Let’s get right to this… I’ve got something fun for Father’s Day! Five free MUG Root Beer Grilling Kits!!! Details on the giveaway are found at the bottom of the post…
The kits include:
- A MUG Root Beer cooler
- A MUG Root Beer apron
- The ingredients to MUG Root Beer Southern Specialty Brew-B-Q Sauce
I’m going to tell you all a secret… I don’t generally drink pop, soda, whatever you want to call it. I used to drink a lot of it, but gave it up 5 years ago last month. I just don’t like it anymore. That is, except for root beer! It’s got enough flavor to be more than just sugar water, and MUG is a great example of root beer.
And this sauce looks really good; I’m going to try it this week myself!
Okay, here are the giveaway details:
Leave a comment here with the funniest grilling story you remember about your dad! It’s that easy. The five that make me laugh the most win!
Here’s my best Dad story (though there are more… sorry, Dad!)…
My dad had this great redwood cart he’d built for a Weber kettle grill, back in the late 70′s. We were having burgers one day, and he went to open the lid, knowing nothing about flashback or anything like that. As he lifted the grill lid, the air that caused a big fireball to shoot up, singing the front of his hair and pretty much removing his eyebrows! He wasn’t burned, just his hair singed. And he looked pretty funny until his eyebrows grew back.
Winners will be announced on Father’s Day, so hurry up with your stories!
No Excuses BBQ is also running a giveaway with MUG Root Beer, with a different take… To win there, give them the reasons your dad deserves to win!
I can only remember my dad grilling one time. The burgers could have been substituted for hockey pucks and the dogs were pretty much charcoal sticks. After that all the cooking chores belonged to my mother, indoor and outdoor both, but it was a mutual request on everyone’s part. They visited us last weekend and my Dad watched me and asked all kinds of questions while I was grilling some pork tenderloins for supper and I thought maybe he would reclaim the outdoor cooking chores but when we got inside all he had to say was “Pat, you need to talk to Mark about some of this grilling stuff.”
I can remember quite a few years grilling at home and out camping. Dad would work at a metal shop that made these circular grills out of sheet metal with three different levels for grilling. So he had a pile of the bases and legs in the garage, being foreman, you get some perks. It was mainly because these would only last a season or two before they would rust through.
Well one day Dad was heating up the charcoal for cooking up some hamburgers. He went inside to start getting the food ready to bring out. While he was in the house, part of the bottom must have been rusted enough through because he came back outside to most of the coals on the cement.
My dad was not bad at grilling. He retired long before my mother, so he took up cooking as a hobby. We must have had 50 cookbooks and he would start flipping through them and find obscure recipes for stuff he had never eaten before, much less cooked. It always turned out great–except for one time. I was probably 12 or 13 and he had grilled steaks and asparagus. They were great, but as a part of his grilled meal he wanted to try Yorkshire Pudding. He said he had it with steak in England and thought it would go well with a grilled meal. He prided himself on his relatively newfound cooking skills. So, when I tasted it and realized it was the worst thing I have ever put in my mouth I didn’t say a word. When mama tried it she just looked at me. We waited as he tried a big bite. He didn’t say anything for a little while and I finally burst out laughing. I simply stood up and walked to the back door and tried to bounce it down the patio!! We laughed and laughed about that. Thank goodness the grilled portion of the meal was good. When my dad passed away some years later, and my mom and I were reminiscing, we laughed and laughed about the “Yorkshire Pudding Incident.” I’ve always wanted to try it again to see if it is any better, but I can’t bring myself to tarnish my only experience with it!!
My dad was a hunter, unfortunately his chosen prey was wild squirrel. Go figure. One day he got the idea to try barbecuing squirrel. On the grill they went, basted in bottled sauce. When a neighbor invited himself for dinner, thinking to mooch a burger or a hot dog, he was horrifed to receive a plate with a red crusty rodent on it.
A boy who lived behind us and his friend were forever making their own homemade firecrackers. Apparently, they had an arms race going to see who could make the biggest one. After several near-disasters, the one boy’s father insisted that they bury all future trials before detonation. The older boy, Bruce, made a gigantic firecracker, probably two feet long. He and his friend, Steve, carefully buried it in Bruce’s back yard. Meanwhile, my dad was in our back yard on that sunny Saturday afternoon, grilling hamburgers. He didn’t see what Bruce and Steve were up to behind him. They boys lit the long fuse and ran behind some bushes to watch in safety. They expected the ground to raise up with a low-pitched boom. What they didn’t expect was to blow a giant crater in the yard. My father also didn’t expect to have a mud-and-grass shower rain down on his hamburgers. Last anyone saw, he was chasing Bruce and Steve around the neighborhood, brandishing his spatula.
My dad once built a huge brick BBQ in our back yard. It was a beautiful thing. SO one day we are going to grill out and the charcoal wouldn’t catch because it was probably wet. So he decides to use some gasoline to get it going. Well that was a wrong move. Yep, it blew up and destroyed part of the BBQ. It wasn’t pretty and it was pretty scary but I sure learned a lesson.
