We Like to Party! (Tray)

‘Tis the season for party trays! Here are the options that we have for party trays this year - buy one for an office party, or a Christmas party, or even just for yourself! Each tray includes our smoked summer sausage, ham, turkey, and an assortment of our smoked cheeses. For an extra fee, we can even provide crackers.

Small Tray $31.50

Feeds 8-10 for an appetizer or snack

1/4 lb. summer sausage

1 lb. mixed cheese

1 lb. ham

1 lb. turkey

Medium Tray $44.50

Feeds about 12 for an appetizer or snack

1/4 summer sausage

1 1/4 lb. mixed cheese

1 1/4 lb. turkey

1 1/4 lb. ham

Large Tray $63

Feeds 25 or more people for an appetizer or snack

1/2 summer sausage

2 lb. mixed cheese

2 lb. ham

2 lb. turkey

Giant Tray $94.50

Feeds 50 plus people

1/2 summer sausage

1 venison sausage

2 1/2 lb. mixed cheese

2 1/2 lb. ham

2 1/2 lb. turkey

We hope you’ll place your order soon!

December Catering

It’s time for Christmas parties. Shockingly (that’s sarcasm btw), many people don’t plan their office/company/family Christmas parties until after December 1st. Consequently, their choices of date, venue, and menu gets a little limited. Below are the dates and times we are still available for catering or Christmas parties in December 2018.

Sunday, December 9 2-5 pm

Thursday, December 13 2-8pm

Saturday, December 15 until 5pm

Thursday, December 20 all day

If you’ve planned a weekend away on the Buffalo River this holiday season, we’ll be glad to fix you up with in-house parties or pick-up catering. We can customize your menu to fit your tastes and your group size. We do anything from simple cheese and cracker appetizers to locally grown ribeye steak. We absolutely love doing home-style southern cooking for the holidays. And since our specialty is BBQ, that’s a very easy meal to get together for you. Just give us a call at 870-439-2900 or shoot us an email from the contact page on this site to book your party.

If you need more guidance than that, here are the menus for some past and upcoming parties we’ve done.

BBQ Brisket, Baked Beans, White Potato Salad, and Rolls for 40 people, (I just booked this yesterday, so I know off the top of my head it was $8.05 per person, they’re picking it up and serving it themselves)

Beef Tenderloin Smoked Filet, Baked Potatoes, Size Salad, Baguette (Use this one if you want simple, delicious, and elegant. I think it'll run about $12 per person if you pick it up, $15-18 if we serve it here)

Pick 2, in-house, family style dinner: Brisket and chicken quarters, rolls, coleslaw, baked beans ($12.99 per person, and these guys reserved the whole restaurant for a Friday from 3-5pm)

Don’t forget, if there is one of the specials that we run that you absolutely love, we can cater that also! Our Cuban sandwiches, gumbo, and cheesy ham chowder have all sold well lately.

Whatever kind of celebration you’re having this December, we can help you with it! Call us, text us, message us, send us a smoke signal. We’re here to help!

The Season of Giving is Upon Us!

Christmas will be on us soon, so we wanted to take this time to write about some of the catering that we do around this time of year, and our specialty gift baskets! Our gift baskets are very unique, as we can adjust them to any budget. Just give us a call (but first check out our gift basket order form) and tell us what you want and what price you’d like it to be and we can make it work. The only thing is that you need to be realistic when you’re ordering your basket - if you only have $15 dollars to spend on it, the most that we can put in it is about three items. Any more than three and you’re looking at a slice of each thing you choose. The number of items that you can choose goes up with each basket. $25 should be about four items, $35 medium basket should be about five items, our large $50 basket should be about six items, and our deluxe $100 basket can hold about 10 items. However, you DO NOT have to pick ten items for the deluxe basket, or six for the large, or four for the small. When we say custom, we really mean custom!

Our gift basket order form

We can also cater your Christmas dinner, with our awesome smoked hams (bone-in or bone-out) and our smoked turkeys (bone-out deli turkey or bone-in rosemary turkey) - but don’t wait to late to order one! The last day to order a ham or deli turkey is December 18th, and the last day to order a bone-in rosemary turkey is December 19th!

