I am also grateful for so much in 2014.  I’m grateful for my wife Jeannie, who has gone out of her way to support me in this crazy adventure, despite it being a huge leap out of her own comfort zone.  I’m grateful for everyone at Roux and in the Hamilton food community in general for all of their support and help.  I’m grateful for every person who saw our little cart and chose to spend their hard earned money on our food.  I’m grateful for all of my friends and family who understood when we missed event after event this year because we were either working or exhausted from working.  I’m grateful that I’ve been fortunate enough to be in a position to take this path, and grateful for everyone who has helped along the way and believed in what we are doing.

With that being said, here’s some of the highlights from 2014 for us!

The first time Meatventures made any money.  This was from someone buying some bacon and Jeannie framed it for me.

The first time I ever got a look at the Meat Wagon.  We learned a lot by starting out with a little.

First time I ever got interviewed – thanks to Carly from the Fat Girl Food Squad!

Food and Drink show – the first time I ever served our food to the public.  I was terrified and shaking and it took an hour for me to calm down.  Also where I learned to let go of what I think I know and listen to those who know better.

Sew Hungry – the first time I ever did a cooking demo in front of anyone.  Again, terrifying to start with, but better after Susan, Scott, and Iain helped me practice.  They also introduced my to Chanry who I met for the first time and helped me out by co-hosting.

First service with the Meat Wagon.  It was cold, it was windy, our umbrella blew away, our pilot lights wouldn’t work, and then it rained.  Luckily some friends came and kept it from being a complete disaster.

First time at the Village Station Bazaar, and the first time we ever sold out completely.  Which was good, but bad because we were still figuring out how much food we needed to bring to events.

First big event we ever did – the Waterdown Street Festival.  We had a lot of friends come and visit us which was great.  We brought an entire trailer full of crap to this event because we just didn’t know any better at the time.  by the end of the season our setup was half the size.

Popup Hamilton – first time doing an upscale event and first time cooking for 90 people.  Thanks to Jeannie, Iain, and Terry for helping me out and Susan and Dave for believing in me despite my inexperience.  It was terrifying to present my dish to a big room full of diners, but it went well and the night was awesome.  Was fun to work with everyone and help put everyone’s dishes together.

We competed at the Canadian National Bacon Championships and won, winning an entry to the World Food Championships and a trip to Vegas!

We travelled to a bunch of different events. Some were good, some were bad, but every time we learned something new and had fun.

We did our first big catering jobs.

We met some awesome people and made a bunch of new friends – I wish I had pics of everyone!

We travelled to Vegas to compete in the World Food Championships.  Missed the second day by 0.3 of a point in 11th place, but had a blast and got to hang out with lots of good people.

We had an article written about us!

Finally, we launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise some funds for expanding our business so we can step it up this year.  Together with our own funds we were able to put together enough money to move into a full size mobile kitchen.  The new Meatwagon is currently under construction and will be out on the streets this spring.

There’s more – so much more, but if I put in everything from the year this post would go on forever and it’s already too long.

2015 is going to have a lot more firsts in store, and I’m sure it’ll have its own share of terrifying moments.

I’m really looking forward to expanding our menu and having a proper mobile kitchen to cook in and I can’t wait for the new season to start.  Hope to see you all out there this year!

That’s us!

We got in late Monday night last week, got our rental car, and drove down to the El Cortez in downtown Las Vegas where we were staying at their Cabana suites.  The casino is older, but the suites are in a separate building, newly renovated, smoke-free, quiet, and most importantly, cheap!  It’s in Fremont East, which over the past few years has transformed from the place tourists were warned to stay away from, to a hub of arts, cool bars, great dining, and innovative creations like the container park.

Cheap and nice, hard to find in Vegas!

Any other time we’ve landed late in Vegas, we’d dump our stuff in the room, then head out drinking until all hours of the night.  This time we called it a night early as we had a lot of running around to do the next couple of days to get prepped for competition on Thursday.

On Tuesday the first thing we did was unpack all the stuff we brought with us to make sure nothing got lost or forgotten.  Everything got double-checked against our checklist.  Then we headed out to get supplies, looking for a wheeled cooler, visiting all the Filipino bakeries to find the best pandesal, and looking for some plates to use for our presentation.  We had plates for our 1st dish, but needed some for our 2nd dish, and options for our 3rd if we made it to the top 10.

