Mom's Ribs

“What did Mom make for dinner every night when we were little,” I recently asked one of my sisters.

Our mother cooked dinner most days of the every week, except when she and our father would eat dinner out. On those occasions, my siblings and I would eat TV dinners, or canned ravioli, or perhaps Beanie Weenies, if my older sister got involved in the cooking. Don’t feel sorry for us. We considered those kinds of meals to be treats. At least I did.

But every other night she prepared a meal that included some kind of meat, some kind of starch (generally potatoes), and some kind of vegetable. She wasn’t big on fresh vegetables, so we generally ate canned peas, corn or beans. Again, don’t feel sorry for us. My mother was a fabulous cook, and we thought the canned vegetables were delicious.

But back to the question I posed to my sister.

“Fried chicken, breaded pork chops, pot roast, meat loaf, things like that,” my sister recalled.

Being so dedicated to providing my father and their four kids with a nutritious and delicious meal every night, I wonder if she ever struggled to think of what to cook for dinner the way that I do. Probably.

I thought most of the meals she made were delicious; some, probably not so much. For me, breaded pork chops – which were my father’s personal favorite – didn’t thrill me. I ate them, because my mother was not the sort who would become a short-order cook because one of her children didn’t care for a meal.

But I was surprised to learn, during this same conversation with my sister, that she wasn’t a fan of my mother’s roasted spareribs and saurkraut. “When I would come home from school and ask Mom what was for dinner, and she would tell me it was spareribs and saurkraut, I would be very disappointed,” admitted my sister.

Not me. That was one of my favorite meals. Except that at some point during my youth, Mom decided to start putting apples in the saurkraut. I never enjoyed it quite as much after that. I would try to pick out the apple, but since the meal was cooked in the oven, the softened apples pretty much became part of the saurkraut. Oh well.

Mom was not big on recipes, unfortunately. She wrote down a few of her specific dishes, such as her cole slaw dressing and her gazpacho. But as for her regular main dishes, not many recipes. Sometimes I try to recreate her meals from memory, but mostly I go on the Internet or look at my cookbooks and see what I can find.

That’s what I did recently when I developed an overwhelming desire for these baked spareribs. And I found my recipe in a somewhat surprising place – one of my Lidia Bastianich cookbooks!

I would link to her recipe on her website, but it’s not on her website, so I will simply tell you that the recipe comes from Lidia’s Italian-American Kitchen, copyright 2002.

Spare Ribs Roasted with Vinegar and Red Pepper
6 servings
1 rack (about 3-1/2 pounds) pork spare ribs
Sea or kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1/3 c. extra-virgin olive oil
12 cloves garlic, peeled
4 fresh or dried bay leaves
1 cup (or as needed) canned chicken broth
1 cup dry white wine
½ cup red wine vinegar
2 tablespoons honey
1 to 2 teaspoons crushed hot red pepper

Cut the rack of spare ribs between the bones into single ribs. Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.

Pat the spare ribs dry and season them with salt and pepper. Toss them in a roasting pan into which they fit comfortably with the olive oil, garlic, and by leaves. Pour in the broth and roast, turning occasionally, until the liquid is almost completely evaporated and the ribs are golden brown, 45 minutes to an hour.

Meanwhile, stir the wine, vinegar, honey, and crushed red pepper together in a small bowl until the honey is dissolved.

Brush all sides of the ribs with some of the vinegar glaze, then pour the remaining glaze into the roasting pan. Continue baking, turning every few minutes, until the glaze is syrupy and the ribs are mahogany brown and sticky to the touch, about 30 minutes. Spoon off as much of the fat as you like before serving the ribs.

I used a rack of baby back ribs instead of pork ribs since they seem more manageable, and I was cooking only for my husband and me. It took the whole hour before the liquid came close to being evaporated. And I’m not sure my ribs were ever sticky to the touch, but they did turn a lovely golden brown.

I served the ribs with saurkraut (sans apples), mashed potatoes, and corn. I, of course, mixed all of these courses together on my plate and had one big delicious supper. The meat came off the bones easily, and the flavors went terrifically with the saurkraut.

Here’s to you, Mom!

Kitchen Essentials

I haven’t posted a blog entry for a while because we have been in Arizona, busily setting up the home we bought in Phoenix last March.

Setting up a new home has been an interesting experience for me. We have lived in our house in Denver since we were married 18 years ago. We have no intention of moving to Phoenix permanently, or even of becoming so-called snowbirds, any time soon. All but one of our children, and all but one of our grandchildren, are here, so here is where we want to be most of the time. Instead, our plan is to get out of Dodge when we see or hear about some bad weather coming. We will probably be in our Arizona house a few weeks at a time throughout the winter.

But, when we are there, we want it to feel like home. For me, that means being able to cook and eat at home. So I headed straight for the kitchen to begin my nesting.

My kitchen in Denver has everything I need. In fact, my family mocks me for some of the can’t-live-without appliances and accessories that I have purchased over the years. I don’t use the term lightly. Frankly, the mocking is often well deserved.

For example, do I really need that long, thin olive dish that I have used exactly never? What about the teeny-tiny propane torch to heat up the sugar on the top of the crème brulee that I have made once? Then there’s the food mill that I felt was a critical purchase because my beloved Lidia Bastianich uses it to make her red sauce. I used it once only to discover that it was an extreme pain in the you-know-what. Oh, and don’t forget those three crock pots which attract dust in my basement storage room.

Setting up this new kitchen, particularly since we are on a budget as we are now making a new house payment, has required that I think carefully about what sorts of things I really CAN’T live without to be a good cook as opposed to those things I THINK I can’t live without.

Here is the list of things that I have decided I can’t live without, in no particular order:

· One good chef’s knife
· A reasonably good paring knife
· One 10-12 inch cast iron skillet (to fry chicken and steaks) with lid
· One good 10-12 inch non-stick skillet (to cook everything else) with lid
· One decent sized saucepan with lid
· A Dutch oven that can be used on the stovetop and in the oven – preferably cast iron, and most preferably with enamel coating
· A coffee pot
· A toaster
· A cookie sheet
· 9 X 11 pan
· 8 X 8 pan
· Tongs
· A couple of wooden spoons
· A spatula
· Dining plates and utensils
· Steak knives
· A corkscrew
· A bottle opener
· A can opener

There’s probably more. My bigger point is that I certainly need far less than I think I do when I visit kitchen stores. After all, pioneer women probably cooked and baked using a cast iron pan and little else. This isn’t to say, however, that I have any intention of throwing away my electric waffle iron any time soon, despite the fact that I’m much more likely to breakfast at Village Inn than to fire up the waffle iron. And while I can’t currently afford to purchase a second one for my Phoenix home, you would truly have to pry my Kitchen Aid standup mixer out of my cold, dead fingers to take it from me.

Even though I never saw Ma use one on Little House on the Prairie.