I am so stinkin' proud of the Nibble Me This BBQ '&' Grilling Team. This past weekend we cooked at the North Florida Eggfest hosted by Pench A Penny of St. Johns and won 1st Place!
This is on the heels of them cooking at the Chain of Lakes Eggfest hosted by Mannix Pools and Grills in Winter Haven, FL, where they came in 2nd Place!
I like to share our experiences at these grilled food festivals, so tag along with us at the North Florida Eggfest as seen through the eyes of our team's (including my parents) mobile phones.
The Trip
Our team comes from Tampa, Jacksonville, and Knoxville. Alexis and I had a 1200 mile round trip. My truck has sat idle for four months because the part it needed was nationally out of stock. We just got it fixed, but I didn't trust it yet, so we decided to rent a car to be on the safe side. About that....
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Irony of ironies, as we were loaded and ready to pull out, the rental car pooped the bed. 😐 But major kudos to Nick Stamps, the Manager (or should be) at Enterprise. He bent over backward to get us on the road. After troubleshooting, he quickly had a replacement delivered to our house.
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We took Ramsay Ramdog with us because he LOVES Aunt Rhonda's house.
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| As we arrived in Florida from Tennessee, we happened to get behind the Mister Brisket food truck from Nashville. We took that as a good luck sign. |
The Prep
The prep is the key to a successful Eggfest, and our team has that down to a science. It wasn't always like that. Our prep was more like science fiction when we first started doing this! 😆
Better planning + better ingredients + better prep = a better time at the event + better results
A solid prep leaves fewer things to chance and less cleaning at the event. The only downside is that it might require more cold storage, but that is offset by requiring less onsite equipment and supplies.
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| We prepped approximately 650 of Jordan's Drunk Pickles. |
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| We could have had our own Eggfest at Rhonda's house. Don't you love that custom hand-made table? Sean's neighbor, Luciano Gonzales, made it for him. The detailed work is impeccable. |
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| Laurie prepping the smoked green chile pork for the pickles while I was chopping Boars Head ham. |
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| Meanwhile, Rhonda was preparing pans and pans of ooey-gooey mac and cheese. |
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| Laurie and Alexis crossing swords. |
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| Prepping a ton of garlic for the lettuce wraps. |
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| Reinforcements arrived later in the afternoon when Scott and Carson arrived from Tampa. |
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| And they brought food! Carson made smash burgers to fuel our prep army. Everyone is watching here because we were having a spatula issue (it was too thin), so I showed them how to use tongs to reinforce the weak spatula. A few minutes later, the spatula fell off the handle anyway 😂 |
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| It takes a LOT of hands to slice, core, and stuff that many pickles. |
Eggfest Set Up
The first thing you do when arriving as a cook at an Eggfest is to find out where your spot is if you haven't already done that the night before. Then you want to get your Egg fired up so it can be warming up while you set up your booth.
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| The event was held at Trout Creek Fish Camp in St John's County. It is a sprawling venue with live oaks providing a canopy of shade. |
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| The few hours before the gates open is a beautiful symphony of smoke in the air, teams setting up their booths, and saying hello to friends you haven't seen since the last food festival. |
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| There is a buzz of activity at each booth - setting up decor, writing up menu boards, and doing final preparations. |
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| When presales of the demo Big Green Eggs are down, you typically don't get as many grills to use at the festival. One Egg isn't enough for our production or menu, so we brought our parents' large BGE. Carson brought his Mini-Max, which has attended many an Eggfest. |
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| If your Egg isn't getting hot fast enough, it helps to get 4 people to stare at it (kidding, of course). |
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| We have our processes down, and we get a lot of comments about how well our team works together. It is something of which I am quite proud. It is even better when people ask us where our restaurant is located....since we don't have one. |
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| One of my favorite things about Eggfests is catching up with my BBQ brothers and sisters. From left to right, Cowboy Kev, me, Mikey Kay, and Trace Scarborough. But there are so many others as well - Don James, Brad Stuart, Captain Ron, Mel Chmilar, Bob Kolky, Kim and Ginny Youngblood, and countless others. |
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| Scott and Alexis loading up trays of pickles for their "spa treatment" in the Big Green Egg (20 min at 350f with a pickle spritz). |
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| One of the excellent gifts for cook teams was this custom engraved santoku knife from Rhineland Cutlery. Alexis uses one of these for her primary knife in our kitchen and loves it - super sharp blade, and it fits her hand perfectly. They support several Eggfests, so check out their website. |
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| One minute until the gates open....bring on the crowds! |
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| Here they come! |
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| Here is our menu for this event - minus the breakfast casserole. |
Carson's Breakfast Casserole
We usually try to have a breakfast item on the menu, and this time it was Carson's Breakfast Casserole. It was fantastic with potatoes, sausage, smoky bacon, onions, chiles, eggs, cheese, and Meat Church Holy Voodoo. I'll post the whole recipe as soon as I wrangle it out of his hands ;)
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| Breakfast casserole is good because a lot of it can be prepared ahead of time. |
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| Scott and Alexis dishing up our first servings of the day. |
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| Let the feasting begin. |
Jordan's Drunk Pickles
These fantastic stuffed pickles are our quirky, award-winning signature item. They are basically a Cuban sandwich stuffed into a pickle and roasted - slow-roasted green chile pork, Boars Head ham, Boars Head salami, swiss cheese, and mustard.
