheese Cake Ice Cream
Pig candy with chocolate

My Favourite little wine bar, Cafe Taste will be hosting an awesome "Showdown" of Riesling vs. Chardonnay this Saturday August 6th from 1-4. As a self professed "ABC" (Anything But Chardonnay) you can guess where my money is going to be! Should be a very engaging event with 4 wine expert (2 for each grape) leading a debate before a blind tasting with paired food to crown Ontario's best white wine grape. 

We're locked and loaded for yet another BBQ contest this Fathers day weekend, at the Crossborder Blues, Brews and Que in Wilson, NY. This may be our smallest contest this season with less than 30 teams, and were hoping the smaller field size will give us a chance to experiment with our recipes a little, to hone our signature flavours for competition style bbq. As always you can follow me to find out how we do on Twitter 

We competed at our very first KCBS & NEBS contest this past weekend at the Roc City Rib Fest, and with some amazing help & guidance from DivaQ we managed to take home a trophy (second place bacon, 6th overall nebs) and enough cash to pay the entry to our next contest, The Crossborder Blues, Brews & Que. We sure learned a lot at this contest, it's amazing how easily something that's been practiced over and over is a whole new ball game when it's during a competition. We'll be working hard to bring up our kcbs scores for the next contest. Full results can be found here

I Somehow forgot to post about this weekend's BBQ Competition in Rochester NY! After a number of false starts, the BBQBlog.ca "Pork Ninjas" will be making their debut this weekend. We're cooking every contest that's offered at Roc City (Ribs, KCBS, NEBS, Kids) and we've been really looking forward to it all winter! 2 members of our team (myself and Jamie P) attended last year and became certified KCBS judges, and had a blast eating.  If you are in the area of Ontario Beach Park in Rochester pop by and say hi!

I'm headed down to Memphis in May  again this year, I had a blast last year,  and hoped I could return again this year, and I'm going to be able to do it! This year's trip started out with similar planning as last year, except this year I'm driving down with my friend and brother in fire Jamie P. We had already signed up  and payed for the VIP program again this year, even though the price had increased.. I should really look into selling my vip pass to someone, as it' looks like I'm not going to have much of a chance to use it this year as I've been invited by Yazoo's Delta Q (last years Memphis in May Grand Champion!) to help them cook the ancillary categories. It should be an interesting week, and I hope I'll learn lots by being in such great company. As always you can follow me on twitter.

This week I'm off to Greenville, SC, to the NBBQA BBQ Bash,.Road tripping down with the infamous Danielle Dimovski aka DivaQ. We'll be showing our fellow bbqers how to use this new fangled invention called the internet while we're down there, feel free to follow my tweets and Danileele's tweets as It's destined to be a culinary extravaganza.

It's my favorite dinner of the year! instead of going out to a busy bar or restaurant, a bunch of us throw in some cash and get some really awesome ingredients and alcohol, and sit down and enjoy for a few hours at my house.. Here's this year's menu! Lots of cooking,this year I'm pairing with favorite pinot noirs.  

I'd made it to Memphis, now was time to check out the largest pork cooking contest in the world. I was a little anxious as this had the potential to be disappointment, kinda like when Lucas rebooted the star wars series. My campsite was a short 20 minute drive to the contest, and finding where my parking pass had  put my VIP parking was a bit of a challenge, I did however find it, put on my purple weekend pass wristband, adorn my VIP pit pass around my neck and stroll on in. I was not sure what this VIP pass would actually entitle me to, as I did not get an itinerary with the pass. First off, this contest really is HUGE, I decided to walk around the entire contest first to take in all the sights, this took almost an hour! I popped in and chatted with a few of the competitors who were all very welcoming when they saw my vip pass. For some reason I forgot to take photos this first day! I finally found the VIP area, and was greeted to my choice of draft beer or a glass of wine, I had got there just in time, as we were splitting off into groups and going to eat bbq at various competitors booths.  Over the following 2 days I we would meet and eat with 6 different teams they would give us a little talk on what they do, answer a whole lot of questions and feed us some of their award winning bbq. The coolest competitor we visited was called "the shed" They had the coolest cooker i've ever seen, they had modded a vintage truck into a well insulated cooker, they were competing in the whole hog category.  My vip pass was worth every penny, I ate amazing bbq for 3 solid days, drank my face off for free and hung out with 60 or so (vip) people that were also passionate about the craft of bbq, no rib boilers in this crowd!  On Sunday morning I packed my car, made sure I had lots of sugar free redbull and drove home.. in one 18 hour shot!

Sorry to inform everyone that we will not be cooking at the Canadian open bbq contest at the beach rib fest. The company that was organizing it sent me a nice letter (today) 1 week before the contest to tell me that they are canceling that portion of the event. I'm pretty angry and am fighting the urge to write defamatory coments about the organizers. We lined up sponsors and spent a pile of money on supplies and ingredients for this event. I've included the letter they sent me if you feel like reading the "read more" button.