No goat, at least I don't think...

They told me it was chicken, but I don't think it was chicken.

I've eaten a lot of chicken in my day, and I've never tasted chicken like that. Chicken is not flat like paper, greasy like pork or rubbery like a pool toy. Smothering it in Asian sauce - didn't help. Asian sauce, wait a minute...oh God, please tell me my gut was not meowing.

The contest was great, and judging was really fun. They sit you at a table with six people and in front of you they lay a place mat with six squares printed and a score card. You are instructed to not get any sauce on the scorecard because it irritates the computer entry guy. That was just prior to taking the grand oath of BBQ judging. Literally put my right hand up in the air and repeated after the guy facilitating the training.

When I was sworn in we made our way to the table and the grub was on.

They open a Styrofoam box and you judge appearance. This was tough because you just had to go off first impression. It was really just slices of meat on some lettuce. They all looked the same to me, so I just tried to be consistent. Then they pass the box around and you dig in and get a slice - with your fingers. You lay the slice of meat in the corresponding square on the place mat and when you have your six - dig in.

You're supposed to judge taste and tenderness. Tenderness was fairly easy to judge. It either took you ten minutes to chew, or not. The taste, however, was a little bit trickier. At least for me it was, because it all tasted great. There were only a few I literally had to spit out because they had been doused with pepper sauce or something else inedible.

Speaking of inedible. Two things crossed my mat that were, in my opinion, inedible. One was a scallop with soggy parsley paste on top, situated on a round Tostito with some sort of avocado nasty sauce. It was horrible. The other horrid dish was a batch of chicken wings - my mouth is still burning after trying to extract the meat from the bone. The entire table felt the same way. There is nothing funnier than guys (that think they're tough and can eat ghost peppers by the handful) reach for water and napkins - red faced and coughing.

The fun part of the day was the eating, but having the opportunity to do something fun on a Saturday was pretty cool too.

Even if the chicken wings are hotter than the sun.