Adventures in BBQ,Old Friends and the Zoo

This weekend we had originally planned to visit the San Antonio Zoo. But even the best laid plans often go awry. So we went to the Austin Zoo instead. Not quite on the same level but much closer to home. You see Christian was sick on Friday and we even had to give him breathing treatments throughout the day. This meant the middle of the night too, so no one in the family got a good nights sleep. The Austin Zoo was a good compromise and since Chris hadn't been there before, Christian and I had plenty to show him. We even rode the train this time.

I promise Christian liked the train ride, even though this picture would say the opposite. He loved the train whistle and the whole ride.

After our visit to the Zoo, Christian and I were dropped off at the house, hoping Christian would take a nice long nap while Chris went to HEB to get a few things. No such luck on the long nap. Actually he didn't really nap at all Saturday and by 6pm you could really tell.

As luck would have it our old friends Diego and Christina were in town too. Diego didn't feel like napping either, so they stopped by for a visit.

Our final adventure for the day was smoking some ribs on R2-D2. Who is R2-D2 you ask? Well R2-D2 is our newly acquired smoker for our friend Colin. Colin is the market for a much bigger and badder smoker since he just moved into a new house, so we were given R2-D2. While Chris was at HEB a guy in the meat department was telling him about these ribs that were one sale. So Chris took this as a sign that R2-D2 needed to be put to work.
Here is R2-D2.

This adventure required investing in a chimney fire starter as shown above. And it also required soaking wood chips in water for proper smoking.

I was put in charge of making a dry rub to go on the ribs. I used an online recipe as a guide, but ended up throwing several other things from my spice cabinet in as well. The ribs turned out really well. We will be having them a few more time because there were so many, we have 3 more servings in the freezer. Chris had his ribs dry, but I added a little Salt Lick BBQ sauce to mine. So R2-D2 is a productive member of the Wenck Family now. Thanks to Colin for letting us adopt him.