Strange meats

Tonight's Menu

• grilled cross-cut baby back ribs
• chips
  
• coleslaw
• sliced tomatoes
• freezer pickles

My grocery store has had some unusual cuts of meat lately. I usually go for spareribs if I'm going to do ribs, but these cross-cut baby back ribs were WAY cheap. We'd had some at a neighborhood potluck not too long ago and they were yummy, so I decided to try something different for a change.

I had purchased a locally produced molasses-garlic marinade for the ribs but upon getting it home, I discovered that soy sauce was the second ingredient on the label. Argh! DH and the girl are allergic to soy, so that meant I couldn't use it. (I have GOT to learn to read those labels a little more closely in the store! I never dreamed a molasses-garlic marinade would be soy-based. Stupid!) So I had to cobble together a marinade from what I had in the pantry/fridge. I ended up whisking together some bourbon, brown sugar, orange juice & zest, minced garlic (I actually grated a large clove on my microplane), garam masala, salt & pepper, onion powder and cayenne. I marinated the ribs in a big plastic zipper bag for about 3-4 hours.

After the ribs had marinated I grilled them over medium heat for just a couple of minutes per side to get some nice grill marks/browning on them. Then I moved them to an unlit burner for a good 45 minutes. They weren't QUITE as tender as I would have liked, but they weren't too terribly chewy, and they were super flavorful! If I made these again, I'd leave them a bit longer over the unlit burner to really render out all that fat and get them nice and tender.

Coleslaw was the usual, left over from last night when we had fish tacos.

We're still eating the freezer pickles I made a few weeks ago from the CSA cucumbers. Yum!