Baby Back Ribs

It's beginning to get nice - you can feel it - The days are getting a little longer, the sun on occasion is beginning to show itself. Heck, baseball begins next week! With all of this, you think summer can't be too far off - Along those lines, I was getting a hankering for some summer food. We hadn't done ribs all winter. Unbelievable when you think about -  so the time was right. Ribs were on sale, I took a Friday off - Everything was in proper alignment.  You can click on the images to increase their size so you can see whats going on.

We will be making a rub and sauce - We're doing nothing out of the ordinary - Just the standard house, go-to recipe. Old school, baby! It's like 1974. We listen to the same music, we eat the same food, so something good must be going on.

Let's get busy on the rub first. My biggest gripe with store bought rubs is that  they are too dang salty. They are like 50% salt - Yuck.  I prefer a spicy and lightly salty rub. There is no real recipe for these things, you sort of look at what you got and go for it. I like to use dried Guajillo, New Mexican, and chile arbol for the heat. Also dried garlic, onion, corridor seed, ground pepper and salt - 

Grind it all up, mix it up, and we have something that looks like the above.

After removing the membrane off the back of the slabs, we hit them with a little extra virgin olive oil and the rub.

 

We're doing these on the Weber smoker at 235 degrees. We added a couple chucks of peach wood- The above is after about 3 hours. Got a little bark going on at this point. We begin to spritz them with apple juice every so often to keep them moist.

While the meat is doing its thing , we get busy on the sauce. I guess this is what they call a Kansas City type sauce. It's tomato based with sugar. I like to use palm sugar for the sauce. 

After about 5 hours, they get sauced, and flipped a couple of times for about 30 minutes.

 

Served there with some 'tater wedges - Summer really is coming - You can taste it!

Chile Rellenos

Making Chili Rellenos is an operation. We hadn't made them in years, but got the inkling a couple of weeks ago. We had a nice piece of pork so we thought we go for it. We base our recipe off the classic Diana Kennedy recipe - Ours take of course is geared to prepared outside.

We start out with some stuff. There's quite a few steps in the process and it really takes about all afternoon to do.

The recipe is traditional - Well, before we get our hands on it anyway. It calls for the pork to be boiled and then simmered - Not happening! We need to get some smoke on that thing first - On the WSM for about 3 hours with peach wood...

Then chopped up and into some cast iron - We need some pork induced liquid so we need to submerge and simmer for a bit ...

Cut up the pork,  add some onion, peppers, spices  and chicken broth  - Into the  pot and back on to the cooker.

We let it go another hour or so - just simmering to mingle the flavors, and get some of that sweet  pork juice a flowing.

While the pork simmers, we get busy on the chilies and tomato broth. Blister the peppers then into a bag to steam prior to peeling.

Meanwhile, we simmer the broth and get some beans going - Right now, the kitchen is beginning to smell pretty dang good.

Next we haul the pork in, and add some more deliciousness to the mix - Almonds, raisins, roasted tomato and spices.

After peeling the peppers, we make an insertion, and carefully remove the seeds and membrane from inside. Then they are stuffed with the pork.  At this point they are dusted with flour and dipped in a egg white bath and gently fried - Oh yea!

Smother in the tomato broth and served with rice and beans - These are tasty treat!

Smoked Turkey Breast

We ended up with an extra turkey over Thanksgiving - I don't remember the exact situation, but  I think we had one larger one,(15 lbs)  then decided based on the number of folks that we were hosting thought it better to do 2 smaller ones - something like that - Anyway, the result being, we had a very nice 15 pound Diestel Ranch organic turkey sitting in our freezer. It was too big for just me and Doris, so we decided to do a couple of different things with it.  We have smoked breasts before, but we've never done the entire process of boning and prepping them - We now had the proper opportunity. click on the images to enlarge and get a good view of whats going on.

Here she is - I think its a she anyway. We did our typical brine regiment - For a 15 pound bird, it takes about 24-30 hours to brine.

The idea was to remove the breast meat intact. To do this, first the legs and wings come off. Sometimes its easier if you remove the wishbone first,  but knowing where it is and that you have to deal with it is usually enough. Above is the result - Seemed to work just fine. We prepared the wings, legs & thighs for dinner -  We made broth out of the carcuss.

We skinned the breast, and then seasoned the insides with a mix of crushed brown mustard, rosemary, garlic, sage, thyme and bay leaves.

This is where it got a bit interesting. We had some netting, but the breast wad wasn't cooperating. the netting seemed too small of a diameter, as we were having trouble getting it over the breast.We tried a couple of different approaches, and then Doris came up with this handy devise. A cup with the netting stretched over it. We essentially stuck the the breast in the cup, and just fed the netting over  - This worked great - I tell yea, it was looking a bit grim there for a bit.

Booyah! success - we secured the ends - seasoned the outside, and we were about ready to go.

Arch had hooked us with the smoking rack at Christmas for the Weber smoker - It worked great!

sliced and ready to go - Turkey sandwich  anyone? -