You folks are sick. I won’t even tell you one of them was my mother. Sick, I tell you.
I mean, I do have plantar fasciitis, so I am limping around today. Six blocks was just this side of crazy for an old cripple like me. If, someday, I could extract that plastic insert in my shoe and melt it in the backyard like my old Star Wars action figures, I’d be the happiest man on Earth.
But, I want to make you all happy, so I’m bringing you a tale of woe.
Well, I’ve told this story once before, but it never got captured on the website (http://timkretschmann.blogspot.com)so I thought I would get after it. And German Fest is right around the corner, and that’s usually a good opportunity for me to be completely injured.
A couple of years at German Fest, I cooked Spanferkel. For the three of you that read this outside Milwaukee or without a German background, spanferkel is roast pig. Generally done on a spit. Not spit on. On a spit. C’mon, people, work with me.
Anyway, one year, the brain trust at German Fest decides to make a new menu selection: the Spanferkel Sandwich. This, ladies and gentlemen, is a roast HAM SANDWICH! That people were willing to shell out $6 for a bun with roast ham on it continues to mystify me. But people do what they do.
I was given an actual grill rig. A carousel with 6 trays rotated within it. Four removable drawers were along the bottom. You could fill these drawers with charcoal and a grate kept the coal from being from top to bottom. This kept air flow and maximum heat. We would get a BLUE FLAME on that coal fairly often. And blue flame is no joke.
A similar grating system was on each tray so the oil and grease would collect in the bottom of each tray and keep that really exciting ham out of that lard. Oh, yummy.
They still sell this by the way. I suggest the Rollbraten. I suggest the Schnitzel. I suggest if you want a Spanferkel Sandwich to buy $6 of ham, grill it and you’ll have 20 sandwiches for what this thing is. It tastes fine, mind you, but I just don’t get it when we have such good food.
Don’t believe there’s good food? Check out the previous post and my bouts with weight.
I digress.
So I’m shoveling this nasty charcoal into the drawers. And it’s heavy and filthy. It’s that charcoal that looks like wood–not the nice chemically treated briquettes. I get that into the drawer, start the fire and let it begin to cook. I then wash up (I would wash up like thirty times as I went between meat prep and shoveling coal. Necessary evil, I suppose.) and I would start to cut the slabs of meat. Everyone told me to cut “with the grain of the meat.”
I went with the “perpendicular is good enough” approach. Grain of the meat, my hind end. You go look for a butcher you want that crap. I cut the meat in half. There you go. Don’t like it? Hire a butcher.
I was so tough when I did this because I had a really big, sharp knife. By the end of the day, it would be as dull as a rerun of “Night Court” without John Larroquette and my hands would have grooves from where I applied pressure to chop the meat.
I’d place the meat on the trays and it would cook for approximately one hour. Halfway through, I would turn the meat over, so a nice grating pattern would grace both sides. Didn’t really need to, I suppose, since the meat would be sliced deli style afterwards, but I thought it cooked more thoroughly that way.
When a load was done, I’d take the meat off the grate and the grease would bubble away in the bottom of each tray. I’d take the meat in, shovel new coal into the drawers, and start the process over. After stoking the fire, I went inside to wash up and I came back to this.
The grease had caught fire.
I’ve never encountered a grease fire before and this baby was hot!
I was going to wait a while to see what happens, but it takes a long time to get a hot fire going and I needed at least one more load for the day.
So I commence to thinking. This is where things always go REALLY, REALLY wrong.
I really need to get going, so I decide to go over and take a look at things. Only a little flame spilling out the side. What I really ought to do is open the cover and take a good look.
At first, it was sort of surreal. A little flame danced on each rotating tray in the grease. I thought, well, that ain’t so bad. I’ll just take these out, restock and let that fire cook it. Maybe we’ll get a load in forty-five minutes this time. I’d have to put the little tray fires out, I suppose.
So I grabbed a pail and went inside.
Filled the pail with water.
Went outside.
Poured the water.
Stepped back and watched flames rise up with a mighty whoosh!
Slammed cover back down.
Opened cover up to take another look:
Okay. Not good.
I can tell. I can tell it is not good because a crowd is forming. Someone said, “You did not put water on a grease fire, did you?”
Was that wrong? How the heck was I supposed to know? Not a lot of fires over in my cube at work. Grease, electrical, paper–never had many fires over there. Now I’m a fireman? Not bloody likely.
My mother was so concerned when she saw this, her natural instincts went into action. She grabbed the camera and took these pictures here.
I wasn’t terribly injured but I did eat some smoke. The fireman on the German Fest grounds came in and blanketed the grill with so much foam that a fire would never start in the grill again. Well, until it had a through washing. I remember people being critical of the firemen foaming the heck out of it, because it was, afterall, a little fire. I always supported their choice since I knew had the grill been even slightly recoverable, we would have thrown another load in and cooked away. This way, we had to pressure wash the whole thing.
I should mention that German Fest volunteers on the whole are better at cooking than me. Afterall, not everyone is . . .
Captain
Catastrophe