Boss pork chops

We are going to the Bruce Springsteen concert on Tuesday. We also went last year, in Cologne, with Kaska and Thorsten (our Krakow traveling buddies) and our host, their friend Alex.

Alex is a serious Springsteen fan. Maybe devout is a better word. He knows every word to every song and has multiple t-shirts and memorabilia and other stuff that serious fans have. What I learned about Alex when we stayed at his house is that when he likes something he likes it intensely, fiercely and fanatically.

Even though I am nowhere near as big a fan as Alex, or Brian, I still like Springsteen's music and love a good live performance. And, unlike in the U.S., the concerts in German venues don't have an end time. The band doesn't have to stop because of noise ordinances or police issues. In Cologne Bruce played for almost four hours, having a blast on stage the whole time. One of the three German stops on his tour this year is little old Hannover. Not only that, the stadium where Springsteen is playing is in walking distance of our apartment. You can even see it from the balcony.

Getting back to Alex, what I learned when we stayed at his house is that there are three things that he loves intensely, devoutly, passionately. Other than his wife and kids, those things are Hamburg's HSV soccer team, Bruce Springsteen, and, most recently, barbecue. Yes, the art of the grill. He's dived into it and taken classes and read up and tried and tested different methods and marinades and sauces. When Alex first explained this love to us, Brian's Kansas City side perked up (I think he acquired a bit of a twang). He started to talk about rubs and sauce from Gates and Haywards and burnt ends and pulled pork and the differences between Carolina and Kansas City and Texas style barbecue. They had another love in common.

If you put these two things together, what you get is this that Alex has taken a couple of days off work, is traveling to Hannover from Cologne for the Springsteen concert, he's coming over for a pre-Boss barbecue. There will be 6 or 8 other people there too, but Alex was the inspiration for us acquiring some big fat KC style pork chops. Brian made it clear to me a couple of months ago that I had the important job of acquiring said pork chops. This is harder than it sounds. First of all, we are now buying and eating a limited amount of meat, which we know comes from "happy," sustainably raised animals. More importantly, they don't make big pork chops in Germany. There is a lot of pork to be found but the chop is generally no thicker than my finger. Getting a pork chop worthy of sauce imported from KC was going to take some effort.

So last Friday, I went to the weekly farmers' market where I sometimes buy meat from a "happy" butcher, and put my German language skills to the test. I asked to special order chops that were double the normal thickness. I didn't know if it was weird to ask for a special cut of meat, or to put in an order at all.  My habit in potentially awkward German cultural situation like this is to go for cuteness. I smiled and told the butcher lady that we were having a special American barbecue and my husband really wanted to have special thick pork chops like we have back home. It probably didn't sound quite that good in German but I was hoping she'd like my accent and that would score me points. Or maybe she'd just feel sorry for me, which could have the same effect.

Apparently it worked because today I went back to the market and picked up five big fat pork chops, somewhere between 2 and 3 fingers thick. There is a bottle of Hayward's in the fridge waiting for the big day. Will the pork chops meet Alex's standards? I'll have to let you know next week.
If Alex is not intensely, fanatically in love with them, he'll have to eat somewhere else.