Fridays of Intestinal Fortitude: Here's a Barbie even a feminist could love.

Note: Fridays of Intestinal Fortitude is a weekly feature about food, food and more FOOD. No, I do not necessarily want to be a food blogger, but I do LOVE to talk about food prep, cooking food, eating food and making sweet love to food.

Okay, maybe not the "sweet love" part. After all, this is not meant to be an homage to 9 1/2 Weeks.

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Last Friday, Manoj and I went to the American Royal BBQ. He knows a few of the members of the Burn Rate team and we had an invitation to their party tent.  The entire thing was just as much Awesome as you would expect.

For those of the Uninitated, the American Royal BBQ is a Major Deal here in Kansas City:

The American Royal Barbecue is the opening event of the American Royal and the season finale for the competitive circuit. Spreading over 20 acres in Kansas City’s historic Stockyards District, and with nearly 500 teams competing in four meat categories, The Royal is the largest barbecue contest in the world. Combine this with a barbecue-related trade expo, this four-day food festival is truly the “World Series of Barbecue.”

The scene was crazy. And huge - the equivalent of 10 football fields.  And smoky - besides the food part, apparently celebrating The Cigar was in order.  I didn't mind, though - I LOVE the smell of a good cigar.  And cheap, canned beer flowed like champagne.

Or something like that.

It was also the scene of many, many questionable fashion choices.

Run, pig, RUN.

A fiber-optic mohawk that actually twinkled like a Christmas tree.

And punk rockers everywhere weeped in shame.

Fortunately, the food more than made up for it.

Although, I do believe this qualifies as a complete Food Photography Fail. I never did figure out how to get good shots in that dimly lit, smoky tent. And then I got hungry which signaled the end of our photography session (obviously, the very best part of food photography is eating your subject.)  Speaking of shots, I had a Nickler shot with some fancy-pants vodka that was so pure, it tasted like water.  Which was sorta of scary so I limited myself to just ONE shot, lest the evening unravel into something that I couldn't blog about, much less REMEMBER.

Now, that's a fire!

That behemoth saw a lot of pork butt over the weekend.


Moaning Myrtle meets Simon Majumdar

That's some stellar Double Chin Action there, Kelli.  Also, would it kill you to use a blush brush just once? Anyway! Simon is a British author, Iron Chef judge and food blogger extraordinaire at Dos Hermanos.  He is buddies with one of the Burn Rate fellows and loves coming to the American Royal BBQ (which was featured in his book Eat My Globe (extract of that article is here).  We also found out that Simon is a desi via Calcutta , which always increases one's street cred in my book.  Y'all know how I love me some Indians.

Iconic.

I used to work at the Livestock Exchange building down in the stockyards. This smoky, ethereal installation never ceased to inspire me. Simple, beautiful and wholly representative.

Man, I love Kansas City.