July 9 2005

Well gang, most folks think about barbeque when the Fourth of July rolls around, but there are some of us that should give that kind of thinking a wide birth. One of those people is Charlie Coleman, and of course everybody calls him "Char Coal".
It seems that "Char Coal" invited some friends over to his place and had a shooting competition set up, and had a fresh pork ham on the grill that was to be finished with a pineapple, mango bourbon glaze.
One of the ladies was making a punch for the fairer sex, and had dumped a bottle of Ever Clear into a punch bowl to get it started.
The shooting competition was coming along just fine with a closely matched field of competitors, when someone mentioned that the barbeque pit was really putting out a lot of smoke.
"Char Coal" scratched his head, walked over to the pit, and lifted the hood.
Afterward it was figured out that "Char Coal" had put the huge ham on the grill while the coals were much too hot. Scored side up of course. As long as the lid to the grill was closed, all the fat just hit the coals and smoked a lot.
But when "Char Coal" lifted the lid, thereby allowing fresh air and oxygen inside, the flames shot about seven feet in the air or so.
Not one to be caught off guard, "Char Coal" looked keenly around, and grabbed what looked for all the world like a big bowl with water in it.
With the grace and verve of a ballet dancer, he wheeled, grabbed the punch bowl of Ever Clear, and heroically poured the high octane fluid onto the doomed ham in one fell "Foomp"!
The results were predictable. The look of cool aplomb was no longer on "Char Coal’s" face. In fact, his eyes were as big as saucers, and if he had still owned a pair of eyebrows they would have been up in his hairline somewhere.
After putting out the fire with the kitchen fire extinguisher, his wife called to have some barbeque delivered from a local Hickory Pit or some such thing." Char Coal" went around telling everybody that the instructions were to cook the ham at 450 degrees for the first 45 minutes or so, in order to make the cracklings nice and crispy. But of course that would have been for a conventional oven.
He also spent the rest of the afternoon trying to convince everybody that if you put more bourbon into the glaze and poured it onto the rocks, it made a really exotic and festive party drink.
Oh, sure.