Functionally ReTodded

As you may or may not know, this past Thursday was my 40th birthday. There was much rejoicing and celebrating (photos to follow later this week), but the point of this entry is to tell you about one of the greatest gags ever.

I am a big green egg owner. I have two larges. I love my BGE’s. I love cooking on them. We had some amazing rack of lamb Thursday night, and more stuff thru the weekend.

The reason I’m telling you this is that I’m sort of famous / notable in the little enclave of ours as a BGE expert, as is my brother in law that lives across the street.

One of our buddies in the neighborhood has had his BGE for about two years now and got it thru me. He is a nervous cooking guy and as such, he’s usually asking me or my BIL for advice on cooks, especially on ones that you do very often.

So here we sat Thursday night, full with draft beer and my brother in law mentions that our buddy is doing his very first overnight cook of Boston Butts. Even better, our buddy was cooking them for his son’s baseball team party the next day.

So my BIL and I (and about five other drunks) start talking, and we decide to commit butt larceny. So I set my BGE up for a butt cook and let the temp get settled for about an hour and a half, and we hit the road.

We had a (difficult to find) sober friend agree to drive us over there. Armed with our own aluminum pans and some food service gloves (food safety is never a joke kids), we set out to make our move.

Our driving friend parked behind an ice plant about three houses away, and we drunk folk proceeded to ninja / special ops traverse the yards and enter the subject’s back yard area.

We found just what we expected: a perfectly set 230 degree large Big Green Egg containing two nice looking sevenish pound boston butts. My BIL and I grinned at each other and moved the butts to our aluminum pans and, before leaving, dumped a pile of that night’s chicken wing remnants in their place.

We laughed our butts (pun intended) off on the way back to my house, and after getting the pork on to my grill, we all hit the rack and called it a day.

The next morning, I check the temp.

Perfect.

I open the BGE and look, and the butts are spectacular. Possibly a top ten ever effort on my part. I removed them, wrapped them in foil and towels and set them in an Igloo cooler to finish the work. So I head over to the BIL’s house to see when he wanted to return the meat.

As I was walking in the house, I hear his cell phone ringing, and right after that, the house phone is well. I was about to close the door when I heard my wife from across the street saying my Blackberry was ringing. I was pretty sure of the source of all three phone calls.

After a moment of chatting, we agreed that my 12 year old nephew should go to the door and say "Excuse me, but I am raising money for a state baseball tournament. Would you like to buy some pulled pork?"

We drove over, went to the front door and rang the bell, and Mrs. Victim answered the door.

She did NOT look pleased. Or amused. She looked pissed.

Our buddy came to the door and, after some cajoling, he more or less agreed that it was funnier than all get out that someone stole his overnight cook.

The best part for me was that I had drilled into him the following advice:

Never ever look. At least not before the 12 hour mark. You KNOW it’s not done, so don’t mess up the joo joo by peeking.

Trust the Egg. It won’t let you down.

So when he lifted the lid at 8:30am and saw nothing but a very crisp pile of wing carcasses, two things happened:

He yelled to his wife (who was just returning from Starbucks): "Honey!! Someone stole my meat!"

He then thought to himself "Jesus, I burned those butts down to nothing."

Nevermind that it is very unlikely to burn something so badly that it’s DNA and / or species changes. I mean really.

I must have laughed for half an hour straight, but all the while I was telling our buddy how to proceed as far as foiling, resting in the cooler and pulling the pork. I also said that I’d come over and help pull it if need be. I even said that having that meat stolen by me was kind of like having your children kidnapped by The Super Nanny or the Dali Lama. His butts really couldn’t have been in better hands.

Fast forward to my little birthday soirre Saturday night, and I was sort of shocked that he and his wife didn’t show up for my party after saying they’d attend earlier in the day. But I kind of understand why now.

The stolen butt story was the talk of the party (besides grown men funneling beer). Everyone there, literally, was talking about our prank. I am prouder of that prank by the moment and I look forward to doing it to someone else in the future.

Anyway, I just wanted you all to know the story and to watch your butts. You never know when a group of drunken neighbors may try to steal yours.