It's hard to believe that so quickly summer arrived, we are now close to the end of what's been an absolutely beautiful sunny season especially by East Coast standards. Time passed by way too quick and other duties got in the way of my planned summer of trouting, camping and salmon fishing, but such is life some years.

This Labour Day weekend Sandra and I enjoyed a fun and relaxing weekend in town with friends. Friday night we headed down to Westside Charlie's Torbay Road where Rod Giles and I partnered up for another weekly doubles chip tournament. This is a regular event at the club which is open to league and non-league players alike. Teams are classed based on known ability, lower skilled teams receive more chips than higher skilled. Teams play one rack, you loose one chip if you loose the rack, winners stay on the table. Last team remaining wins the top prize with usually the top four teams paid out.

Saturday morning Sandy and I fired up the Blackstone for a breakfast (lets be real, it was closer to lunch time! LoL) of moose sausages, bacon, hash brows with fried onion and of course eggs.

With breakfast cleaned up and put away, I seasoned up a pork shoulder to put on the Pitboss Austin XL for a low & slow smoked cook to make Pulled Pork.

It was quite breezy today so I set up my temporary windbreak, this really helped maintain a more consistent temperature especially while running a low heat setting on the smoker.

Now that we have our Blackstone griddle permanently set up back on to this side of the deck, I decided to improve wind protection by moving all the palings tight together in this area. This really helped maintain consistent temps on the griddle as it's nearly always windy here in Torbay!

Next up was putting together my famous Spicy Buffalo Mac and Cheese which adds hot sauce to our traditional homemade Rou/Cheese sauce. The Mac n Cheese was baked on the smoker while the pulled pork finished out.

The mac n cheese stayed on the smoker for almost an hour, I stirred it regularly which mixed delicious gentle smoke flavour throughout the dish.

At the end of the cook I added a layer of cheddar cheese to melt in place, finishing off this amazing dish.

Needless to say supper was absolutely outstanding!

Saturday night Rod Giles and I headed over to Topsail Billiards (formerly Dooley's) to hit some balls,  we wanted to get some practice for the upcoming summer session Tri-cup championships which will be hosted at this location. The big difference between here and the Westside Charlie's locations is that we will be playing on 4.5'x9' tables instead of the 4'x8' tables we are used to. It was a great night of practice which will hopefully serve us well next weekend.

Natasha and Cory invited Sandra and I over Sunday evening to celebrate my birthday with a barbeque. Not wanting to arrive empty handed I decided to make (for my first time) party ribs on the Pitboss smoker.

The main difference in party vs. regular ribs is that you cut up the ribs before cooking, this allows all sides of each piece to be seasoned and sauced instead of just the top & bottom on normal ribs.

The segments were put on the Pitboss using the smoke setting for about an hour before getting bumped to 250ºF for another hour-ish.

When the ribs were well coloured I got them ready for the next step - a tinfoil bath.

Like my regular ribs, the tinfoil tray was layered with brown sugar, real butter, honey, and some barbeque sauce.

Meanwhile Sandy got to work making my favourite summer salad, Kraft Macaroni salad with Ham, boiled egg and cheddar cheese.

Needless to say, these party ribs came out absolutely outstanding!

An absolutely deadly Birthday Supper with so much food it was crazy.

Huge thanks to Sandy, Natasha and Cory for an absolutely great evening, I truly enjoyed every minute of it!

On Monday we headed back to Westside Torbay Road to partake in their Pool for Meat event which is always a great time. These events run quickly and a lot of fun, it's a seeded blind draw doubles where the tournament director pairs lower skilled players with higher skilled players. Each match consists of four teams in a race for two wins, the winners of round one play each other in round two (same race) with the winners receiving a steak dinner cooked on site. Each match runs quickly and you can play as many times as you like.

All of our regular crowd participated, I played a total of four times. Rod and I were lucky enough to get paired, we played great and won our steak dinners!

After pool for meat we had our regular Monday night CPA team league which finished out a very relaxing and fun in-town holiday weekend.

Cheers, MIKE

Copyright © 2025 Michael Smith