One more barbecue story to end the week

OK, I promise to stop after this. But in a barbecue-centric week, I had to share one last thing.

It was such a beautiful fall Friday that a friend and I had to get outside at lunch. So we headed over to the Men's Fellowship barbecue at First Christian Church at the corner of East Boulevard and Dilworth Road.

What's so special about that? For one thing, the barbecue plates include egg rolls made by the church's  Montagnard community. The Montagnard are people from the hill country of Vietnam who worked with American soldiers during the war. And a crispy egg roll is a very cool thing to find inside your barbecue plate.

Second, I opened my little cup of barbecue sauce and noticed that it wasn't a Carolina-style, vinegar sauce. This was thick, brick-red and peppery. It was also very familiar: It was almost exactly the same as my family's traditional sauce, a fourth-generation sauce recipe handed down in my dad's family in South Georgia.

I took one taste and whispered to my friend: "Hey! That's my family's barbecue sauce!"

"It's really good sauce," she said.

"I know," I said. "I'm telling you. That's my family's Georgia sauce."

One of the volunteers was passing, so I hailed him down to ask about the sauce. After the usual joke -- "If I told you what was in it, I'd have to kill you" -- he started to walk away. Suddenly, he stopped and turned back.

"Wait a minute," he said. "I just realized -- the guy who keeps the sauce recipe in his pocket? He's a Georgia native."

Ha! I know my sauce. A few minutes later, the volunteer stopped by our picnic table and rewarded me with a whole quart of it.

The First Christian Church barbecue is still going on Saturday, from 11 a.m. until dark. Plates are $9 and you can drive through and pick them up to go. Enjoy the egg roll. And the sauce.