Festival of Smoke

This morning I had the great opportunity to visit the Second Annual Festival of Smoke hosted by The Culinary Center of Kansas City. The amazing thing about my visit was that I had no idea that it was going on or that there was even such neat place in my city until two days before the event was set to occur, and I owe a huge thanks to twitter and Jason Day of BBQ Addicts. The event was sponsored by the center's Midwest BBQ Institute and consisted of live cooking demonstrations, a pork butt competition, BBQ tasting, and whole list of other events designed to be both educational as well as entertaining.
 

The Culinary Center of Kansas City host's a whole slew of cooking classes for every age and every level of expertise or in some cases no expertise. After looking through their website I found a whole bunch of classes I want to take to help further my cooking abilities.

While I was down there I had the great opportunity to meet with Jason Day of BBQ Addicts, who are well known for their mouth watering creation "The Bacon Explosion". Which has been featured on practically every major network and is quite possible known the world over. Jason was at the event to demonstrate just what goes into making "The Bacon Explosion" as well as helping to spread the word about their new cookbook BBQ Makes Everything Better, which it does! Just look around the next time your tailgating or at a BBQ competition, every one just seems so much more open and receptive when there's plenty of good BBQ and ice cold beverages to go around.

I have to say, after seeing him whip together one of these delicious treats I can't wait to try my hand making one.

I would like to say a huge thank you and nice job to The Culinary Institute of Kansas City and the Midwest BBQ institute for hosting this truly exciting event. I hope the event continues to grow as it shows great promise in bringing more people to the joy of cooking with live fire and giving us more reason to huddle up around a BBQ grill.