This is just the beginning of The BBQ Forum Cookbook.  On this web page I have only listed recipes and information that came from the first two years of The BBQ Forum.  Less than 800 messages had been posted to the forum the first two years. Today it is not unusual for their to be over 300 messages posted in a single day.  The recipes that will appear in the 1997 section come from over 5,000 posts to the forum.  The cast of characters was small in the beginning but it will change as the cookbook expands and continues through out the history of The BBQ Forum.  As you read more you will see that some of the original people who posted messages on the forum disappeared and new people appeared to take their place.  Occasionally some of the people that posted messages and disappeared come back again because they really never have gone away.  Maybe they just got too busy to post messages or became tired or posting.  Then they just melted into the vast audience of people who read the forum but don't post messages.  On the Internet these people are called "lurkers.'  The BBQ Forum is fortunate to have thousands of lurkers.  On any given month we have over 15,000 completely different, individual people who stop by the forum at least once a month.  Some people are so fascinated with the forum that they come back ten or 20 times a day.

This entire project would have been impossible it I hadn't have the good sense to save all the threads that were posted on the forum.  I had no idea what I was going to do with this information but I knew it had to be saved.  I have attempted to make this information available to people but none of my attempts to make this treasure trove available to the public really worked well.  The vast amount of information that was posted became too much to keep on line and as I had to remove portions of it I saved it all to disk.  I have copies of these disks stored in a safety deposit box at a bank and in an online storage vault.  I even have almost all the deleted messages and that should make interesting reading some day.  Putting together this cookbook and the future volumes is a huge project as all 500,000 past messages will have to be re-read and condensed. 

The future of this cookbook depends on the response that comes from the people that visit it and in the next few months we will see what happens.  I hope this online version of the cookbook is the start of something much larger.  I hope it turns into several print cookbooks. If this happens then future additions to the online book will appear after the print book has been released.  The plans I have for this project are too big for me alone to carry out, and I will need some help in the future.  A portion of any proceeds that come from the "Cook Book Project" will be returned to The BBQ Forum to make it better and expand the scope of it.  

Ray Basso

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