If you read my Los Angeles food blog compadres The BBQ Junkie, The Survival Gourmet and Soul Fusion Kitchen, you know the four of us have teamed up to cook at the Autry BBQ contest on April 7-8, 2006.

We’re Team Four Q: “Where the blog meets the hog,” as in there’s 1,2,3,4 bloggers for the price of one. We’re a bunch of rookies up against a lot of competition-hardened pitmasters at the Autry. Come see us and cheer for the underdogs!

This contest is organized by the California BBQ Association, which follows Kansas City BBQ Society competition rules. KCBS teams compete in chicken, pork rib, pork shoulder and beef brisket categories. Each meat is blind judged, and champions decided for each category. The overall Grand Champion wins on combined points from four categories, so a team that’s gunning for the overall title has to do well in each category.

Our gang of four each took on a specialty. I’ve been assigned the pork ribs. Before April 7, I need to hone my skills at trimming meat, creating rubs and sauces, and of course, perfecting my fire control and cooking expertise.

Here’s two racks of ribs I made last weekend. It’s trimmed Kansas City style, which means the sternum and the flap meat have been removed from the rack, and the ends squared off to look pretty. It cooked for four hours at 200 - 235 degrees, and was mopped & re-rubbed three times during the cook. Howma doin’, team?

As preparation for this event, I did some field research on some top barbecue joints in Texas a few weeks ago. Stay tuned for my report from Luling, Lockhart, and Austin, Texas.

Hello to my readers in Iceland, which shot up to fifth place of countries that visited this blog in December. I don’t even know you, but thank you for stopping by. The top ten visting “nations” this month are: USA, Canada, EU, Iceland, Netherlands, Australia, Spain, China, Switzerland, and Singapore. Shame on me for not having picked up around the house before the world came by.

Since I’ve moved this blog to a Wordpress platform, I’ve had to learn how to manage a web server. Every webserver logs very non-specific data about their visitors, like which countries they live in. It’s fascinating to see where you all come from, and reminds me to write with a more global audience in mind.

For those of you who have a food blog in other countries, please leave me a comment with a link to your blog. Show me what’s good to eat where you live.

I’m told the title of this post means “where are you from?” in Icelandic. Some other useful Icelandic phrases include:

All of which might lead to these other useful sayings:

Happy holidays, everyone, wherever your are. Eat well and be good to each other.

The LA Times ran this story today by Scott Martelle about the Los Angeles blogosphere. Among the 50 or so featured local blogs are some long time foodists, like Steve Doggie-Dogg’s The Hot Dog Spot, Sarah at The Delicious Life, Luis at BBQ Junkie, and yours truly.

“This is a highly selective list of some of the more interesting — and regularly updated — blogs.” Always nice to get good press. Thanks Scott, and the LA Times.

Cute Flash animation of Gloria Gaynor as a disco turkey.