Fall Favorites: Mushroom Onion Soup

Today here at Big Springs we’re feeling the effects of Fall - it’s pretty chilly and we’re looking forward to having some hot soup! Jenn is whipping up a batch of of some yummy mushroom onion soup, and we’d like you to try some too!

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Mushroom Onion Soup

Ingredients:

• 4 cups chopped onion

• 1 LB chopped baby bella mushrooms

• 3 cloves of minced garlic

• 4 bay leaves

• 1 can of Coors Heavy Beer

• 32 oz container of beef broth

• 1/2 cup butter

• 1/4 cup flour

• 2 Tbsp olive oil

• fresh thyme or 1 tsp of dried thyme

Directions:

To begin, you’ll need to chop your onions - you can do them as fine as you want to, but we kept our pieces about the size of a thumb. Next, we minced our fresh garlic from the witch garden. After washing our mushrooms, we cut them in half and chopped them into small, bite size pieces.

Next step is sauteing - saute it good. You’re gonna want to saute your veggies and garlic together with the olive oil until you’ve reached the state of saute that you desire. Lightly salt your veggies after they’re done cooking to avoid pulling the water from the mushrooms, which can cause them to be tough and rubbery.

Once you’ve sauteed your veggies, dump them in a stock pot. Preferably a large stock pot, but you’re your own person so use whatever size you want to. In the interest of doing less dishes, you’re gonna reuse the saute pan to make a rue. Melt your butter in the skillet, then dump your flour in. You’re going to want to stir the rue constantly as it cooks at a medium to high temp. We cooked ours until it was well browned.

Dump both your can of beer and the beef broth into the stock pot with your veggies. Add thyme and bay leaves, then allow your soup to simmer on low for about 15 minutes. You can garnish it with provolone cheese and croutons, or just eat it as is!

We hope you enjoy this mushroom onion soup as much as we do!

Fancy Holiday Anxiety

It’s the time of year where I trade my regular anxiety in for my fancy holiday anxiety. Yep.  Thanksgiving.  Personally, I have about 4 celebrations that I’m supposed to show up for.  I’ll definitely make it to 2 of those.

 The Richardsons celebrate Thanksgiving at our grandmother’s, where she presides over the festivities with cane in hand.  She hasn’t actually hit any of us with her cane yet, she just shakes her head with a disgusted look on her face a lot.  She’s 97.  She can do whatever she wants. 

What she wants is for us all to be together on Thanksgiving day, at her house, with a pretty epic lunch, preceded by a pretty amazing breakfast.  My dad actually lives next door to her, so we all show up at his house Wednesday evening, spend the night, then eat all day Thursday.  We cook a late dinner of our favorite foods at the ranch house Thursday night.  Friday the hunters all hit the woods, and I and the other slackers sit on the deck and enjoy the day.

Saturday is the Younger family get-together at my mom’s, which 54 people attended last year, and we’re expecting a few more this year.  We divide and conquer on this one, so we each volunteer or are assigned what to bring. 

Anyway, I thought it might be helpful to everyone for me to give you a printable version of my grocery list for Thanksgiving.  Of course, there are some incidentals on here that I’m sure I’ve missed. You’ve got a couple of options for printing or saving… I’m a fan of saving images to my phone since I probably won’t forget to take it to the grocery store.  So just access this post from your phone, hold your finger down on the image below, and save it to your phone.  If you have an iphone and a wireless printer, one of the options when you do that should be to print the image, and you can do that also.  If you’re reading this on your actual computer (weirdo), then you probably already know how to print it.

I’m including our menus here as well, because it might help to know what in the wide world you need all that crap for.

I should also mention that I’ll be taking a smoked bone-in ham for the ranch dinner, and a smoked whole turkey to fill in the cracks at the big lunch.  My aunts have started buying the turkey for that and it’s never big enough.  I highly recommend adding both of those things to your holiday menu if you haven’t already.  They’re delicious.

Now that I’ve completely overwhelmed you with my lists and off-loaded some of that fancy anxiety onto you, let me help you with that.  I am in the business of making home-made food for your family’s Thanksgiving dinner.  I love the idea that something I made makes an appearance at so many gatherings.  It’s like I get to attend everybody’s Thanksgiving.  I’d love to come to yours, but like not actually.  Just some food I made.  OK, I’m awkward.  Order something from me, already.  There’s a list on this page under “holilday ordering” or something like that.