I am from Central California, where Mexican-American culture thrives. Part of that culture includes having a BBQ for every occasion – birthdays, Oscar De La Hoya fights, Quinceañeras, and celebrating Sundays. At these BBQs, my dad would be the grill master and he always had a small crew to stand around and “appreciate” his grilling mastery. I should mention that Tri-tip was always mandatory at every BBQ event, as was taking a picture of my dad holding up the meat with a two-prong grilling poker. These times were always torturous for our dog Chavez, a Boxer who would salivate half of his body weight at every cookout, especially when it came time for my dad to hold up the tri-tip. He drooled every time the beads of meaty juice fell from the tri-tip to the concrete and with no shame would lap up every bit of flavor. It was inevitable that one day during this moment of grilling pride the tri-tip would hit the floor.
That day finally arrived. As the onlookers held the cameras to their eyes, and my dad gloriously lifted the tri-tip to face level, it began to slide off. It all happened in slow motion as the meat released itself from the prongs. It was too hot to try and catch with a bare hand. Everyone knew it was doomed. As soon as it hit the floor, the 5-second rule was immediately thrown out the window as our dog began licking it like he was the mother of a newborn puppy. It was obvious he was waiting for this moment for a looooong time.
The back yard erupted with laughter. My dad was so embarrassed and Chavez was in heaven.
My dad wasn’t much of a griller, my favorite memory is actually at a grill-out party hosted by someone else. The host was a hot and spicy fan, my family didn’t eat much of a spicy nature. I was in High school, and this was long before I developed a taste for spicy food. My dad is the classic “waste nothing” kind of dad and was quite used to my pickiness. Frankly we joked that we wondered how he stayed so skinny the way he would finish what the kids left behind.
Well the metts at this party were Hot Metts. I had never had a hot mett, and did not now what I was getting into. One bite, and I had enough. As I was getting ready to toss the rest my dad started his “waste not want not” speech. I made it very clear that this was a “want not” for me. He shook his head and took the mett from him, and explained we don’t waste food. He took one bite, and quickly determined that there WERE instances where you could waste food. Over 20 years later, the “hot mett” becomes a topic of conversation at any grill out with my family.
My Dad was rather inventive so there are a number of funny family stories involving him. One of my favorites is the “flaming ice cream carton.”
I think it was 1968. We were on a family trip to Florida, staying in a waterfront condo. It was after dinner and we were settled in for a little TV watching. During a commercial my dad had gone out to the kitchen, but had returned before the show started again. Time went by and all of sudden… we smell smoke. It took my Dad a second but he had this horrified look on his face and then rushed into the kitchen (with my mom, brother, and I close behind). He opened the oven to reveal… a flaming carton of ice cream (with melted ice cream dripping down the sides). Finding that the ice cream was frozen too hard to scoop, he had turned on the BROILER, opened the carton, and put the ice cream in the oven to soften it. The broiler element had ignited the top flap of the ice cream carton, resulting in a spectacular display of flames, smoke, and dripping ice cream. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen my mother laugh so hard. But it was classic Dad – always looking for a creative solution!
My favorite Father grilling memory is manning the squirt bottle to fight the flare-ups. My brothers and I fought for that really important job and I thought I was king of the grill when I got my turn. Once he got sick of us fighting over the squirt bottle, he started cooking a lot more with the lid closed. At that point his favorite saying became “if you’re lookin’, you ain’t cookin’”….
My Dad was one of the best burger grillers I have ever known! However, one time when I was a child, my mom was in the hospital, and Dad decided to grill some quick burgers. As he was grilling, he grabbed what he thought was the salt shaker. He seasoned them up, and we began to eat. We all had a funny look on our face at the strange taste to the burgers! We couldn’t put our finger on the odd seasoning, so we all started adding more ‘salt’. Several four letter words later, my Dad opened up the salt container to find out that it was actually the cinnamon and sugar mix that my Mom kept for toast! They were both in the same looking tin shaker! He never lived that down! We couldn’t understand why our burgers kept tasting sweeter, and the grill burned enough of the cinnamon, that we couldn’t really put our finger on the strange flavor!
My dad loved grilling out in the summertime-usually every few nights he would grill some steaks for himself and his three dogs (he fed them very well!) and he always was a pretty good cook on the grill.
Flash forward to the midst of winter-an ice storm is pummeling Central Maine. It’s been raining for a few days and you can see the major icing on the trees and power lines. Soon enough, the snapping of the poles and downing of the trees began to occur. Power lines came down along with those trees, leaving hundreds of thousands without power in the Northeast.
My dad, being French Canadian and used to the cold was pretty tough- but the roads were treacherous and he didn’t own a generator for his mobile home. Cold, tired and hungry he thought of his Weber grill and charcoal he had stored in the shed. Without power, his frozen food would be spoiling quickly so he improvised. He’d been a few days without power already and they were talking several weeks before they would even get to his area.
