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Warning: This Post Contain Scenes Of An Horrific Nature. Small Children And The Overly Sensitive Should Not Be Exposed To It.
Don't say you weren't told !
Don't say you weren't told !
So It's our annual guide dog day on sunday. We put on a plant sale, tombola, raffle, sausage inna bun, etc. We do it to raise money for traning guide dogs for the blind. Can't remember why we started but we've been doing it for 5 years now.
It takes a lot of work and lots of people help out. So on the sunday night I throw a bbq for the helpers.
This year I thought I'd go with fatties and hot smoked salmon as the main courses. Give em a real treat.
So friday night finds me fatty making, ready to be smoked up on saturday afternoon while we were setting things up in the garden.
I'd chosen to go with traditional sized 1lb fatties. Made up 6lb of really great sausage meat and had decided on three fillings with 2 fattys each type of filling.
Started with a Greek style filling:
Rolled 2 of those.
Next I went for frenchs mustard and pickled red cabbage and rolled it swiss roll style:
That cabbage and mustard tasted so good together I was really looking forward to this one being cooked.
Third up I started with a layer of mushrooms cooked in butter, added oinion and sweet red peppers cooked in olive oil and topped with grated stilton:
Six fattys went into the fridge.
Come saturday afetrnoon loaded up the bradley: 2 trays with 3 fatties each and two trays each with aside of salmon - simple coating of honey and pepper and garlic.
Look Away Now If you cry Easily !
And it's at this point that things started to go hideously wrong.
I made the cardinal and unforgiveable sin of all smokers in wanting the smoker temp to rise a bit quicker than it was.
In short I forgot about the smokers most important attribute: 'patience'.
So I added a bit more charcoal to the basket and went back to my workshop.
20 minutes later my dad shouts: 'somethings beeping !'.
Odd I thought, no way should the fatties be done yet.
Gets back to the smoker - and was it !
Thick black evil looking smoke was pouring out of the thing.
Yep the bloody smoker was on fire !
The bung I was using to block the hole where the smoke generator should sit was on fire, the rubber door seals were on fire and the foil tray the charcoal basket was sitting in was on fire.
The fires were easily put out - but the damage had already been done - forget about the smoker, that's just kit. The food was ruined.
I tried my best but all the fattys and the salmon (which was actually perfectly cooked) had a nasty black coating. And even after this was scraped off they still tasted of burnt rubber.
All six fatties and both sides of salmon had to be thrown away.
Regardless of this disaster, the show goes on and I still had to feed 17 people sunday night.
So saturday night finds me up till 2:30 am making food for the next day.
Things turned out well in the end. We raised nearly $900 - amazing considering the weather didn't exactly cooperate. I worked out I was serving a hotdog every two minutes for 2 hours.
The evening bbq consisted of thai style prawn cakes/pattys, lime marinated pork steaks, ribs and a variety of sausages (I cleared out both freezers and am now totally out of sausage lol).
Everyone enjoyed it.
Oh but man, how good would those fatties have been ?
Closest I've come to crying since my brother in law died.
And that's what I did last weekend.
On the good news the first uds is nearly done. And once we've worked out how to improve it - we'll be building mine :-)
The bradley really is dead this time and I'm going to try smoking with the outlaw next - that CAN'T catch fire !
![](http://weathersticker.wunderground.com/weathersticker/bigwx_cond/language/www/US/CA/Apple_Valley.gif")
for not giving up and being discouraged to put on a fine meal for the volunteers that helps with such a great event....kudos to you and the volunteers 
" -- 
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