Playing with some dish ideas for our third dish if we made the top 10

Later Tuesday night we used a couple of free coupons from MyVegas to eat at Yusho, and watch Cirque De Soleil: Zarkana.  The show was great, and the meal was even better – hard to go wrong with a Japanese street food style place.  Free/cheap deals really saved us this trip – with our $ going towards the truck, there wasn’t much extra to spare to spend on Vegas indulgences.

Wednesday we went out to grab all of our ingredients for our 2 dishes on day 1.  We went to Whole Foods for our produce and International Marketplace for our Asian ingredients.  International Marketplace was awesome with aisles full of foods from different European and Asian countries – sort of like Nations back in Hamilton, but on steroids.  I wish we had a place like that close by – I wouldn’t shop anywhere else!

Blurry wall of delicious Haribo gummies at International Marketplace

Supplies and ingredients

We were also lucky enough to meet Dennis, Chelsea, and Kent from Urban Hydro Greens.  We thought we had some microgreens for garnishing our dishes lined up, only to find out the person I spoke to had the wrong information (whatever can go wrong, will go wrong).  I found Urban Hydro Greens on Google and even though they didn’t normally open for retail business, Dennis was nice enough to let us come in and put together a great mix of greens for us to use.  We got a tour of their operation too, and we were really impressed at how they were focused on building a local and sustainable business.  We also learned a lot about the individual properties of the greens and ended up altering our plans with some suggestions from Dennis. Thanks again guys!

All the micro greens at Urban Hydro Greens

Later that night we met up with some of the other Canadian teams for some whiskey and pictures,  then took part in the opening parade (really more like a short walk), before heading over to the PICNIC rooftop pool lounge at the Downtown Grand for the WFC welcome party.  Was fun to hang out with some of the other competitors and get hyped up for competition the next day!

Pre-parade maple whiskey shots with some of the other Canadian teams

WFC welcome party at the PICNIC rooftop lounge

Finally it was Thursday – hopefully the first of 3 days of competition.  A mix of excitement and time difference had me wake up at 4am, and I futilely tried to squeeze a bit more sleep in.  We went out to pick up our fresh pandesal from Valerio’s bakeshop, and grab a few more last minute supplies.  Then we got everything packed, and sat around and waited for what seemed like forever.  Our competition wasn’t until 2:30 in the afternoon, and the day just seemed to drag on and on until then.

Checking and double-checking our checklist and timeline for the competition

We hauled our food and supplies up the street to the kitchen coliseum in time watch our friends in Team Canada finish up their second turn in in the recipe division.  It looked and tasted fantastic, and scored a 98/100, which I think was the highest score of all of the first round scores.  Then it was time for our cooks meeting, then off to our assigned kitchens.  We ended up next to our friends Jeff and Jennifer – fellow Canadians and winners of the Roc City bacon competition (the first one I tried to qualify in).

Our friends on Team Canada BBQ, finishing up their second recipe entry

The first thing we noticed at our station was that we only had 2 pieces of the 14 piece cook set we were supposed to be provided – not good as we needed almost every pan.  The volunteers did a great job however and got us our missing pots and pans very quickly (they were also awesome about helping cleanup!).  Then it was time to setup and start cooking our first dish – the Korean Bacon sliders – almost exactly the same as what we served on our food cart this summer, with a couple of minor tweaks.

Slicing cucumbers for our Korean bacon sliders

Everything was going well.  We were on schedule, and didn’t run into any other hiccups.  Then about 10 minutes before turn ins, we started to run into problems.  The stove we were cooking on was an induction cooktop, and for the life of me I just couldn’t figure out its quirks when it came to toasting the buns for our dish (cooking on something new for the first time at competition sucks).  I ended up burning half of them, and the rest got the colour I wanted, but not the crispiness.  With all the time spent on that, we ended up cutting it really close and barely made our turn ins on time – with some additional drama as I forgot to include the card with our dish name and had Jeannie yelling at me from the turn in tent and me running as fast as a fat guy can to bring it in.  We made it with about 30 seconds to spare.  Extra thanks to Sean and Tabitha from Team Canada who were watching and keeping an eye on the clock for us – would have lost track of it without you!

The other problem that came up was that during practice, I had been doing most of the finishing of the dishes, and Jeannie didn’t know what had to be done to finish them so she couldn’t help me much when we were rushing to finish.  That’s something that we’ll definitely address for any future competitions.

