You gotta love it when the weatherman is wrong but in your favor! The weather forecast for the week leading up to the First Annual VA, MD Meat-Up just seemed to keep turning into a big pile of wintry mix. The forecast read something like this.
Friday - Windy, gusts up to 25 mph. Friday after 2 am rain turning to sleet.
Saturday - Rain, Sleet, and snow. Just perfect for low and slushy cooking.
Ha! Ha! Thank you Doppler Radar and all those goofy weather forecasts. Here’s what the weather really turned out to be.
Friday - Perfect with a slight spike to 73 degrees. Wind, 1 mph coming from just east of who cares. Friday night after 2 am. Slight snoring from campsite number 4.
Saturday - Chilly with no wind, snow, rain, sleet, ice, bomb cyclones, or tornadoes. Saturday night, a nice 29 degrees. Perfect for the winter sleeping bags!
I got up early Friday morning to try to beat all the other campers to the best site on the Shenandoah River. It’s first come first serve so that means get up when it’s dark and get after it. I gave my camping list a once over to make sure I had everything. It looked something like this.
- Bring everything you own.
Before Gerry (HawkerXP) and I started setting up we saluted the river with a beer or two and then started settling in for the weekend. We had more Webers than tents so we knew it would be a good time. Once the tents were up, the cookers were stationed, and the fire was lit we started on the first night’s cook. Jambalaya and cornbread were on the menu so cast iron made its first appearance. Mmm.. mmm… mmm! Throw in some nice green salad and you got the makings of a great meal!
After dinner we just talked it up while sitting around the fire and putting a little more dent in our coolers. It was just Gerry and I on Friday but Saturday was to be the big cook day.
Nothing says camping like Lodge and Weber and boy oh boy they did their job on Saturday. Let’s see. Breakfast. I smoked some Italian Sausages on the Smokey Joe. Gerry fixed up a medley of peppers, onion, cheese, spinach, mushroom, and bacon omelettes in his lodge skillet. Delicious! We could of stopped right there but we all know that ain’t how we do it so the day and cooks continued on.
Next up Gerry set up his Weber 22†Kettle and smoked up a chuckie in an ensemble of oak, hickory, and cherry. While he was doing that I set up my WSM 14.5†and smoked two racks of ribs with a couple of hunks of cherry. While that was going low and slow I hung the DO over the fire and started on some beans.
More friends of the Pit showed up on Saturday as Britt (T-bone) and his son Liam rolled in with pork chops, coleslaw, and another Weber Kettle 22â€. Hee! Hee! Hee! So now we have more Webers, more friends, and more proteins! Could it get any better than this? Well, yeah. We shared the day cooking, telling stories, laughing, and just getting to know each other. All within our little corner of the world. A patch between a firepit and a river, filled with the sights and smells of hardwood smoking just below some meat, tamed and controlled by a man and his cooker. (Okay I’m getting a little carried away there.) But yup. Life. Is. Good!
The menu on Saturday was truly a feast. We had Gerry’s pulled chuckie rubbed with his own southwest spice and wrapped in beer. Britt and Liam reverse seared some SV’d pork chops and served it with homemade coleslaw. My MMD ribs came off the smoker and I served it with homemade Chipotle KC BBQ sauce on the side. Other sides were a big ole pot of beans with Jalapeno peppers, mushrooms, more peppers, and onions. Oh and leftover cornbread. All were delicious and many of the shared ideas and recipes from the Pit were in full display! I’m telling you folks we had enough food to feed all of you!
We ate until we had our fill and just finished the night with more storytelling and joking around. There must be a term that describes meeting old friends for the first time. First we got to know each other a bit through comments and posts in the Pit. We got to know each other a little more when PM’ing while developing a plan, and even further when we started texting each other to refine the plan. By the time we met for the first time, it seemed like we had known each other forever.
Britt and Liam did not spend the night but most definitely shared the night. We wrapped it up fairly quickly after they left. The temperature dropped on Saturday which made for a great night’s sleep. For us anyway, but the night critters came out and did a full on search for food at our site. We thought had defeated them by putting anything that resembled raccoon food in the truck and staking down a tarp over our picnic table. But it turned out they were perfectly happy eating their way through the bags of garbage we forgot to put away. Oh well. Perhaps a lesson learned.
Sunday was a beautiful blue day. Crisp and full of sun. Gerry finished off the trip with a masterfully layered blueberry pancake, smothered in a heated blueberry, maple syrup, and Chambord slurpy delight! Fantastic! We warmed up the leftover sausage and finished off the bacon. I don’t know how some of the Chambord made it into the coffee but oooh what a way to end it!
We took our time packing up. The wind had picked up a little but it was a beautiful morning. After the trucks were loaded we made one last stop at Culler’s overlook. The view is spectacular from there. You see a big lazy horseshoe bend in the river with the Shenandoah Mountains right behind it. A great way to end a great weekend! Thanks Britt, Liam, and Gerry for a great time! Hope we’ll do it again soon!
I’ll start posting some pics so you all know it happened.
HawkerXP
T-bone13
🤗 😇 🤗 
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