But, I had some nice success with smoking a brisket yesterday, so the edge is now off the pain.

For this past Memorial Day, I decided to smoke some pork ribs. I got some nice ones, prepped them, well and got them smoking along nicely. They looked so good, and we had so many, that we invited some good friends over to share.

Since I was cutting up the ribs, I was the last one to start eating, and when I did I noticed an awful crunch. The ribs tasted great, but every bite there was the same gritty crunch. At first I couldn't figure it out, and everybody else was really enjoying their ribs. Our friend's oldest son was even going for seconds. But I couldn't get over the crunch.

Then I had a thought--I had noticed the sea salt looked a little different from normal (just bigger than the normal Costco grain). I got up, grabbed the salt container out of the spice cupboard, and said "Is this sea salt?"

My wife's face dropped with realization, and she said, "No, that's sand." For my daughter's "Harry Potter" themed birthday party a few weeks prior, my wife had decorated the kitchen with all kinds of "potions" and "spell ingredients". For one of the ingredients, she pulled the label off of a Costco sea salt container, filled it with white, shiny sand that looked just like salt. Apparently as they were cleaning up after the party, one of our helpful children thought it WAS salt, and put it away in the spice cupboard.

So, for Memorial Day, I made some beautifully smoked ribs, with excellent flavor other than a liberal coating of sand. After figuring out what it was, I couldn't eat them anymore. I tried, but couldn't do it. That is my BBQ shame and pain.