Once again, I'm super proud of the Nibble Me This grilling team. Last weekend, we cooked in the 2023 Chain of Lakes Eggfest and the hungry crowds voted us as the 2023 Champions.

I couldn't ask to cook with a better group of friends and family.

But even better, this grilled food festival is an annual fund-raiser hosted by Mannix Pools and Grills for Girls Inc. and the local Boys and Girls Club. The top 3 placing teams - TromboKing, Pork's Peak, and Nibble Me This - not only donated our cash prizes back to the charities but the 3 teams also MATCHED that with an additional donation, totaling $5,000 extra for the two clubs.

Here is a look back at the event.

Planning

Before we light the first fire, Rhonda (team captain and my sister) and I plan it all out.

• What to serve - We look at things that are crowd favorites, can be prepped ahead of time, and have short cook times so we can keep the food coming out.
• How much to serve - We create a demand forecast by taking the number of ticket presales and typically double that to account for walk-up sales.
• What to take - We coordinate our equipment & supplies lists so that team members bring everything we need but not 2 and 3 of everything since space is a premium.

Pre-Prep

Eight-pound pork butt seasoned with Albukirky's Green Chile Seasoning. For smoke, I used Jealous Devil Smoke Wood blocks that I cut down to cubes for the kamado grill. I used the Thermoworks Signal with a Billows fan to run the Big Green Egg grill at 250°f. Thermoworks Signal [Affiliate Link] (currently $59 off) Thermoworks Billows [Affiliate Link]

This was taken when I was about to wrap the pork butt in foil with lime butter about 9 hours into the cook.

Here is the graph from my Thermoworks Signals. The green line is the cooking temperature which held steady all night. The red line is the internal temperature. You can tell that I put the butt on about midnight and then see when I wrapped it at about 9am. After wrapping, I turned the heat up to 290°f to finish it up. I pulled the pork butt when it hit an internal temperature of 205°f. Thermoworks Signal [Affiliate Link] (currently $59 off)

Thursday - Travel Day

Our team has members from the Tampa area, Jacksonville, FL, Knoxville, TN, and Virginia. This time we also had our friends Rob and Sue Ann down from Ontario, CA to stay with us and help out.

Alexis and I drove about 700 miles from Knoxville, TN to Winter Haven on Thursday. On the way, we stopped in at Owls Nest BBQ supply store to pick up some Meat Church Fajita seasoning and Blues Hog Raspberry Chipotle sauce for the event. Owls Nest is located in Ooltewah, TN just off I-75 near Chattanooga. 

Friday Prep Day

We always rent a large house so the whole team can stay together and prep out everything on the day before the event.

We got new team shirts for 2023!  The black dots are steer, hogs, and chickens - aren't they adorable? They are the Omaha shirt from the Chef Works Urban collection. Shout out to Kelly S. at Chef Works for helping us rush this order in 1 week!

I prepped 2 beef tenderloins. I center-cut one because it was so tapered and just cut the other one in half. We also used the small "mini-roast" pieces once we ran out of the 3 larger pieces. I seasoned them with black pepper, green peppercorns, kosher salt, and garlic for a 20-hour dry brine.

Next was pickle time! We did just under 500 portions which meant all hands on deck for slicing, coring, and stuffing pickles.

If you HAVE to be prepping food all day, you might as well do it lakeside, right?

We use a modified apple corer tool for coring the pickles. We add a fine wire to the end that cleanly cuts the core without penetrating all the way through the pickle and it pulls the core back out mostly in one piece.

Sean slicing the pickles while Alexis and Rob core the halves.

Laurie, Sue Ann, and Rhonda getting a head start on stuffing the pickles with the mix of green chile pork, salami, ham, and Swiss cheese.

The stuffing process starts with a carefully applied squirt of mustard. Ideally, you want mustard in every bite, not just pooled at the bottom, so we do a light criss-cross application. Yeah, we're that exacting about it.

Help! Help! I'm being repressed!

Carson and Scott showed up from Tampa just in time to help with the pickles.

The taquitos were a new menu item so we fried up a few samples on Friday and did some taste testing to come up with the best sauce combination. We prepped about 450 portions of these.

Rhonda kicks butt at doing our menu board for these events.

Eggfest Day

We arrived bright and early Saturday morning to set up before the gates opened to the crowds at 10am. The first order of business is to fire up our loaned Big Green Eggs. While they preheat, we set up our team site and then start cooking our first dishes of the day.  Our full menu was....

Dueling Breakfast Casseroles

-Sean's has biscuits, green chiles, eggs, sausage, cheeses, and sausage gravy

-Carson's has potatoes, onions, peppers, eggs, bacon, sausage, and cheeses.

Jordan's Drunk Pickles

Crowd favorite - It's the ingredients of a Cuban sandwich, minus the bread, 

stuffed into a pickle and fire-roasted.

Reverse-Seared Beef Tenderloin

Seasoned with our Umami Steak Seasoning recipe, reverse-seared, glazed with 

bone marrow butter, and served with Cherry Bourbon Sauce or Gorgonzola Sauce.

Smoked Pork Taquitos

Smoked pork, corn, peppers, poblano chile, and cheeses in a white corn tortilla

shallow fried in a skillet. Served with chipotle-lime crema and a spicy BBQ sauce.

Mom's Strawberry Cobbler

Literally.....Mom's cobbler recipe with in-season Plant City strawberries.

I collect the cook tags we've had from the events over the years. For me, it's like keeping concert ticket stubs....back when they HAD concert ticket stubs. I'm old.

