Happy Birthday, Sebastian
Well, my little red-haired baby boy is two years old now. The party was on Saturday, and I think it's safe to say that it went very well.
His birthday last year was a somewhat bloody affair; three different children fell off our swing and were hurt. The grilling did not go smoothly, and tempers ran a bit high. Not so this year.
I started the fire early; people were supposed to arrive at 1PM, and Teri had told me that she wanted to have the food ready when people came in, so I started the fire a little past noon. I knew that this was going to be a challenge for me and my Weber, because I had to cook 36 hamburgers and an unknown number of hot dogs, and I can only fit 16 burgers at a time on the Weber at most.
Last year I'd built a really big fire in the grill, but it had still gone out too quickly and Teri had had to finish some of the cooking on her gas grill. This year I decided to add charwood to the fire on an ongoing basis. Since chunk charwood doesn't have any petroleum distillates (it's just kiln-fired wood), you can add it to hot coals and keep on cooking the whole time.
I've tried that trick a few times before (I don't often get to cook for that many people, unfortunately), and it's a bit, well, tricky; usually by the time I add the wood the existing coals are too cool to ignite the new wood. So this time I decided to add wood early and often.
It worked like a charm. Every five minutes or so I shoved chunks of wood down the holes beneath the handles on the sides of the grill; after I took each set of burgers off the grill I picked up the grill with my spatula (it's extremely strong) and dumped more charwood on from the bag (which I held under my left arm). Of course I also frequently added small chunks of smoking wood.
Everything was cooked nicely, and on time.
Apart from that my mother brought some pilaf (nobody cooks pilaf like my mother - I wish I had more of her talent for cooking), and some vegetable quiche. Teri's mother brought a vat of chili. And we had a large sheet marble cake from Wright's Dairy with a chocolate pudding filling and whipped cream frosting. We totally forgot to break out the ice cream, but nobody noticed.
Sebastian got a lot of cool presents, and was actually quite good about helping with the unwrapping, for a two-year-old. One present did scare him badly: a talking barbecue grill. We had expected him to love it, because he's always talking about "Mommy grill" and "Daddy grill" when he's in the back yard (as I mentioned, we're a mixed marriage: she prefers gas, while my allegience is to charwood). But this grill is large, animatronic, and it scared the wits out of my baby boy.
His real birthday was on Sunday of course; that is, that's his actual birthday. It was a good day too, and he had lots of fun playing.
He's doing so well! The doctor gave him a checkup this morning: he weighs 32.5 pounds and is 34.5 inches tall. She says he's perfect. If you saw him, you'd have an awfully hard time believing that he's only two years old.
Okay, enough. I'll post more soon about politics and a change to this journal.
His birthday last year was a somewhat bloody affair; three different children fell off our swing and were hurt. The grilling did not go smoothly, and tempers ran a bit high. Not so this year.
I started the fire early; people were supposed to arrive at 1PM, and Teri had told me that she wanted to have the food ready when people came in, so I started the fire a little past noon. I knew that this was going to be a challenge for me and my Weber, because I had to cook 36 hamburgers and an unknown number of hot dogs, and I can only fit 16 burgers at a time on the Weber at most.
Last year I'd built a really big fire in the grill, but it had still gone out too quickly and Teri had had to finish some of the cooking on her gas grill. This year I decided to add charwood to the fire on an ongoing basis. Since chunk charwood doesn't have any petroleum distillates (it's just kiln-fired wood), you can add it to hot coals and keep on cooking the whole time.
I've tried that trick a few times before (I don't often get to cook for that many people, unfortunately), and it's a bit, well, tricky; usually by the time I add the wood the existing coals are too cool to ignite the new wood. So this time I decided to add wood early and often.
It worked like a charm. Every five minutes or so I shoved chunks of wood down the holes beneath the handles on the sides of the grill; after I took each set of burgers off the grill I picked up the grill with my spatula (it's extremely strong) and dumped more charwood on from the bag (which I held under my left arm). Of course I also frequently added small chunks of smoking wood.
Everything was cooked nicely, and on time.
Apart from that my mother brought some pilaf (nobody cooks pilaf like my mother - I wish I had more of her talent for cooking), and some vegetable quiche. Teri's mother brought a vat of chili. And we had a large sheet marble cake from Wright's Dairy with a chocolate pudding filling and whipped cream frosting. We totally forgot to break out the ice cream, but nobody noticed.
Sebastian got a lot of cool presents, and was actually quite good about helping with the unwrapping, for a two-year-old. One present did scare him badly: a talking barbecue grill. We had expected him to love it, because he's always talking about "Mommy grill" and "Daddy grill" when he's in the back yard (as I mentioned, we're a mixed marriage: she prefers gas, while my allegience is to charwood). But this grill is large, animatronic, and it scared the wits out of my baby boy.
His real birthday was on Sunday of course; that is, that's his actual birthday. It was a good day too, and he had lots of fun playing.
He's doing so well! The doctor gave him a checkup this morning: he weighs 32.5 pounds and is 34.5 inches tall. She says he's perfect. If you saw him, you'd have an awfully hard time believing that he's only two years old.
Okay, enough. I'll post more soon about politics and a change to this journal.