Ribs (closing in on perfection)

My recipe was different this weekend. I added a wet sauce to the ribs. I started normally with 3 racks of baby back ribs. I coated them with dry rub (Emeril's Rib Rub) and a hearty dose of paprika. Those went on a cherry wood smoke for 2 hours. My heat got a bit too high and I left them on the smoke a bit too long. The smoke ring was tremendous, almost all the way thru the meat between the ribs. The wood chips I used had been soaking for a week in a bucket. When they dried out, they made some tasty white thick smoke.

At the halfway point (2 hours) I basted the ribs with Sonny's Sweet sauce along with another shaking of rib rub. We found it at Sams this week. It doesn't have any junk in it and tastes real good. (Junk is high fructose corn syrup or MSG). Then I wrapped the ribs in foil and left them alone on top of the fire for 4 hours.

They were falling off the bone and very hard to cut, it was so tender. The wet sauce gave them a good caramel sugar coating of BBQ goodness. Temperature control is important. Too hot too long will put a black burn on the meat that is tough to chew. So keep the temperature in the Ideal setting for all six hours.

My Next Batch of Ribs

Before vacation I made a new rub for ribs. I tried it a few weeks ago. Here are the ingredients.

My dry rub consist of turbindeno sugar 1/2 cup(I know I misspelled that), cayenne pepper 1 TBs, chipotole pepper 1 TBs, salt 1/2 cup, black pepper 1/2 cup, dry mustard 3 TBs, and paprika 1/2 cup. I chopped it all in a spice grinder to blend.

The only prep I did to the ribs was to liberally add rub to both sides and rub it in. Then I put another coat on. I smoked them with a bullet type smoker with a propane heat source. I put cherry chips and hickory chunks above the fire. I had a pan of water inside the wood chip bowl and a pan of orange juice and apple juice under the ribs. The liquids help keep the heat down and the moisture up. After two hours in the smoke, I applied more rub and wrapped the ribs in aluminum foil. The trick is to get the foil to hold in the moisture at this point which converts the rub into a sauce. I didn't add any bottled sauce.

As I was cutting the ribs to serve and doing the proper taste testing, I thought there was too much cayenne spice. Later when eating the ribs, the additional meat helped cool down the spice. The next time I make a batch of rub, I am going to cut the 2 hot peppers back by 50% and change the paprika to smoked paprika.

Dip Makin and Dry Rub Creation

We found some new spices this week at Rainbow Grocery. Rainbow is where all the hip people in Jackson go to get their groceries, incense, and tofu burgers. They let the rest of us shop there too.

I found some organic adobo spice. I thought it was going to be like the adobo sauce that the chipotole peppers are stored in. Turns out it is pepper, salt, oregano, garlic, onion, and turmeric. I have to be honest, I used it as the only spice this weekend on our steaks. It wasn't right. The steaks were just ok. They needed salt. So, my views on adobo seasoning is, "Ah, it's ok, just remember to use some salt too."

I found roasted garlic granules. These are wonderful. All the flavor of roasted garlic, and none of the work or squishy finger mess. These puppies are very powerful. I mixed them one to one with my other find, chipotole powder to make a spice for chip dip.

The dip was 1 cup of sour cream with 1 tea spoon of garlic granules and 1 tea spoon of chipotole powder. It was way to garlic. I added 1/2 a tea spoon of Cayenne pepper and balanced it out. This dip was good. It grabs the back of your throat on the way down with that good pepper feeling.

My dry rub consist of turbindeno sugar 1/2 cup(I know I misspelled that), cayenne pepper 1 TBs, chipotole pepper 1 TBs, salt 1/2 cup, black pepper 1/2 cup, dry mustard 3 TBs, and paprika 1/2 cup. I chopped it all in a spice grinder to blend. Going to try it on the next batch of ribs.

BBQ Chicken Speghetti

On the first night in Honduras we fixed speghetti. And as always, we fixed too much. We had a fridge this year and we were able to save two gallons of the mix. It was routine speghetti using Ragu and browned ground beef along with noodles.

As a side note, we fixed 7.5 lbs of meat with 2 large cans and 3 small cans of sause and 6 pounds of dry noodles to feed 50 people. With that, we had two gallons left over.

Back to the story.

Someone suggested we make BBQ Chicken Speghetti. We said, "great idea". Not knowing how to do it, we just winged it. (pun intended). We purchased two chickens that had been roasted and pulled the meat off of them. And for those that know me, yes I did pull the meat off of the birds, amazing! We cut the big chunks of breast meat into bite sizes and mixed the chicken meat in with the speghetti along with a bottle and a half of BBQ sause. We used a local Honduran BBQ sause that was a vinegar based sause like you would find in North Carolina. We stirred it all up and put it in the oven to warm.

