A Healthy Dose of Competition

This week has been crazy, and I know it’s only going to get crazier!  The weather finally decided to turn warm.  Hot actually.  These past few days have been scorching, just in time for outside activities.  Evenings at the ball field have been nice.  The past couple of nights we haven’t even had to use our sweatshirts.

Today was the annual Traeger cook-off through work.  The rules are simple, the food must be completely cooked on a Traeger Grill.  Not much more to it than that.  This is a healthy competition among co-workers.  It’s also a great place to bring families.

Once again, the Traeger cook-off ended up on a B-shift day, which means that Scott had to work.  Kim’s husband Matt works out at the Air Base, and being that it’s duty weekend, he also had to work.  Kim and I decided to team up and enter the competition together (with a little help from Makenzie).  We weren’t in it to win, just to have fun.

We also decided that if you can’t guarantee a win, you can at least guarantee the best dressed award.

Yes, those are provocatively, half-dressed firemen on our aprons.  We have to be politically correct at work, but not at the Traeger cook-off!

We decided to cook chicken wings.  We figured that it would be fairly easy.  We made three different kinds.  During the test run it took about three hours to smoke them.  Today, it the hot beating down sun, it took about 45 minutes.  This caused a little bit of heartburn, since we had to wait another two hours before the judging began.

In the end, we had only good compliments on our wings.  I genuinely think that people like them. It was stiff competition, but we lost out to a meatloaf.  The judging was fair and we have nothing to complain about.

Nothing except I am pretty sure that I gained five pounds today eating all the really good food!