Happy Mother's Day

Since the custody agreement stipulates that Mother's Day is always Mom's and Father's Day is always mine, we did Mother's Day with my Mom on Saturday. Worked out, too, because my Bro could go on Sunday to his frau's mother.

We did Oklahoma Joe's barbecue. It's been much ballyhooed, and I have to say it's justified ballyhoo.

KC is a barbecue town if it is anything. We have choices on the smoked meat scene like no place else I know. Arthur Bryant, Gates, Zarda, KC Masterpiece, and so on. I used to have a job that sent me to St. Louis every month, and when I searched for barbecue there, the best I could find was a so-called "Memphis' Best" that was, to be kind, mediocre.



I once compared the NYNEX yellow pages with KC's, and came to the conclusion that while New York might boast eight or ten times our population, and an embarrassment of ethnic cuisine from around the glob, if you're after barbecue, you won't heart NY.

I was uncharacteristically in the mood for ribs. Normally, I'm all about burnt ends, though that was not on the menu. Ribs are a lot of work, and I've had the experience, more than once, of ordering a full slab of ribs, the most expensive thing on the menu at most smokehouses, and genuinely still been hungry when I finished.

So I also ordered a pulled pork sandwich.



But these ribs, it's a good thing we shared around the table. They were maybe the meatiest ribs I've ever seen.



And all the meat was thoroughly infused with hardcore smokiness. In a barbecue-centric town, Oklahoma Joe's manages to stand out.



They also have a barbecue store hooked onto the joint, where you can spend well over a thousand bucks on a smoker for your home use. It's brilliant cross-marketing: feed someone world class smoked meat and then dangle the tools of the trade in front of them until spending several hundred dollars seems like the frugal move.



After, we headed to Aunt Jeane's for some stellar gelato.





Oh, and we also tortured my Mom's cat, who used to always flee company, but at sixteen years old, he's decided to stand his ground. Turns out he can still be playful.