Kansas. BAR - BE - CUUUUUE!

Bread? Heck naw. It's meat time.

Kansas: there’s no place like home. At least, there wasn’t for Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, who calls Kansas home. In fact, you can even see Dorothy’s house in Liberal, Kansas. I’ve been to Kansas City for an outdoor concert. The concert was flooded out with roughly 5 inches of rain. Anyway, I find it funny that the city isn’t called Missouri City. I mean, about half of it is in Missouri.

Like most other Midwestern states, Kansas produces a lot of produce. Kansas produces so much wheat in a year that if the wheat was baked into bread, Kansas could feed every person on Earth six loaves of bread. That’s a lot of bread. Even so, Kansas is known for BAR - BE - CUUUUUUUE! Even though we tried some BBQ on our visit, we had to try it at home. This week: brisket.

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There's no meat like brisket.

We started our brisket out at 7:30 in the morning. That means that I was awake at 7:20. On a weekend. Anyway, Dad and I mixed together our rub and massaged it on the 2-pound brisket we had bought the day before from our meat shop here in town. I also used my Taekwondo black belt skills to tenderize the meat, after the was sufficiently massaged. This was some good practice for the tournament next month.

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Burning wood for a good cause.

When the smoker and brisket were ready to go, we put our slab of meat on our smoker and let it sit. Nevermind, the Super Mario pajamas - it really was 7:30 in the morning!

Every hour we came back and sprayed the brisket with apple juice, then turned it. It was cool to see the brisket get more and more cooked each time I sprayed it with apple juice. And what wasn't so cool was when the wind blew some smoke in my face. Oh well, it smelled delicious.

The brisket was done at around 4:00, and we let it rest in the microwave. No, not because the brisket was cold, but because our cat, Artie, would have eaten it before we got our chance at it.

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Melt-in-your-mouth goodness.Except for the potato salad.

We came back again before dinner and served up our sides. We bought our potato salad, which I will later regret. Mom took care of the beans, and I made the cornbread. I am ashamed to say that the cornbread was, in fact, made from a box. We dished everything up, and dug in.

The brisket was soooo tender! I loved it, and think all the work was totally worth it. The beans and cornbread were both great. However, I wish we had made our own potato salad. Because it had so many egg slices, the store-bought stuff made me feel like I was eating calamari salad. And I usually love calamari, but the flavor together with the texture was weird. The cornbread (for being a box recipe) was good, especially with a bit of honey, and the beans tasted great with some bacon in them. Overall, I think it was an amazing meal!

Try it for yourself here: Joe's Kansas City-Style Brisket