Tabitha and Sean – our timekeepers who made sure we got our first dish in on time – thanks guys!

Our second turn in went much smoother – even though things went wrong with it.  Part of the dish is a 5 minute soft boiled egg that then gets breaded in panko and parmesan and quickly deep fried, so you get a nice crispy shell and then when you break into it, the soft yolk oozes out.  Peeling a soft boiled egg is really delicate work, and Jeannie was having a particularly hard time with it here, with us ending up with 7 out of 18 usable – luckily we only needed 6, and I didn’t split any of them during the breading and deep frying stage.  Luckily for us we had practised this before, and knew that peeling the eggs could go wrong, so we knew to make sure we had lots of extras boiled.

This time our turn ins were ahead of schedule, and I was even able to get a picture of our dish!

Country bacon breakfast remix: panko/parmesan crusted soft-boiled egg, potato puree, maple/bourbon/cider braised/seared thick cut bacon, bacon and sage gravy, nebuka onion microgreens, Dawson’s big smoke hot sauce

Once turn ins were done, we got cleaned up, got some drinks, then headed over to the stage for awards.  Our friends in Team Canada got 1st in the recipe division, and with a pretty good lead too.  We ended up not getting called into the top 10, which was a big downer.  Our friends Jeff and Jennifer didn’t either, so we headed over to La Comida to drown our sorrows with tequila and Mexican food.  Had a really delicious torta there, which gave me a lot of ideas to try to work into our own dishes for the truck.  We ran into the team that ended up 2nd place in bacon last year but didn’t crack the top 10 this year, and we joked around about how much it would suck to finish 11th.

Me and Dr BBQ Ray Lampe!

Team Canada winning 1st place in the recipe division

The next morning I woke up to Jeannie screaming.  The detailed scores were posted, and we found out that we finished 11th, barely missing the 10 spot by 0.3 points out of 100.  That really sucked.  I went in between feeling really happy that we did that well, and being upset that a tiny improvement to our dish could have made up those 0.3 points.  I immediately thought to how rushed we were on our first dish, and the garnishes that didn’t make it onto our presentation dish that could have made all the difference.

Just missed top 10 and the second day of cooking in 11th place by 0.3 points

Finally I settled on the feeling of being happy to be 11th best in the world at cooking bacon – which sounds pretty awesome when you put it that way.  I stopped looking at what it would take to make up the 0.3, and I’m focused on what we would have to improve on to make up the 6 point difference between 11th and 1st place.  We had solid scores even though things went wrong and we missed some components, and there are lots of areas we looked at that we can improve in, especially in our organization and presentation – so lots of points to make up!

We’re definitely going to try to qualify again next year, and I’ll be working on trying out all kinds of different techniques and recipes.  There’s such a world of flavours and knowledge out there when it comes to cooking and I’ve barely scratched the surface of it.  We’ve been lucky to eat a lot of really great food here, and there are definitely some flavours that have inspired me and will surface in our own dishes for the truck next year.

We’ve got one day left here in Vegas and we’ll be enjoying the sun before heading back to the frozen north and the snow.  Once we’re back we’ll be focusing on our planning for next year and getting our truck built.  It’s been a crazy week here in Vegas and an adventure.  Got to hang out with some old friends and met some new ones and share some unique experiences with them.  But now I miss my degs, and can’t wait to get back home and focus on the next steps of our journey!

I miss this cuddle puddle.

Today we get on a plane and leave for Las Vegas to compete in the 2014 World Food Championships in the bacon division.  We’ll be competing against over 350 other teams across 9 divisions: BBQ, Chili, Burger, Dessert, Sandwich, Bacon, Recipe, Pasta, and Seafood.  It’s a mix of professional and amateur teams, with each team having won a contest or event to be here, so it’s going to be some tough competition.

We’ll be cooking in round 1 on Thursday against over 40 other bacon teams, and we’ll have about 2 hours to do 2 dishes: our choice of a signature dish, and then a dish that has to fit into the theme of bacon and egg brunch.  If we make it to the top 10 on Thursday, then we move on to Saturday where we cook a corn and bacon dish against the rest of the top 10, with a chance to win up to $10,000 and be the Bacon World Champion.  If we win, then we also cook again on Tuesday against all the other category winners, for the chance to be World Food Champion and win $100,000!

