To dry age or wet age. That is the question.

I'm slowly coming to terms that wet aged beef may be comparable to dry aged. I'm excited to see what my thoughts on it will be- right before I die. Perhaps I'll have my decision engraved on my tombstone.


Sometime in mid-August...I think
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Because the vote between having the 48-Hour BBQ in NY or LA was so close, I decided to do one in both cities.
The following is a vague recounting of LA's.


Steve and I had set up during the evening. The goal was to finish the 48th hour during an evening, as opposed to it's usual sunrise.


Valerie was in charge of decorations.


So she brought us pirate hats and swords.


I bought a pirate flag while we were on Catalina...


...so we hoisted it on the flagpole outside of our apartment.


It would be sure to keep rival pirate apartments away from our seas.


It would also serve as a guide to any lost souls in search of bbq.


We played video games and watched movies into the night. The next morning promised a beautiful day.

A beautiful day to cook meat.


The pirate flag was at full mast.


We fired up some fresh coals for breakfast, on the grill of 1,000 seared animals.


Steve treated us to his famous "one-eyed jacks."


There's nothing quite like the smell of fresh, crisp morning air and the sizzle of food on a grill.


And mimosa's!!! Ah yes, nothing compliments a cheap jug of orange juice like a cheap bottle of champagne!


The flag waved in the wind as the morning matured into full-on day.


Chris came over on his porpoise. With gas prices the way they are it's really just more economical to travel by sea mammal.


We ran in circles in the pool to see if we could create a whirlpool.


It sucked me in. I partook in creating that which would almost result in my own watery demise.


The next few hours were spent trying to see who could wrangle the porpoise and last the longest on top of it.


Seriously. Hours.


Pirate Valerie. 'insert predictable "booty" joke'


At one point it seemed like a good idea to throw 3 lawn chairs in the pool, let all the air out of ourselves to sink to the bottom, and then conduct underwater meetings in our chairs.
Many taboo, almost...racey, topics were discussed. All-in-all it was very productive.


The sky was starting to get dark. Nighttime was upon us.


It was this night that Don showed up with his grill, which he had modified to work as a make-shift smoker. He then proceeded to smoke a shoulder of pork- late into the night. It was awesome.


The next morning looked to be another glorious day.

We soon decided to hold some more underwater meetings. While underwater it was noticed that there was an enormous, dead, black spider on one of the chairs. We hoisted it up out of the water and with a piece of paper scraped it onto the cement. At that point realizing it had a very bright red hourglass shape on it's stomach.


We had discovered a dead black widow.

I had seen a few of these before, since I've moved to LA, but it's still strange to me when I find them. I suppose it's because when I was a kid I was extremely interested in venomous creatures, one of which was the black widow. But I was always in the mindset that the only one of which was any danger, in NY, was the rattlesnake. Black widows, scorpions, etc. Those were all creatures of a different land.

So. With that said. We had discovered a dead black widow.


The thing about it was. It wasn't dead. Apparently they can sit in a pool all night and still live after a few minutes of being out of the water?


Until I stepped on it.


What happened next was something discussed to much extent during our underwater meetings.


We would have a treasure hunt. Underwater.

Gold doubloons would be scattered throughout the pool, amongst a wreckage of plastic lawn furniture, and the person to retrieve the most gold coin would win the challenge.


The race was on.


Our individual piles of gold shimmered in the high-noon sun.


I forget who the winner was...but I remember that it was really really close between all of us. Perhaps we were all winners...

Or losers. I guess it depends on how you look at it...


Chris was getting verrrrrrrrry sleepy.


But nothing wakes Chris up like some fresh grilled corn!


As the day moved on we had progressed into a back-to-back-to-back viewing of all three "Back to the Future"s, edited together so that they would play as one solid movie.

Then we followed it with a nighttime underwater doubloon scavenger hunt by glow stick.


The 48-Hour BBQ was a 54-Hour success.