We’re having a barbecue this weekend at our home.  We’ve done this barbecue now for each summer that we’ve been here, so I guess it makes this the fourth annual version of said barbecue.

Last week, I practiced a bit.  We went up to my parents’ condo in Cuchara, CO.  We had no real plans of things to do, and mostly just hiked around the condo a bit.  On one of the days up there, I read about a smoking technique for smaller charcoal grills and put it to work to see how it would do.

By visual inspection, you may guess (correctly!) that it went pretty well.  I smoked a pork shoulder rubbed with this.  It came out perfect – you can ask Anna and Owen.  And possibly some bears that got to smell it.

While I don’t intend to do a pork shoulder for our barbecue, the important thing was the smoking technique, since I will likely try it this weekend.

What really makes our family’s barbecue is the sauce.  People like the sauce – it’s a sauce my dad’s mom taught him to make, that he taught me to make, and people seem to generally like it.  (Side note:  I need to make it again at the beach this year and not experiment like I have the last few years, so beach attendees can taste the proper sauce.)  It’s kind of funny – the thing my neighbors like the most is my sausage and my sauce – and they’ll talk about how my “sausage is so good” and how I “have great sauce”.  You haven’t lived until a gaggle of ladies talks about how good your sausage is.  It’s cool, but not as cool, when one or many of the dudes say the same.

Oddly, Anna never complements my sausage.  Huh.

We have some neighbors that moved away to whom I’d like to send a care package of some sauce so that they can still get a fix.  The problem there is that the stuff only has a shelf life of a week or so.  In past years I’ve had neighbors ask me to make extra sauce that they can bring home.

We got one of these last summer.

What is that, you might ask?  A pressure cooker!  I started canning things last summer with all the stuff we got from our farm and from our vegetable garden.  It went very well – having cans of vegetables through the winter and spring was very awesome.  It was especially more awesomer when the tiny moocher decided he wanted to start feeding himself.

It seems I can do this!

So, last night, I made a giant pot of sauce, and canned it in the pressure cooker.  Problem solved!  The sauce should (if I canned it properly) last up to a year unopened.

Last year I canned vegetables.  I never actually thought about canning sauce – let alone the barbecue sauce my family has always made.  This is the first time I’ve ever done this with the sauce – but I feel like it’s kind of a monumental occasion.  The sauce is being distributed for the first time!

I need to come up with a clever name to slap on the jars with a label.

The other yellow jars contain an experimental sauce that I’m not sure how I feel about yet.  It’s a honey-peach-bourbon sauce I kind of followed a recipe for.  I say “kind of” because it gave me a vague idea of what to add, and then I went ahead and ignored most of what it said to do.

The problem here, for the neighbors, is that I think they know what they’re getting for Christmas each and every year from this point forward.