Montgomery Inn Barbecue

Oy. I love food samples. I love trying new things that might not be on my radar.

The downside to food samples is that sometimes it takes me a while to do the sampling. I hate wasting food, and there's only so much that I can eat every day.

So when I got an amazing box of samples from Mongomery Inn, it took me a while to get through all the goodies.

Everything came frozen (well, except the sauce, which was just chilled from keeping company with the frozen goods) so it was safe for eating soon or for tucking into the freezer for later.

First, there was barbecue sauce in several flavors. Then, pre-cooked racks of ribs that just needed to be heated. A container of pulled pork arrived, too, as well as some baked beans.

I started with the ribs. They're seriously fall-off-the-bone, to the point where if I heated them and tried to cut them into individual ribs, they didn't hang onto the bones at all. Then I figured out that if I wanted to eat ribs on the bone, I could cut them while cold, then heat them to serving temp. The meat still fell right off the bone, but it was finger food rather than fork food.

I thought the rub was a little salty for my taste, but not terribly so. I slathered the ribs with the sauce before I heated them up, but I'm sure they would have been fine with just the rub. Yum!

The pulled pork was great for easy dinners, since all I had to do was heat it up and throw it on a bun. Since I like sauce ... I added more sauce to the top (did I mention that they sent me sauce? Yeah, they did). The meat was perfect for those sandwiches, and cooked to tenderness, but not dry or stringy. Seriously, all you need is buns and you're ready to go.

Last was the beans. I wasn't expecting much, but I was sooooo wrong. The beans said they included brisket, which had me imagining some dry shredded meat, but instead there were pieces of super-tender brisket along with some porky goodness as well. These were sweet with just a little kick. These are the beans that you order in bulk and bring to every potluck, where you tell people it's an old family recipe that you can't divulge. Seriously. These were insanely good.

The Montgomery Inn Barbecue Sauces are also available on Amazon, if you're looking for a new sauce to try for your own ribs, chicken, pork, whatever. But those beans ... so freaking good.

Kabob Skewer Rack

Do you kabob?

What kind of skewers do you use?

Do they work?

One thing I've learned about cooking anything on a skewer is that sometimes they spin. You turn the skewer, and the food spins so that the same side is always facing the heat. It's annoying.

One other little problem is that depending on what you've got on the skewer, sometimes the whole skewer turns. It's hard to get all sides evenly cooked.

So when I got the Kabob Skewer Rack from a company called Cave Tools, I was happy to see they addressed both of those issues.

To keep the food from spinning, the skewers are flat instead of round or square, so the skewer can hang onto the food better. They're thin enough that they're easy to insert and remove from the food. There's also a little round ... hmmm ... let's call it a washer, that you can use to push the food off of the skewer.

To address the uneven cooking, the skewers come with a rack they sit on, and the rack has special indentations that hold the skewers in different positions at 0, 45, 90, 135, 180, 225, 270, and 315 degrees - eight different positions, so the food will cook on all sides.

The one downside to the rack is that it lifts the food higher if you're using it on a grill. But it's not super-high so it should be fine on most grills. And, seriously, you don't have to use the rack - you could just use the skewers.

The upside to the rack is that since the food isn't resting on the grill grates, you won't end up with food sticking to the grill. And, you can use it in the oven on a cookie sheet and the food gets heat from all sides.

Use the coupon code LHWJZQMZ to get 15% off your kabob rack on Amazon.

Who's it for: Kabobbers.

Pros: Nice idea.

Cons: The set has 5 skewers and they're not super-long, so you'll need multiple sets if you have a large family or want to use these for parties.

Wishes: It would be nice if there were extra skewers included.

Source: I received this from the manufacturer for the purpose of a review.