July 9, 2011- Country Style Pork Ribs

Yesterday afternoon I started making Country Style Pork Ribs for Kate and Spencer to have for dinner.  Ben was the first one to prepare them in our house, and he did a great job documenting the process in the following post: http://duckywhit-whatsfordinner.blogspot.com/2011/02/monday-2212011.html.  In order to get out the door for our date last night, I turned the preparation over to Spencer at step #8 in the directions.  We made enough so that we could have left overs for our dinner tonight.  I reheated the pork in the microwave, smothered with more bbq sauce.  I reheated corn on the cob from last week's PEPS potluck for our side dish.

July 7, 2011- Kalbi Short Ribs

I got Kalbi marinated beef short ribs from the Fred Meyer meat counter yesterday morning.  They grill up really quickly and are usually quite tasty.  Well, I didn't get the best selection this time.  The meat was really fatty and the marinade didn't penetrate the meat like it usually does.  I guess that's what I get for shopping so early in the morning.  We grilled asparagus tossed in olive oil, salt, and pepper as our side dish.  

Saturday, 3/19/2011

Our church potluck group, The Crock Pots, gathered tonight at Tom and Cherie's house.  Ben made BBQ country style pork ribs this afternoon for us to take.  While delicious, the pork was not as good as the first time he made it.  We think it had to do with the BBQ sauce.  We used Stubb's Spicy Bar-B-Q sauce, which was definitely spicy.  In fact, Tom and Cherie's daughter, Katie, was brought to tears when she tasted it.  We didn't know to warn her that it was spicy.  Tom made fantastic fondues tonight- cheese fondue for the appetizer and chocolate fondue for dessert.  Laura and David brought a tasty green salad.  It was a great meal:)

We had a small group tonight, just six adults, two kids, and one babysitter.  It was the perfect group size for carrying on one conversation.  When you get more than six people talking, the conversation splits into smaller groups.  We gathered at 5:30 and were sad to leave three hours later to take the babysitter home. 

Tuesday, 2/22/2011

Tonight Ben and I finished the BBQ country style ribs he prepared yesterday.  I put them into a foil-lined baking pan, covered them with foil, and baked for half an hour in the toaster over set to 375 degrees.  They were as delicious tonight as they were last night.  Definitely a recipe worth repeating over and over again.  YUM!!!

Katie wasn't at all interested in the pork.  She ate some cubed chicken and half of a banana instead.  The good thing about her not liking the pork was that there was more for us:)  I definitely didn't want to share. 

Monday, 2/21/2011 Guest Blogger

Ben prepared a delicious meal for us last night, the 19th, and has offered to blog about it.  Thanks Ben! 

In light of the fact that I was able to fully enjoy a three-day holiday weekend and Sarah was, shall we say, not so lucky, I was bestowed the responsibility of producing a fine family meal for dinner on Monday.  Adding to the challenge, Sarah requested I prepare a couple of pounds of country-style pork ribs she purchased several weeks ago and stored in the freezer.

I’ve never prepared country-style ribs before.  In fact, I can only think of two times previously I’ve every prepared ribs of any kind.  So, I needed to find a recipe.  I learned that country-style ribs, which aren’t really ribs at all, are marbleized such that slow cooking is the ideal preparation to render tender results.  I settled on starting with a recipe for BBQ Country Style Ribs I found on www.allrecipes.com.  But, that wasn’t enough for me.  I had to go and read the comments and learn more from others’ experience.  The original recipe calls for cooking the ribs for two hours uncovered with lemon slices on top.  It seemed the folks that were happiest with the recipe raised the temperature, sealed them in foil, and added a little water.  If I remember my Alton Brown training correctly, I believe this changes the process from baking to braising.  I liked that, so I ran with it.
 
BBQ COUNTRY STYLE RIBS

Ingredients:
4 Country-style pork ribs
2 teaspoons minced garlic
2 lemons, thinly sliced
Barbeque sauce
 

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.
2. Line a shallow baking pan with aluminum foil up and around the edge of the pan to keep water contained. Place the ribs in the pan.
3. Spread minced garlic over the ribs.  I used the minced garlic you can buy in a jar at the grocery store. 
4. Cover the ribs with the lemon slices.
5. Pour about 1/16 of an inch of water in the pan.

6. Cover with aluminum foil and seal tightly to hold in the steam as the ribs braise.
7. Bake for two hours.
8. Remove from the oven and remove the foil cover, carefully, to avoid getting burned by the trapped steam.  

9. Remove the lemon slices and poor off the liquid.
10. Coat the ribs, liberally, on all sides with your preferred barbeque sauce.

11. Reseal the ribs in foil.
12. Bake at 275 degrees F for forty minutes.

After the second bake, I put the ribs back in the oven with the broiler on in an attempt to carmelize the barbeque sauce to give it a little crispiness and better presentation.  It didn’t work.  Instead, it made them look dry.  So, I flipped them over before I served.  I’d recommend skipping the broiling.
 

I served the ribs with a wedge salad with chopped bacon and blue cheese dressing for me and chipotle ranch dressing for Sarah.

The ribs were absolutely delicious.  It takes a while to cook them, but the actual time put into preparation is no more than 15 minutes.  Plus, country-style ribs are super cheap.  With the low prep-time, low cost, and excellent results, I’ll definitely be serving these again.  I think they’ll scale up well to large groups.  So, the next time we host a potluck, I think we have our meal.