He brought the Weber grill into the mobile home and set up camp. Soon enough, the sizzling smell of steak on the grill filled his home. His 3 lhasa apsos waited patiently as he began serving food, a treat after a long few days of only dry dog food. Now my dad does not pay attention to safety regulations, because they did not pertain to him. The radio had stated warnings about lighting a BBQ grill inside your home due to risk of fire or smoke inhalation. But my dad was killing two birds with one stone, his plan had a dual purpose: cooking food so it wouldn’t spoil and warming up the inside of the home since the heat was out. You’d think he would would have at least ventilated a bit, right? No, not my dad-he didn’t want that warm air going anywhere.
He’d placed the grill in the living room, on his new beige carpet. It started to get a little smoky in there and sure enough, the battery operated fire alarms went off. He was still midway through cooking his food and didn’t want to stop. He finally decided he’d have to give in and open the door and crack a few windows, because it was getting hard to see in the room and his eyes were burning from the smoke. Now all of this really isn’t funny-I know-but anyways, one of his neighbors sees smoke coming from out of the windows and doors and figures my dad has gone and set the house on fire.
He yells for the wife to get a bucket of water from the tub and slip slides the way to my dads trailer, throws open the door, becomes blinded by the smoke and trips on one of the dogs-throwing a pail of ice cold water on my dad. Not to be outdone, my dad takes a few steps backwards, hitting the Weber grill and tossing it up into the air. The briquettes were still warm but thankfully not sizzling hot. A dozen half cooked hotdogs and twice as many briquettes end up airborne. The neighbors wife rushes to the scene horrified. There sat my dad, on the floor surrounded by his three dogs happily scarfing down those hot dogs. The neighbor landed face first, and a few hot briquettes ended up on his back-giving new meaning to a hot stone massage. The rest of the briquettes ended up on dad’s new carpet-whenever I would go over to visit him I’d be reminded of the incident-since there were about 10 nicely placed charcoal sized burn marks
And from that day forward, come rain, ice, hurricane or high winds-my dad never attempted to BBQ inside his mobile home again.
I wanted to nominate my dad! He is phenomenal! He works so hard for his family. Not only has he served as a police officer, he is a cancer survivor who still works more than full time to provide for his family, and help my husband & I provide for our children, one of which is disabled. My dad has always stuck by my side, and he always lets my momma know how much he loves her. He ROCKS at makin’ bar-b-q, whether its a few racks O ribs, or 26 oz. Ribeyes, or when he slow cooked 8 briskets all on his own for a wedding, hes got it goin on! I have never seen a man who watches more bar b q shows on food network! I think his dream would be to go up against Bobby Flay!
Well, my dad grilling story isn’t of him grilling at all. My dad is a laid back guy that loves to get a kick out of other’s mishaps and this incident is no exception.
We have a large deck off our A frame house and you can sit on the deck and pretty much watch what is going on at the neighbors. One day, my mom is staring out the back door asking what my dad is doing out there laughing his butt off. Well I go out there to find out and my dad motions me to get down (as not to be seen by the neighbor guy). We are now looking at a neighbor that is caddy corner from us sitting there looking around and scratching his head. My dad is laughing so hard now that we have to crawl into the house because the neighbor is walking the streets. LOL (makes me laugh just retelling it)
What happen is the guy has been out in his backyard getting his grill perfect and then goes in, bringing out these two beautiful thick cut steaks all wrapped in fancy butcher paper. He loads the grill with these two steaks and then walks into the house to grab tools and seasoning, leaving the grill open. My dog Kintaro (a gorgeous husky mix) trots right up to the grill and snags a steak (there are no fences, just acreage). At first my dad is shocked and is whistling for the dog to come back, but the dog just trots off the other direction. The neighbor comes back out and he looks at the grill, his butcher paper, the grill, the table behind him, the grill and is looking everywhere for the steak. Thinking maybe he left it inside, he goes in the house and Kintaro goes for the other steak. At this point my dad thinks the dog deserves the trouble he is about to get into, but Kin takes off around the house, just as the neighbor comes back out. Now the Neighbor is looking at the grill, looking at the butcher paper, looking around the yard (this is where I came out). My dad is laughing hysterically and the dog is nowhere to be seen. The neighbor slams his grill closed (too late dude) and starts down the street looking for anyone with a couple of steaks (that is when we crawled into the house).
I know it sounds awful to laugh like we did, but it was beyond our control and instead of making a huge scene with the dog, my dad never told the guy what happened, but he mowed their yard (which was 2 acres or better) all summer for free. He told the neighbor that he enjoyed mowing on his riding mower and the guy was ecstatic because he hated mowing. So it all worked out in the end. Kintaro went to my granny’s place out in the country as a guard dog, so his steak stealing days were over.
oh dang how did I end up here a year late. oh well scratch that entry.
buster,
No worries; the giveaway is over, but that’s a great story!