Taking the rest of the week off, woo hoo! Fall break from High School for our son, so he and I are going all cave man and smoking baby back ribs today. We made a dry rub earlier, not to a recipe, we are more daring than that.
Ribs are now cooking, low and slow. The smell is fantastic. It’s a beautiful Autumn day, fresh air, blue sky, but still happy to be outside in shorts and t-shirt.
Mrs ROTW gets home from work soon and then she is off for the rest of the week too. We are going to upgrade phones as it is a free upgrade, then when we get back those ribs might be close.
I have a small group coming over first christmas so put together the shopping list and have spent a few days going to different places to pick up everything I need. But I totally out of luck finding suet anywhere in this godforsaken country. It’s not even that places dont have it, it’s that when I ask someone they look at me like I’m an alien. I can find a pack on amazon that will cost me $35 and not get here until Jan7th, but that kind of tells the story of how difficult it is to get here.
This is primarily for the christmas pudding. I know butter is a crap alternative but does anyone know anything better?
It’s a weird experience given the superficial similarities, but christmas is a time that really drives home the difference between the US and UK. Mince pies? no chance. Christmas Cake? Never heard of it. Yule log? Yeah sure, but only these fancy ones for $50.
You’d be amazed. The “hipster” movement of the 00s brought back food trends that lended themselves to having real butchers and so 3 or 4 opened up, but none of them were actual butchers. They were just stores that sold more/different meat than you could get at the supermarket. But like all of those, the butchering was done off site
Smack in the middle of Orlando. I know of not a single real butcher and every thing you can find that touts itself as one is just a store where they sell meat.
Suet is beef ‘kidney’ fat sure if you ask for suet they will look at you strangely.
I can not imagine that in the US they don’t have some sort of beef fat. Anyway if not try pork fat (known as lard here in France). It’s worth finding what the locals call it.
(The important thing is suet is the fat found around bovine kidney, perhaps your just in the wrong state, move to Texas).
Its 9 in the morning and lunch menu has just been finalized. Rice, chicken gravy and prawn curry, served with slices of onion and lemon. Might get topped up with a bowl of raita. Going to be the best Monday of the year.
Lazy Christmas Day here. Kids older so we got up at a sensible time and did presents. Mimosas on the go, smoked salmon bagel, with cream cheese and capers.
In a while we will do some nice prawns, tossed in garlic.
The big meal of the day will be a bit later, a rib roast. Special day, special meal, cooked rare to medium rare, with all the trimmings.
Charcuterie and cheeses on the go, but I doubt I will have any of that, not today.
Crème brûlée will be a nice dessert, something sweet, but not too heavy after all the other stuff. I will get out a little blow torch and pretend I’m a chef.
we were coming back from the States last weekend, did a Costco shop and one of our purchases was a package of pork ribs. so I did a version of a 3-2-1 on them and they cooked for about 5hrs. bones pulled right out, clean. Fed 6 of us, and still had a 1/3 of a rack left over.
so what do you do with that much leftover ribs? make Mac & Cheese with the deboned meat. complete with brussel sprouts, because I love them.
going to add a recipe here for anyone who would like to make brussel sprouts, my 9yo eats them
prepare the sprouts by trimming the end an taking off the outer leaves. cut in half through the stem. put cut-side down in a med-hot fying pan (that has a lid!)with TBSP of EV olive oil and a TSP of bacon fat (flavor) close to smoking hot. let them sear in the oil for 60sec while you add S&P, and a bit of chili flake. once you get that sear on the cut edge (like you see above), lower the pan temp to med-low and add about 100ml of water to the pan, cover immediately. this will steam the sprouts, about 4-5min. I buy bags of crumbled bacon, which I will add to the sprouts when they’re finished cooking.
for the mac/cheese recipe above, I assembled the dish and then folded the cooked sprouts into the casserole before topping with cheese and baking for 10min. every part of the dish was already cooked (bechamel cheese sauce, etc) so baking was just to finish the dish off.
