April 12, 2011: Apologies for the lateness and Baby Back Ribs

I apologize for not posting in a while. My freezer got distractingly empty and my veal went bad last week. I was going to make veal burgers, but ended up with rotten egg smelling veal so it was a bust. Blair and I ended up eating at Studio 220, which is partnered with Epiphany Farms. Unfortunately, the only item on the menu that was "Epiphanized" was the house salad. Which featured a Rice Wine Vinaigrette. It was the best salad I've had my entire life. The lettuce supposedly came out of a planter outside of Chef Ken's Mother's kitchen while the rest of the fruits and vegetables came from the farm. It was an inspirational lunch, but we still needed dinner. We ended up getting plastered on margaritas and over eating at a Mexican Restaurant. So, I really didn't have anything to write about. So, I didn't. But, now I do! I'm skipping Mexican Wednesday this week and making Baby Back Ribs today!


Step one that I'm doing: slicing up some red potatoes and red onions, oiling them and seasoning them and making a bed out of them. A soft, cushiony, pillowy bed where my pork will sleep and have dreams of being delicious dry rub baby back ribs.

Did I mention dry rub? Yes, I did. Have I been watching too much Diners, Drive-ins and Dives? Yes, I have. I got the idea to make ribs last night when I watched some guy at some restaurant on the show make some pork. And I decided to try it. With ribs. So I did. I made a dry rub out of a few kinds of ground chiles, cumin (to get a smoky flavor), cracked black pepper, garlic powder, oregano and celery salt. I whisked it together with a fork and I got a rub. And then for no reason I took a picture of the bottom of the ribs after I applied the rub to the top... for no discernible reason... I don't know why I did that. So I rubbed the pork ribs down and set the oven to 200 degrees and flopped 'em in. I assume that 4 or 5 hours at 200 will produce a nice dry rub rib.

Oh, crap! I never finished this post. That's the problem with live blogging, you forget. In anycase, I ended up scrapping the dry rub when I realized that it was caking instead of barking. The meat wasn't really absorbing any flavor, so I spiced it up with some of my standard base sauce: Meijer's basic generic sauce. It's the sauce that I always use to make partially homemade sauce. So, the dry rub would work in conjunction with the very weak sauce to make the ribs altogether better. Five hours later I had this:

The ribs were DELICIOUS. Absurdly so. They were a little fatty, I was counting on the fat to render off during the cooking, but it didn't. The ribs also had so much more meat on it than I'm used to. Usually when you get ribs, it's had to get meat off the bone, but in this case it was very easy. Over and out!