RECIPE
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| Jordan's Drunk Pickles - a flavor that explodes in your mouth...and sometimes all over your shirt. |
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| Carson and Alexis loading up an Egg with trays of pickles. Multi-tiered racks like the Big Green Egg Eggspander [Amazon Affiliate link] or the Adjustable Rig from the Ceramic Grill Store are worth their weight in gold when cooking for big crowds. |
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| The pickle juice spritz is essential for the big pop of flavor. |
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| Carson and I working the grills. |
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| We get about 36-48 pickles per batch, but they disappear about as fast as we can make them. |
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| Going in for the second bite! |
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| The pickles hold a special place for our team. They are named after my sister's only son, Jordan, who passed away in 2016. We love that he can be a part of our team in a meaningful way. |
Team Jello Shots
A few years ago, we did a menu comprised entirely of dishes in "shot glasses." It was a fun theme, but it hogged labor and grill resources, so we only did it one time. But we continued the tradition of our team having jello shots at Eggfests.
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| Carson made sure we had "enough" jello shots this year :) |
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| Wonder Twin Jello Shot Powers ACTIVATE! |
Thai Steak Lettuce Wraps
This recipe is an upgraded version of PF Chang's lettuce wraps appetizer. We stir fry onions and peppers in a wok and add garlic-marinated, shaved Certified Angus Beef steak. Then we add about a quarter cup of salty, sweet, and hot Thai cashew sauce to the mix. We serve that in lettuce cups with crushed cashews, cilantro, and more Thai cashew sauce. I'll post the recipe soon.
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| These bites pack a lot of flavor in a small package. |
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| The Mini-Max was a stir-frying beast on this day, making 10 batches of the recipe. |
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| Our setup was a 16" cast-iron wok, a woo-rig (Ceramic Grill Store) as the wok ring, and a Mini-Max. |
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| Tommy Lee, eat your heart out! Carson got these great 2 pics of me doing the "drum stick flip" that the drummers used to do in rock videos back in the day. |
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| I love cooking at this event because it is close enough to my hometown that my parents could visit. Pictured with my dad here. |
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| I typically use a carbon steel wok, but we used the cast-iron wok since we were cooking all afternoon. It handles the long-term high-heat a bit better. |
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| I'm not pointing, I'm holding the boats down. The breeze would whip up into a gust from time and time. If you weren't careful, a tray full of paper boats would go flying across the booth. |
Smoked Mac and Cheese
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| Stay golden, Pony Boy! Our gold comes from smoked gouda, cheddar, and smoked gruyere. |
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| Alexis plating up serving cups of mac and cheese. |
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| Laurie serving up mac and cheese while Alexis works on pickles. We did a better job at this Eggfest of serving multiple dishes simultaneously. |
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| Scott and Laurie serving more golden goodness. |
Laurie's Dessert Pizza with an assist from Sean
It is always good to serve a dessert option at Eggfests. Using this recipe was Laurie's idea, but Sean offered a modification, so it was fun listening to them "bicker" about WHOSE recipe this was. I'm not a big sweets person, but this was a super easy and delicious recipe. We are writing it up this week, and I'll post it.
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| We always like to use local, in-season ingredients, so you have to use fresh Plant City strawberries when you're in Florida in Springtime. |
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| Rhonda and Alexis slicing strawberries. Next time I will bring my egg slider which does that a lot faster. |
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| Slicing one of the dessert pizzas. |
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| I felt bad for Laurie because we forgot the mini-spatulas, which would have made this job so much easier. |
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| Crispy and sweet, but not cloyingly so, this dessert pizza is a tasty bite. |
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| This is my first time cooking at this location and I like it. The overhanging trees provided welcomed shade, but leaves would drop onto our food every now and then. We just started joking that they were our secret ingredient. |
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| We could not have asked for a more beautiful day - sunny, warm but not hot, and a nice breeze. |
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| We did our best to keep the food coming and our line short, but sometimes the crowd converges on your booth all at once. |
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| Love this shot of me taking a moment to be with my mom. |
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| We had a wonderful time serving our guests. |
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| Everyone loved Sean's shirt - "Best pickle in town, and that's a big dill" |
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| One of the reasons that I prefer these "people's choice" events compared to the KCBS BBQ contests that we used to do is the judging. Instead of 6 anonymous judges that you never see, we feed a thousand judges in person and they pick the winner. Here Sarah P. graces us with her vote in the form of a gold coin. |
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| This picture cracks me up so much. Sean was positioning us for a picture, but it looks like he is lecturing the team on food safety or something. |
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| Finished and waiting on the awards announcements. We have the best team we could ask for. All of us are accomplished cooks and could run the grills. But we have no egos, and all find our roles to fill. |
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| I'm glad it wasn't a tie because, in the event of a tie, the two times had to duel using the pair of field guns at the campsite 😁😂😃 |
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| When the fires were extinguished, and the smoke cleared, we were thrilled to hear our names called for First Place. It meant a lot to us because this Eggfest is our hometown, it was where we won our first championship, and we were competing against friends who I highly respect as chefs and people. |
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| We all had friends and family visit our site, which was special. |
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| My mom with some of the team. |
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| The hottest boy band since Boys 2 Men? 😂😆😅😄 Album dropping soon ;) |
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| Best group of friends and family ever. The composition of our team changes depending on where the event is, the type of event, etc. Some of our teammates who were not at this event include John and Anna Mae, Jeff Greene, and Carrie. |
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| Photobomb! |
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| See you all next year! |
