[SGVLUG] BBQ Recap

[Mic Chow]

Sounds like everybody had a great time.  I will make it to one of these
someday.

Mic
Missouri City, TX

On 05/18/2014 02:08 PM, Lan Dang wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We had a great BBQ on Saturday.  People came at different times and brought food and dessert, so people were well-fed throughout the day, and there were few leftovers...including a red Coleman cooler and a Quest bag containing bocce balls.  If those are yours, please let me know and either arrange to pick them up at my house, or I'll try to remember to bring them to a LUG or HAK meeting.
>
> We had a couple of shade sails and a popup canopy to provide shade.  It was interesting to see how the party would move around with the movement of the sun.  Chairs started clustering closer together.  The popup canopy was relocated by about ten feet and people were beside the canopy, instead of under it.
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> Mike P-S made these amazing mac and cheese and bacon stuffed burgers.  Michael S. made steaks and short ribs.  Steven grilled spicy sausages and hot dogs, and Joel provided extra sweet corn and small potatoes for the grill.  We had sausage fried rice and salad and pie and Russian caramel cake and fruit.  There was an electric griddle if people wanted to heat up tortillas and chicken for chicken street tacos.
>
> There were a couple of hackerish things we did.  Scoops and Ginko brought their carbonation apparatus, which was a CO2 tank with a special hose and adapter.  They made ginger soda.  We also tried carbonating grapes in a bottle, but it would probably require more than the couple of minutes we gave it.
>
> I put James' kids to work making Nutella ice cream in an ice baggie.  Unfortunately, it tasted more like generic chocolate soft-serve, partly because we "served" the ice cream by snipping off a corner from the baggie and squeezing the ice cream into small dixie cups.
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> I attempted to make an orange slushie  by pouring orange juice over crushed dry ice, but I was not confident about ingesting it.  I kept seeing lumps in the slushie that might be tiny chunks of dry ice.
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> Michael S. and Scoops made self-inflating balloons, by pouring pulverized dry ice into a balloon using a funnel. This is more difficult than it sounds like because the funnel is easily clogged.  Someone turned a popsicle stick into a shiv to make unclogging the funnel easier.  Another complication is that if the dry ice makes contact with the rubber in the balloon, it weakens the rubber and causes the balloon to pop.
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> Rob used two styrofoam bowls and duct tape to create a carbonation chamber to carbonate watermelon with dry ice.  It was an interesting taste--plain watermelon chased with club soda.  We mixed grapes with crushed dry ice.  The resulting frozen grapes were tasty; they didn't seem carbonated at all.
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> I didn't end up doing as much with my dry ice as I'd planned, but it provided an excellent way to keep John's ice cream popsicles frozen throughout the day, and it's keeping them very well-frozen now :)
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> The BBQ was really a lot of fun.  Thanks to all who came and helped set up and contributed all the food and drinks and especially their company.
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> Lan
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