So how did we get here?  I found out about this competition through friends of ours in the BBQ competition circles that had competed at it last year.  When we decided to start the Meat wagon this year, I knew we’d be focusing on bacon, and thought it’d be cool to see how our bacon dishes stack up against the rest.  I also saw it as a great way to get some exposure for our food business, especially since the whole competition is being filmed for a reality TV show.  Not that I’d ever want to really be on TV, but hey – more exposure for our food business will make it easier to do what I really want to do: cook!

I looked at the qualifying competitions for the World Food Championships and found that there were 2 that were close to us – the Bacon Championship at the Roc City Ribfest, and the Canadian National Bacon Championships.  We entered both competitions, but the first one was right after we started the cart, and between that and scheduling issues, I ended up going down by myself with hardly any practice or well-developed dishes, and ended up finishing in the middle of the pack.  The good news is that friends of ours in the team Delivering Smoke ended up winning, and will be joining us in Vegas!

The next and last chance we had to qualify was the Canadian National Bacon Championships.  This time I made sure that Jeannie would be able to come help me, and I made sure that I spent lots of time working on my dishes and doing a full timeline test of each one.  Our preparation paid off, and everything went really smoothly during cooking (other than forgetting an ingredient), and we won the competition.  Our prize was an entry into the World Food Championships and some money to help cover the costs of getting there, which is good, because we’re trying to put everything towards the truck for next year.

I’ve been working on my recipes over the last couple of months, and have done full tests of everything over the last couple of weeks.  The testing process started with rough versions of each dish, then trying variations of each component until I found the combinations that I think will do well.  Each dish has to have bacon as the star, and it has to taste great, but also look great.  With competitions there’s also the fact that it can be 10-20 minutes before the judges eat your food after you turn it in, so you also have to know how it holds up and not just how it is freshly cooked. I’ve got a big printed out plan with everything we need to get there, everything we need to prep, and the schedule for everything that needs to be cooked.

This was one of my ideas for our corn and bacon themed dish that’s not being used. Cider braised slab bacon corn dog, spicy bacon ketchup, corn relish, maple horseradish mustard.

We’re nervous and we’re excited, but no matter what happens, we know that we’ve prepared well, that our dishes are good, and that we’ll do the best we can.  We’re also looking forward to hanging out in Vegas and checking out some of the local food trucks.  Won’t be gambling much since our $ is going to the truck, but it’ll be great to wander and explore and hang out with some of the other Canadian teams that we know!

Wish us luck!

P.s.: There are 21 days left in our Indiegogo campaign – please check out our perks and support us if you like them and please share on Facebook and Twitter!

This is the concept I came up with – would be pretty much identical for either truck or trailer

At this point we’re leaning pretty heavily towards getting a food trailer instead of a truck.  We’ve been starting to think this for the following reasons:

• on the cooking side, a trailer would be pretty much identical to a truck, if not bigger
• cheaper insurance
• kitchen is separate from the vehicle – we’ll need a truck to tow it, but if that truck breaks down, we can easily rent a truck and not miss a service

It’s possible that there could be a little less appeal to a trailer than a truck, but it can’t be nearly the same as the difference between a cart and a truck.  There were a lot of times when we had our cart parked in between two trucks and you’d see someone look at the menu of one truck, then walk right by the cart and look at the menu of the next truck.  It’s tough to shed the image of a hot dog cart, especially with us being the first cart in the city to offer anything other than hot dogs and sausages.

I think that with the right look, a trailer could have just as much if not more marketing appeal compared to a food truck.  Over the summer I’ve definitely seen a number of trailers that do really well, and between a trailer and a truck I think it comes down to a mix of how good your food is and how good your marketing is.

After contacting a number of builders and looking at a lot of trucks and trailers, we’re pretty sure on who we want to do our build, and we’re just waiting on some plans.  Getting excited for next season for sure!

We also started an Indiegogo campaign to raise some extra money for the trailer and give us more room in our budget for it.  Right now we’ve got enough to build or buy the trailer, but with any extra money, we would be able to improve the trailer, especially on the marketing side, including a full wrap and a rooftop sign.  We started the campaign a couple of weeks ago and our response has been really great, and we’re really thankful for everyone who has backed us and helped spread the word about our campaign.

To check out our campaign click on the image below.  Check out our perks and please share the link on Facebook and Twitter!

So it’s Friday, and we’re about to head into our second weekend of service.  I started writing this post on Monday night – that should give you an idea of how busy we’ve been!  Food is hard work – and we don’t want to take short cuts with our food, and that means time and work.  I’ll be keeping a journal of our experience over the summer here and this will be the first of many entries as we live and learn and serve up some food from our little street food cart in Hamilton!