Thursday, 10/21/2010

Last Friday I picked up some short ribs in Kalbi marinade from the Fred Meyer meat counter.  I thought we would have them over the weekend, but we never did.  I wanted to use them tonight, but was pretty sure they were not going to be good anymore.  It must be my lucky day, because they were still good!  Ben grilled them on direct high heat for 5-6 minutes.  We had iceberg lettuce wedge salads to go with it.  My salad was exactly as I wanted it to be.  1/4 of a lettuce head + bacon crumbles + Kraft's Zesty Italian Dressing = tasty salad.  Ben's didn't turn out as I expected it to.  I got him blue cheese crumbles and assumed we had a blue cheese dressing in the refrigerator.  While it is hard to tell if blue cheese has gone bad, Ben was pretty sure the dressing wasn't good anymore. He opted for the same dressing I used, but was not thrilled with it. 

Katie was willing to eat some rib meat, but mainly just ate grapes and cheese.  

I cooked up a pound of bacon tonight so that we could use it for our salads and then breakfast over the next couple of days.   Rather than using a frying pan, I baked the bacon.  I lined an old cookie sheet with heavy duty foil and then placed two square, metal cooking racks inside the sheet.  The racks had to overlap to fit, but it allowed me to use the entire sheet's surface for bacon.  I covered the racks with one layer of bacon and put the cookie sheet into a cold oven.  I then heated the oven to 400 degrees with the bacon inside.  I first checked on the bacon after 27 minutes.  When it wasn't done yet, I continued to check on it every 3 minutes until it was done enough for my taste.   For thin sliced bacon, 27 minutes is often enough.  For the thicker, leaner cuts of bacon, it takes a while longer.  The cooling racks keep the bacon out of the rendered fat.  This is a method Ben learned from Alton Brown on the Food Network several years ago.

I was just about to write about how sad it is that we can no longer watch Alton Brown's show "Good Eats" on TV anymore.  We gave up cable in January and it has not been available on Hulu.com or through Netflix.  But, as I was pulling up the show to link to it for the blog, I found that there are five full episodes currently on the Food Network's website!  So, if you want to learn about salmon, canned tuna, celery, popovers, or home freezing...check it out here:)  You learn a lot about the food itself and then how to prepare it.  We've learned a lot from Alton.

Saturday, 8/14/2010

Happy Wedding Day Kelsey & Jarred! 

As I mentioned yesterday, we are down in Oregon for the wedding of Ben's cousin's step-daughter.  Kelsey and Jarred were married on her parent's property in Mulino, right by a river.  It was a beautiful setting for a beautiful wedding ceremony.  The only downside was that it was really hot at 4pm for the wedding.  Half of the seats at the ceremony were in direct sunlight.  Thankfully, the programs doubled as fans and sun shades. Katie was a trooper and hung out with Jennifer and Spencer for the wedding and most of the reception.  I should say that they were troopers too:) 

The reception was just up the road on Jarred's grandma's property.  The food was excellent!  They served a large fruit salad, pasta salad, watermelon, baked beans, caesar salad, grilled salmon, chicken, and ribs.  The salmon and ribs were notably the best parts of the meal.  The caterer had a hard time keeping the trays full of those two dishes.  They also had decorated heart sugar cookies and chocolate dipped strawberries on the buffet table.  It was nice to have a little sweetness before the cake was cut. 

Friday, 6/11/2010

Katie was walking around the house shouting "Da-da" around 4pm. I decided to call Ben at work so that she could hear his voice. After she was done "talking" with Ben, he and I opted to go out for dinner rather than eat at home. Katie and I picked up Ben from work and headed to Maggie Bluff's. We had to wait about 10 minutes to be seated. During that time, Katie grabbed my iPod out of my purse and was playing with it. All of a sudden, she bolted towards the marina. Who knew she could move that fast?!? Ben and I both started after her, but he got to her first. They walked along the path together; it was very cute:)

We ordered fish and chips for Katie, since she has been eating fish so well in recent weeks. We sacrificed our own health by eating her chips for her;) Ben and I each got a salad and then opted to share a couple appetizers. Ben was brave and ordered the Broadway Pea Salad- sweet peas, water chestnuts, sugar snap peas and bacon tossed with creamy pepper dressing. He didn't like it at all. The dressing was not what he expected and it had lots of onions in it which were not included in the salad description. So, I shared my caesar with him. It was an ok salad.

The appetizers we shared were the Buffalo Chicken Wings and the Basket o' Ribs. The wings were really good in my opinion. They were deep fried, but not breaded. They had some heat, but not enough that my nose ran. It was nice to actually be able to taste the chicken and not have my tastebuds messed up by how hot the spice was. Ben would have preferred them to be breaded, but agreed that the flavor was good. The ribs were ok. I really like the Kalbi flavoring. Unfortunately, I don't think I chose pieces that had the best quality meat on them. I've purchased much better from the Fred Meyer butcher case. They were still good, but I would have been happier if the meat had been more tender.

It was a lovely evening at the marina. By the time we got home, it was time to put Katie to bed. Ah, what a great Friday night!