Chipotle Dip

My favorite appetizer we made this past week in Honduras was the Chipotle Dip. Mix one box of cream cheese and one cup of mayonnaise with 1/2 cup ranch dip. Stir this together until it is smooth. If you want a mild good flavored dip, use one can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. If you want to kick it up 3 notches, use 2 cans. First open the can and dump all of the peppers onto a cutting board. Slice up the peppers in very small pieces and stir into the cheese mayo mixture. Be sure to get all of the sauce out of the can and off the cutting board. There is a lot of good flavor in the sauce. You are using smoked jalapeno peppers, so be careful not to get them in your eyes or other sensitive areas.

We served this dip with crackers, corn chips, or potato chips.

Rooster Sauce

I found this post on Life hacker talking about "rooster sauce" and adding some Worcestershire sauce for a great steak marinade. Down in the responses, vlatro provided this home made hot sauce recipe. (I hope they don't mind that I blatantly copied it!) But it looks really good to me and worth a try. I've got to do something with all of the peppers Will and I are growing this year.


vlatro 7:08 AM

Not much to work with comment-wise. The Article's pretty solid. So I'll just wander off on a tangent here...

I've been making my own hot sauce for a few years now. It's unbelievably easy and can save you a ton if you go through a lot of it.

A $7 (8oz) jar of decent hot sauce lasts about a week in my house. Doing the math, that's $354 a year just in one condiment. So I decided to find a cheaper alternative.

I grow my own hot peppers (they'll grow pretty much anywhere in the Continental US, and many other places as well). That'll be the bulk of your cost.

I prefer Jalapenos and Habeneros, along with the hot Thai chili and Cayenne.

The recipe is simple. Put your preferred peppers (1lb) in a blender along with one cup vinegar. Puree the mix and move it to a sauce pan. Add any dry spices and seasonings (Mustard powder, Turmeric, Garlic, Salt, Onion powder, whatever you want). Add in 5 more cups of vinegar. Boil until you've reduced it by half, stirring occasionally. Strain the mix through a cheese cloth into bottles. Makes 1 quart.

If you want to get fancy, try smoking some of the peppers, add white wine or Bourbon in place of some of the vinegar. Citric acid will kick up the heat quite a bit. Experiment. My exact recipe makes the sauce deadly hot. Many people prefer a milder taste. Start with a small batch, get it just the way you want it and then expand it to fill the quantity you need.

Remember, there's no such thing as a real sauce recipe. The fruit, in this case the peppers, will vary in flavor dramatically from one pepper to the next, so taste it constantly and season and cook to desired taste and consistency.

1 Gallon = 16 8oz bottles. My cost per gallon was about $4.00. That compared to $112.00 for the same amount purchased in the grocery store. Not to mention the home made stuff is way better.

My First Sauce done on the Grill

I've been watching a bunch of Bobby Flay reruns on Bar B Que. He likes to put some kind of sauce on almost everything he does. So I tried it. My girls call my result fancy ketchup. I am leaning toward calling it a tangy steak sauce. I was grilling redfish when I made it, but it works good on steak too.

I melted 1/2 a stick of butter and added 1/4 cup of onions cut into small pieces. I sauteed the onions until the turned soft. I added the juice from one lime and 6 0z. of pineapple juice and one can of rotel. I also added a small scoop of brown sugar and stirred it in. I kept on cooking everything until much of the liquid was gone.

If I had stopped there, I would have had a spicy salsa topping for the fish I was grilling. By cooking it down the spice factor shot up. My boys would have eaten it and loved it, but it was a bit too spicy for me and Donna.

We then added 6 oz of tomato juice and I liquified it with a blender. It came out looking like ketchup but with a chili sauce flavor. Just the right amount of heat. I would call it mild. Somewhat like cocktail sauce but with jalapenos instead of horseradish as the spice.

WOKs Up Doc?

Dad's making a huge mess in the kitchen again. We are getting a new stove for Christmas, and to get ready for that, we began cleaning out the cabinets. Look what we found, our old WOK!

It was hiding in the back of the cabinet behind the Tupperware, curly potato cutter, and our collection of thermoses.


Our creation for the evening was Stir Fry Steak. We grabbed a bag of mixed veggies and a bag of mixed peppers and onions. (Kroger has them on sale this week in their 10 for $10 sale). We put some coconut oil in the bottom along with some sesame seed oil, some soy sauce, and some garlic sauce. After heating up the oil, we threw in the veggies and got them hot stirring occasionally.



The steak was from left overs. (We only buy it when the Kroger butcher puts it in the quick sale section.) Donna cut them up into strips and we added the meat to the veggies. We added some salt, pepper, and yellow curry and let everything get hot. Donna fixed some rice (brown organic) and we spooned the stir fry on top. I added some red curry paste to my rice cause I like it hot and spicy!

It turned out pretty tasty. One thing I will do different next time is to thaw the veggies first. They were frozen when I put them in the wok, and it took much longer to cook than it should plus it added unwanted water in the wok. I think pretty much any bag of mixed veggies works. We used a bag of mixed peppers and onion and the Mexican mix with broccoli and corn.