Of course, with a name like Chain of Lakes Eggfest, this Eggfest is located at a lake-side meadow with moss-laden trees.

They had some bounce houses available for the kids.

The last few minutes before the gates open and the crowds start rolling in. It was a "Chamber of Commerce" day weather-wise - mild, breezy, and sunny.

Set up and ready to roll!

One of the best things about these events is getting to see friends that we only get to see a handful of times each year. My man, Josh Tahan of True Craft BBQ was there to teach a class.

Breakfast casseroles were the first thing we served.

We slow-roast the tenderloins in the morning and then hold them in a pre-heated Cambro hotbox until we're ready to serve some. Then we sear them off just before serving each one so they are hot and fresh.

I brought my Thermoworks Square Dot for roasting the tenderloins to an internal temp of 125°f. It's small in size making it perfect for traveling to events. Plus it's relatively inexpensive so if anything happens to it at the event, I'm not out a lot of money. Thermoworks Square DOT [Affiliate link]

Event organizer, BJ Mannix, conducting the team meeting before opening the event gates to the crowds. This is when the organizer thanks teams and sponsors again, goes over the schedule and repeats any rules/requests for the day's event.

The JROTC Color Guard presented the flags for the National Anthem.  The tribute ended with a hang glider with a US flag landing on the beach, very cool.

Then the tasters arrived and it was time to get to serving!

We have a lot of fun with the dueling breakfast casseroles. Both are great but Sean and Carson give each other a lot of good-natured ribbing about whose is better.

We got the food going early and didn't stop until we ran out at about 2:30pm.

I always grab a portion of breakfast casserole because it's usually the only thing I eat the rest of the day, except for quality taste testing while cooking. I just don't like to eat while cooking.

Scott and Alexis getting another round of pickles ready for the grill. Our team excels at working in concert together - zero egos, everyone finds their roles and everyone pitches in where needed.

All the teams did a wonderful job, putting out quality food for the tasters.

Chad (Kick Ash Baskets), me, and Rhonda kidding around. I bought 2 KAB ash cans at the event and I'll post about them later this month.

To me, Eggfests and food festivals are more fun than cooking at structured type BBQ contests because of the interaction with guests. In KCBS-style BBQ contests, the only people tasting your food is 6 anonymous judges. I like getting to meet the people tasting our food, see their reactions, and talk about recipes and techniques.

Laurie and Carson - I can tell this is early in the day because neither of them is sweaty, dusty, or greasy.....yet.

So typical...the guys are clowning around while the girls are busy working! (Kidding, EVERYONE on our team works their butts off!)

Carson and Alexis doing another round of Jordan's Drunk Pickles.

Carson and Laurie serve up breakfast casserole while Rhonda, Scott, and Alexis work pickles in the background.

Me searing one of the tenderloins on the Mini-Max. Carson's Mini-Max may be small but it has been at every Eggfest we've done and has produced thousands of portions of food for the crowds.

Perfectly medium rare!

You might find any of us manning the grill at some point but Carson is our head grill-master. The dude plays multiple grills like a drum kit.

When we ran out of the main tenderloin, we started grilling off the smaller pieces directly instead of reverse-searing them. That was only because it was quicker and we didn't have a grill to tie up for an hour.

A bite of our beef tenderloin on the gorgonzola sauce. I thought the gorgonzola sauce might be a love/hate thing with the crowd since some folks don't like blue cheese. I couldn't be more wrong, it was a huge hit and I'll post the exact recipe we used later this week.

I always look forward to seeing some of our extended family from my mom's side at this event.

Using my Thermapen IR to temp check the skillet as the oil heats up for the taquitos. That was the trick, figuring out the best configuration to keep the oil between 350 and 400°f. This thermometer has a probe for getting fast internal temperature readings AND a non-contact thermometer for measuring surface temps. My sister gave it to me for Christmas and it's become my favorite Thermapen. Thermoworks IR [Affiliate link]

One issue was the skillet handle didn't fit inside the Egg so we couldn't close the lid without tilting the skillet. We rigged a piece of stiff foil to keep that from happening. I'm getting a skillet that will fit for next time but this worked on the fly.

I bet when the original owner bought this Griswold #8 some 85-90 years ago, they never expected someone else would just the skillet decades later to feed hundreds.

The taquitos were a big hit with the crowds, too.

Next time, I think we'll add a brisket version as well, just for variety throughout the day.

Scott and Alexis ready for the next round of taquitos. For every dish we had, we had a coordinated process for quick service. Before I could finish a batch of taquitos, Laurie would already have counted out how many boats we needed. I'd slice the crispy taquitos, they would already have the chipotle-lime crema smear down. As soon as the hot taquito landed, Scott would sauce it and Alexis would make it "snow cotija cheese". Love cooking with this team.

Carson, me, Laurie, Scott, and Alexis posing for a quick selfie.

Each year, the COL Eggfest has a limited edition knife made by Rhineland Cutlery for each team. The one for 2023 is a 6" Nakiri knife pictured at the bottom.

Our new menu was excellent, our performance was solid and Jordan (the pickle's namesake) must have watching over us, because at the end of the day, our vote bucket overflowed. I told the team before awards were announced, win or lose, I was so proud of our performance and wouldn't want to cook with anyone else.

That said, it was sure still very nice to be called on stage as the 2023 champions!

Thanks to Mannix Pools and Grills for another spectacular event! If you didn't make it this year, you definitely want to pencil it in for next year. Spend a few extra days and enjoy all the Orlando area has to offer.

It was a blast, but it was also good to arrive back home in East Tennessee.