Aunt Bess' Barbecue Ribs
Did you know that you're supposed to cook your barbecue sauce? I sure as I hell didn't! I just stirred some stuff together and figured it would cook with the meat on the grill.
I decided to actually look it up, and I have to apologize to Fannie Flagg, as well as to cooking enthusiasts, book nerds extraordinaire, and foodies everywhere, because the correct title of the Fried Green Tomatoes cookbook is of course: "Fannie Flagg's Original Whistle Stop Café Cookbook." ("...featuring Fried Green Tomatoes and more than 150 other great recipes" if you wanna be really pedantic about it.) I can't recommend it enough. It's one of the few cookbooks where I will actually follow the recipe, because I have no idea how things are supposed to look when they're done.
Mind you, I still substituted things, because I didn't have Worcester Sauce (HP is kind of the same. Kind of...) and also, I'm pretty sure "prepared mustard" does not mean Dijon, but I figure give and take and all that... So anyway, to get back to my original point, the recipe for Aunt Bess' barbecue sauce dictates that you put the ingredients in a saucepan and let it simmer for about 20 minutes while stirring... - Which makes sense, considering that it will dissolve the sugar much better, and also, you're cooking a lemon slice and an onion slice up in there. All the same, it seemed like an awful lot of work for a sauce which will then be cooked again on the grill...
- Totally worth it! OMG, you guys! I'm not just saying this because I made it all from scratch and it wasn't really all that hard, I'd just never tried before, I am saying this because it was So! Good! I already have ideas to make the sauce pop even more, so I will definitely, definitely, be pre-cooking my barbecue sauce from now on. (And in huge batches, so I won't have to do it every time we want to start up the grill.)
Sven and I had the day off, and things are infinitely easier when you don't have those pesky work hours interfering with your free time... I have been super failing at getting anything together even resembling dinner lately, so we've been eating a lot of take out. Much more than I am at all comfortable with. So, in order to ensure that we would actually eat an actual dinner actually cooked by us tonight, I prepared everything this morning, like a proper old-school housewife. - And to prove to you that there's more to my life than just cooking, I'd like to point out that I also did a load of laundry and some gardening, while Sven vacuumed the house and mowed the lawn. Yup, we sure know how to enjoy a day off! :p
In other news, my dad is seemingly done with his radiation therapy, at least for the time being. He is very relieved, and it's clear that this has been harder on him than he's entirely willing to admit. He is now completely bald. He looks like a very round Kojak. I hope he won't have to go in for another round, preferably ever. It just seems so ridiculous to put him through all that in order to "alleviate, but not cure, his symptoms." Yeah, great. Not sure it's worth it, at least not to him.
I decided to actually look it up, and I have to apologize to Fannie Flagg, as well as to cooking enthusiasts, book nerds extraordinaire, and foodies everywhere, because the correct title of the Fried Green Tomatoes cookbook is of course: "Fannie Flagg's Original Whistle Stop Café Cookbook." ("...featuring Fried Green Tomatoes and more than 150 other great recipes" if you wanna be really pedantic about it.) I can't recommend it enough. It's one of the few cookbooks where I will actually follow the recipe, because I have no idea how things are supposed to look when they're done.
Mind you, I still substituted things, because I didn't have Worcester Sauce (HP is kind of the same. Kind of...) and also, I'm pretty sure "prepared mustard" does not mean Dijon, but I figure give and take and all that... So anyway, to get back to my original point, the recipe for Aunt Bess' barbecue sauce dictates that you put the ingredients in a saucepan and let it simmer for about 20 minutes while stirring... - Which makes sense, considering that it will dissolve the sugar much better, and also, you're cooking a lemon slice and an onion slice up in there. All the same, it seemed like an awful lot of work for a sauce which will then be cooked again on the grill...
- Totally worth it! OMG, you guys! I'm not just saying this because I made it all from scratch and it wasn't really all that hard, I'd just never tried before, I am saying this because it was So! Good! I already have ideas to make the sauce pop even more, so I will definitely, definitely, be pre-cooking my barbecue sauce from now on. (And in huge batches, so I won't have to do it every time we want to start up the grill.)
Sven and I had the day off, and things are infinitely easier when you don't have those pesky work hours interfering with your free time... I have been super failing at getting anything together even resembling dinner lately, so we've been eating a lot of take out. Much more than I am at all comfortable with. So, in order to ensure that we would actually eat an actual dinner actually cooked by us tonight, I prepared everything this morning, like a proper old-school housewife. - And to prove to you that there's more to my life than just cooking, I'd like to point out that I also did a load of laundry and some gardening, while Sven vacuumed the house and mowed the lawn. Yup, we sure know how to enjoy a day off! :p
In other news, my dad is seemingly done with his radiation therapy, at least for the time being. He is very relieved, and it's clear that this has been harder on him than he's entirely willing to admit. He is now completely bald. He looks like a very round Kojak. I hope he won't have to go in for another round, preferably ever. It just seems so ridiculous to put him through all that in order to "alleviate, but not cure, his symptoms." Yeah, great. Not sure it's worth it, at least not to him.