[trekmstr]

Well I guess I’ll add my rookie mistake to the list. I did a fund raiser for a buddy last year. Made pulled pork and chicken for about 150 people. Knew it was going to be a lot of meat and I had two problems. #1. Limited equipnemt (I had to travel 3 hours to event) and #2. Time.
I did not want to be late with getting it done, so in my very logical thinking process I figured I’d smoke the pork the day before the event and reheat the pork while smoking the chicken. Everything went pretty good with the pork. I had 1 gal ziplock bags to put pulled pork into and plenty of ice and coolers to get it all cooled quickly.
Yea, right. I somehow despite having 2 others helping me I missed about 3 shoulders worth of meat in one of the smokers that I did not find until the next morning. Boy that was not a good way to start the day. Should have known something was wrong when I managed to just barely get all of the meat into the coolers with the ice and not have anything left over.
Oh, almost forgot I also smoked the pork to about 170 so that it was done but not tender.(I figured it would cook more on reheat and I did not want it getting mushy)
Yea right. It was very hard to pull but I had to so I could get it in to the zip lock bags and cooled down. Then the next day at the event I spent a lot of time chopping up the pork chunks into smaller pieces so they would reheat and cook faster, while also trying to get the chicken smoked. I managed to make it all happen and had no complaints and dozens of compliments. But know I know I would have been better off starting the whole thing the evening before and wrapping the pork as it was done and putting it into coolers then starting chicken as needed. It would have meant less sleep for the event but much less stress.
some lessons need to be learned the had way. but make sure you really do learn from them the first time.