Last weekend we had two services – including our first cart service ever with the Meat Wagon!  Our first service was a bit of a disaster, to put it lightly.

It started with us scrambling around to pack, and double checking for things that were already packed, or things that were forgotten.  My mind was already scrambling because of this, and I ended up forgetting a couple of important things and not realizing it until I was already on the road.  So back I turned, causing us to be a bit late for our service at Terra Greenhouses Hamilton.  Then we had weather issues with our umbrella, and technical issues with our hot water heater and steam table burners (my fault – completely brain-farted with my scrambled head – and we figured it out eventually!).  The crappy weather made for a pretty dead day, but thankfully some good friends came along to visit and support us (Thanks Marc and family and John and Akiko!) and we were able to get some cooking in!  The good news is that despite our issues, everyone loved the food!

Saturday night I looked at what had gone wrong and came up with a list of things to address – first thing was that we needed to have a checklist of everything that had to be done / packed to get ready for a service.  An hour later I created a sheet with everything on it and organized.  We used it the next day for our Sunday service at the Village Station Bazaar and it took us probably a third of the time to get packed and get on the road – and we were early this time!

The event on Sunday was great – and a total turnaround from the day before – it was an outdoor market put on by Chris from Cafe Oranje and Melanie from Modify Your Closet – and for a first time event, it had a great turn out.  Everything went way smoother on Sunday – from packing to setup to the actual cooking, and we were able to apply everything we had learned from the day before.  We did a pretty steady service, and ended up getting slammed for almost an hour straight, which ended with us being almost completely sold out.  We ended up selling out a little bit later, and found ourselves wishing we had packed more food.  But – we were happy to sell out, and we were happy to get a lot of really good feedback on our stuff.  We also had more awesome friends come out and visit (Thanks Mike/Candy, Saundra & fam, and Tyler!).  We hung out for the rest of the day at the bazaar and met some cool people as well, then went home, cleaned up, and passed out!

There’s so much more to learn, and so many ways to make things run better.  I never thought I’d be able to use my systems analysis skills here, but prep, cooking, and service are a bunch of processes like anything else, and there are lots of way to look at them and cut out wasted time and make things work quicker and smoother.  Gotta work hard, but also have to work smart, so that hard work goes a lot further.

We also learned the realities of our little cart, and realized that there’s no way it will support the larger menu we had originally envisioned – there just isn’t enough space.  So we’ll be cutting it back to 1 or 2 mains and a dessert.  I’d rather do a small menu really well than a half-ass job with a large menu, and it will help us provide a better experience for all of our customers.  Weather is a huge factor for us too – and until we get a better shelter system in place there are going to be bad weather days that will force us to cancel services.  But we’re working everything out, and everyone at Roux and The Dirty South have been super helpful.

So now it’s Friday afternoon, and I’m watching the weather like a hawk.  Mark from Dr. Disc has graciously let us set-up by his store during the Raise the Roof concert tonight at Art Crawl, but we’re waiting to see if the weather co-operates or not.  If it doesn’t, then tonight’s service will be cancelled.  That’s life though – gotta roll with it right?  The rest of the weekend looks like it will have great weather though!

Here’s our schedule for the week.  Hope to see you soon!

Today I’ll be demoing our recipe for Tocino sliders at Sew Hungry – the awesome food truck/restaurant festival on Ottawa St in Hamilton!  We’ll be on between 6pm and 7pm at the Kitchen Stadium tent sponsored by Roux Commissary and Go Cooking at 92 Ottawa St N!  There will be a great line up of chefs doing demonstrations there all day – check out the schedule below!

If you want to try out making our Tocino sliders at home – here’s the full recipe!

Tocino

INGREDIENTS:

• 1 pound of boneless pork shoulder
• 4 tablespoons cane sugar
• 1 tablespoon salt
• 1 teaspoon annato powder
• 2 teaspoons granulated garlic
• 2 teaspoons rice wine vinegar
• 1/4 teaspoon prague powder #1

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Take the pork shoulder and slice it thinly into 1/8 – 1/4 inch slices – this is easier to do if you partially freeze the shoulder first
2. Mix all of the remaining ingredients together to form the curing mixture
   
3. Mix the sliced pork into the curing mixture and mix well
   
4. Place the mixture into a ziploc bag or non-reactive container and put in the fridge for 3 days, mixing the meat around every day to keep the cure distributed
5. Once cured, the Tocino will be good in the fridge for at least a week because of the vinegar, salt, and prague powder helping to preserve it
6. Traditionally you would put this in a frying pan with 1/2 a cup of water, then letting it simmer until the water evaporates and then frying until lightly browned.  I like  to shorten the time in the water by starting in a medium pan with a few squirts of water from a bottle to steam, then letting it fry for a couple of minutes on each side.  You want to be careful not to let the sugar in the Tocino burn!

