Even if I had been able to come up with a 100% plausible excuse on why I couldn't possibly be bothered my body language and facial expressions would have totally given me away. See, when you ask someone something and they respond with 10 seconds of stunned silence followed by a total failure to meet your eyes while they mutter into their chest and shuffle their feet, you can be pretty sure they are lying. I just don't have the knack.
I also didn't come up with a counter-attack until just now. Maybe I should have just said "You scheduled and advertised a giant cookout knowing full well you didn't have the labor resources to pull it off? Well done. Did you also neglect to buy food and charcoal fully expecting to Stone Soup that problem away, too?" Then I could have followed up with a "talk to the hand" gesture, Z-snapped, and strutted away.
Ok, ok, calm down. In all actuality I was pretty happy to be invited to help out. First, helping out is the right thing to do. Second, I want to be a part of stuff like this so my kid learns to be involved in his community. Third, I sincerely wondered "How do you cook chicken for 600, anyhow?"
This is how.
The grates are actually the neat part. As with most ingenious ideas, they solve a problem in a "Oh, I could have told you that" way. In this case the problem is how to turn each of the birds without having to have a bunch of people run up and down the firepit with sets of tongs. Not only would that probably destroy the chicken from the constant manhandling, people would be dead of exhaustion or smoke inhalation or both before they got to the end of the production line.
Neat! A great shoulder and forearm workout, too, btw.
Like I mentioned, the grates are several feet above the surface of the coals, so it is a relatively slow cooking process but you still need to baste the birds occasionally (right after you flip, actually) to prevent them from drying out . How to do this? With a garden pump sprayer filled with secret sauce, of course! With this many birds it is a way more efficient way to keep the chicken moist than painting them individually. Another guy with a sprayer full of water hits the coals as needed to manage flame-ups caused by the basting process. The downside to doing this instead of using a brush is that the huge, thick, (albeit delicious smelling) cloud of smoke that is generated is visible from over 1/2 mile away. This is good for advertising that there is a massive cookout happening somewhere but bad for the flippers and pumpers if the wind is exactly wrong (meh... it happens).
Speaking of advertising, how do you prevent turning a poorly advertised church BBQ into a tragically well-advertised mass-poisoning? The meat thermometer guy walks up and down the line pretty much the whole time measuring the internal temperature of random samples of chicken to make sure everything is done perfectly (about 170 degrees).
After his final approval, food is taken off the firepit in the order it went on and goes to join the rest of the coleslaw, beans, and cake production lines inside for packaging and later distribution.
I learned a lot from this process although I think I worried a few of the old timers with my barrage of questions which, to them, must have seemed like I lacked even the most basic grasp of "heat plus meat equals eat". That's fine. I appreciate their patience and admire their ability to hold off the traditional Mocking of the Noob and the eye-rolling until I was somewhat out of range.
I think I am going to try and apply what I learned at this cookout with my firepit out back. But I need to make a couple of grates, first... Hmm, I guess that means I get to learn how to weld a little sooner than I had planned... Stay tuned.
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