I should probably start out by saying that I and my fellow Sentry staff members participating in this feature–Will Fletcher, Emory Maxwell, and Stewart McCullough–are not good cooks. Not even just that, we have little to no experience in cooking. Yet, we, inspired by one who came before us, the great Sam Mosley and his Cookin’ with Sam feature, are going attempt to teach you, our reader, to cook.

Joseph Joubert was once quoted as saying, “To teach is to learn twice over.” For us, teaching will be learning it for the first time. However, we hope that we can make a student-teacher pilgrimage together to food glory. So I ask you to join us in this adventure and have a little bit of fun as we, just as our ancestors long ago were forced to do, learn how to provide a meal for ourselves.

For our first episode of the year, we chose to make ribs. (Note: If it is your first time to do some actual cooking, ribs are not the smartest choice, as you will probably be able to tell from later on in the article.) We began our quest by journeying to the great armoury of food and supplies: Kroger.

As we walked in, avoiding the stares of the many shoppers wondering why four teenagers were coming into a grocery store and filming themselves, our first objective was to find a perfect rack of ribs. After selecting the prized pig, we then proceeded to find our other materials: rib rub and apple juice to flavor the meat and chips and Coke Zeros to compliment our entree.

After checking out, we made our way back to Will’s house and began the process of preparing our ribs. Our first step was cleaning off the ribs. (Warning: It’s a bloody mess. I’m not British. I mean like actual blood.) Next, we applied the rib rub onto the ribs and injected the apple juice into them.

While this was going on, we also were getting the grill up to the proper temperature, about 230 to 250 degrees. More details on our cooking methods are available in our video, which can be found on the Sentry website, jpsentry.net, and our Sentry social media pages.

After about 3 hours smoking on the grill, our ribs were ready to eat. While they tasted fine, they were somewhat undercooked. Stewart and Emory might try to tell you they got food poisoning and they were awful, but they are mightily over exaggerating. Still, they were somewhat undercooked, and if we had been willing to leave them on a little longer (it was 9:00 and we were starving), they could’ve been perfect.

Overall, I believe our first cooking adventure of the year was a successful one. We hope after reading this and watching our video that you might learn something about how to make ribs (or how not to) and that you have enjoyed the first episode of this year’s edition of the Sentry Culinary Collection: Cookin’ With the Boys.

Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will be cooking something much simpler.