A family outing fosters lifelong memories and gives houses the chance to molt in private. Leave your domicile to its own devices with today's Groupon: for $30, you get one ticket to a Family Fun Picnic ($60 value) at the Don Strange Ranch in Boerne. The picnic takes place Saturday, July 16 from 4 p.m.–8 p.m.
For more than 50 years, the longhorn-cattle filled Don Strange Ranch has hosted many a social club and wedding—including the recent nuptials of country stars Blake Shelton and Miranda Lambert—with southern hospitality and down-home eats. As music sets heads a-bobbing, fuel up for a day of family-friendly hayrides, frisbee golf, bingo, water slide, ping pong, and fire-safety filmstrips with a buffet of slow-smoked brisket drenched in Don's famous barbecue sauce, hill-country sausage, double-fudge brownies, and borracho beans, among other homemade salads, relishes, and slaws. Cooking demos and samplings spark the brain-ovens of aspiring chefs, and though not included in today's Groupon, craft beers, margaritas, and snow cones are also available.
Don Strange Ranch's setting adds a few new activities to the traditional picnic playbook, such as feeding longhorns and painting barns with surrealist murals depicting Super Mario Bros. levels. Kids can face off in sack races as their parents play tug of war to determine who gets the last brownie. Foresighted fams who bring towels will get to plunge down the inflatable waterslide, and those who bring bikes can explore the surrounding trails.
Groupon Says
The Groupon Guide to: Barbecue Secrets
Every barbecue joint boasts a secret ingredient or technique that makes its sauce unlike any other. Since most barbecue chefs have taken these secrets to the grave, here's a new list of public-domain barbecue secrets for the aspiring grillsman:
- Throw recipe thieves off your trail by filling your sauce with decoy ingredients such as talc, water, and heaping spoonfuls of rival sauces.
- Age your sauce in an oak cask for 15 years—it doesn't do anything, but you'll sure be hungry by then.
- Go bananas—add bananas to your sauce!
- BBQ is short for B.B. Queen—the wife of legendary bluesman B.B. King—and real barbecue sauce must contain exactly one of her soulful tears.
- As with success in any field, the real secret ingredient is confidence —except in barbecue sauces, in which it is horseradish.
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