Green Mango Slaw

INGREDIENTS:

• 2 green mangos
• 1/2 jicama/singkamas root
• 1/2 purple onion, thinly sliced
• 1 lime
• 1 tbsp rice vinegar
• 1 tbsp Pinoy Kurat spicy vinegar
• 1 tbsp sesame oil
• salt

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Peel and julienne green mangos – mangos have a large flat seed that runs parallel to the flat side of the mango, so when slicing, start with your knife a bit off the center of the mango and slice downwards – you’ll be able to feel the seed to work around it.TIP: cut a small slice off the bottom of the mango to give you a flat surface to sit the mango on when cutting slices off of the sides
2. Peel and julienne the jicama and purple onion
3. Mix together the juice of the lime, fish sauce, rice vinegar, spicy vinegar, sesame oil, and salt to tasteTIP: give the lime a good hard roll on your cutting board before cutting it in half to get more juice out of it
4. Mix the dressing into the slaw and give it a good mix – it’ll be good to eat as is, but even better after sitting in the fridge for a few hours to let the flavours meld!

Garlic Lime Cream Sauce

INGREDIENTS:

• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 1 lime
• 1 tsp granulated garlic
• salt

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Mix the juice of the lime, the sour cream, and granulated garlic together
2. Season with salt to taste
3. Let sit in the fridge for a few hours to let the flavours meld

Now we can put it all together!

Tocino Sliders

INGREDIENTS:

• Tocino
• Green Mango Slaw
• Garlic Lime Cream Sauce
• Pandesal buns – you can find these at most Asian or Filipino grocery stores – in Hamilton you can find them at Nations at Jackson Square, or Adobo Queen at York/Queen

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Cook Tocino using directions above
2. Cut Pandesal bun in half
3. Add Garlic Lime Cream Sauce to bottom of bun
4. Layer with Tocino, Green Mango Slaw, then some more Garlic Lime Cream Sauce

That’s it!  If you saw our demo today I hope you enjoyed it and will give it a try, or better yet, will come find us

Today marks the 1 year anniversary of MeatVentures!

Before I started this site, I posted a bunch of pics on my Facebook profile of different food I’d been cooking on the BBQ and grill and one of my Facebook friends (Steph Seki – check out her awesome band A.P.E.!) posted that she loved my meaty adventures. From that I came up with the name MeatVentures, and a blog was born to document different cooking experiments and BBQ competitions we took part in.

When I started the site, I knew that I wanted to be involved in some kind of culinary career, but didn’t know what. I’ve loved cooking all of my life, and I’ve always been an adventurous and curious eater. So I just kept cooking and writing, and along the way a path formed that has lead to forming a new street food business that is launching 2 weeks from now.

The last few months have been flying by with all of the preparation we’ve been doing to get our street food cart, The Meat Wagon, ready to launch. I haven’t been writing as much because of this, but that is going to change, and with everything that’s going to be happening, I’ll have a lot to write about.

As we close in on our launch date, I have an overwhelming feeling of being both excited and terrified. I’m doing my best to keep one foot grounded with a realistic view of what is in store for us, but I’m keeping the other foot in the sky in dreamland, because I think you need to keep a mix of both inside you to do anything worth doing.  This whole thing is pushing me out of my comfort zone in so many ways at once, and I’m extremely fortunate and appreciative to have so many good people around helping me every step of the way.

So watch here for future posts.  Over the next year I’ll be writing about my career transition, and about our new adventure running a street food cart.  Cooking experiments will continue and I’ll be sharing lots of recipes as well.  It’s going to be a massive learning experience, and I’m ready for the long hours and everything that goes along with it.

Thanks for reading over the last year, and I hope you continue to read over the next year as we continue on our MeatVenture!

Things are rolling along quickly with the Meat Wagon.  The team at Roux have been indispensable  and have helped us at every step to get our new food business up and running.  One benefit of being part of the Roux family was being offered a spot at the Hamilton Food and Drink festival in the Roux booth to showcase our new business.

The Food and Drink festival is the biggest food event in Hamilton that I know of, so having a chance to set up there for a day was going to be a huge opportunity for us.  We had less than 2 weeks to the show once we got confirmation that we’d be able to get a spot, so we had lots of scrambling to do!

Pic Credit: @RouxCommissary

The show was going to be our first chance to make an impression on the food loving people of Hamilton, and we wanted to do it right.  We recently won the freestyle BBQ competition put on by Chadwicks & Hacks and Traeger, and our appetizer for that was a combination of Pig Shots and Poink Balls.  The judges and everyone that tried them really loved them, so we made the choice to serve them at the festival.  It’s hard to go wrong with bacon-wrapped pork!

We also had our marketing side to consider.  The festival is a great chance to meet people and make some connections that could lead to future business.  We came up with a theme for our booth look, then hunted down the few things we needed.  I had a vision of a chalkboard sign hung in a black pipe frame, and after a quick trip to Home Depot, I had one messy basement and a finished sign.  We were fortunate to be able to have the talented Robert ‘Nix’ Nixon design our logo for us, and were able to get it put onto some patches, stickers, and business cards, all on a short time frame for the show.  Thanks to Kevin from Impressive Printing and Frank from And Sew On for that!

The show was on a Saturday, and we went in to get most of our prep done on Thursday and Friday nights.  It was a bit tricky finding our way around a new kitchen, but again, everyone there was really nice and helpful.  We made a few hundred portions – that’s a lot of bacon! With that much, I realized that it wasn’t all going to fit in the smoker that I had brought with me to Roux.  Fortunately Brett and Thomas of the Dirty South were nice enough to let me to use their big smoker.

The thought of cooking on a new smoker that I didn’t know was a bit unnerving, but we didn’t have much choice, and all we could do was adapt.  We ended up getting everything cooked in time and learned some valuable lessons about prepping and cooking large numbers of small appetizers that will save us some time in the future.

We got everything packed up and all of the food loaded into our Cambro, and headed over to the show.  When we got there, we realized that the cold outside air had cooled off our food too much – one of the downfalls of taking food off a smoker when it’s really cold out!  Iain was great and got us sorted out with getting our food warmed to the proper temperatures, and we were off and running.

I was all nerves for the first hour of the show, but luckily Jeannie was there to do most of the talking.  After seeing how it was going, and how people were reacting after tasting our food, I started to calm down and really enjoy the whole experience.  Some of our friends came to visit and support us which was great, and we met a lot of new people.  It was great to meet some people that I’ve only talked to on twitter and to be able to put a face to the name.

Pic credit: David Hunnam

Our day went by quickly, and we ended up selling out of pig shots and went through most of our Poink balls too.  The reactions from people were really fantastic, and the repeat visitors really made my day – including Carly from Fat Girl Food Squad, who have been really awesome to us and given us lots of exposure!  I loved seeing the positivity and support for the show and all the vendors on Twitter over the whole weekend.

Overall, I think it was a huge success.  We got some great exposure and made some good connections that look like they will turn into future opportunities for us.  I’m even more excited now for the upcoming summer with our new business, and can’t wait to get the Meat Wagon out on the streets.  It’s going to be a long and hard summer of work, but nothing worth doing is ever easy.

The MeatVentures Meat Wagon will be at the Roux Commissary booth (129/130) at the Hamilton Food & Drink Fest from 1-5pm on Saturday March 22nd!

This is our first event of the year and last night we smoked a batch of our double-pepper bacon over a mix of hickory and cherry hardwood smoke.  We’ll be using it to make Pig Shots: a sausage/bacon shooter filled with a mix of cream cheese, brown sugar, and a touch of Dawson’s Garlic Jalapeño hot sauce!  We’ll be serving it together with Poink balls: a mozarella stuffed garlic jalapeño cheddar sausage meatball wrapped in bacon, glazed in our signature spicy BBQ sauce, and topped with a bit of garlic lime crema.

These are the two appetizers we turned in at the Chadwicks & Hacks freestyle BBQ competition a few weeks ago, and we’re excited to be showcasing them at the show!

Look for us at the Roux Commissary booth (129/130) on Saturday from 1-5!  Click here to get a coupon for $2 off the show ticket price.