Pork Spare Ribs

I always thought it was silly when people blogged their food. And the diet-obsessed fitness crowd is the worst at this! It's bad enough that these people eat the most boring, bland food known to man, but they have to include the time of day and nutritional profile of everything. People don't care about your oatmeal and organic blueberries! Seriously, nobody cares.

Yet still I find myself writing about food.

But the difference between me and the granola munchers is I eat their "cheat meals" everyday, I eat a lot of it and I could care less about calories. If you're one of those lonely few who turn their nose up at a good steak because it's too marbled, you might as well stop reading now. But if you're somebody who likes to eat, and doesn't mind cooking, I've got a mean pork spare rib recipe for you!

First the appetizer...
Vegetable medley: bell peppers, red onion, fresh garlic, squash & asparagus. Stir fry in a wok over medium heat with olive oil, sea salt, black pepper and paprika. Add ingredients as listed about 5 minutes apart in order to cook properly. Very important to get the timing right as peppers take a while to cook and you don't want to overcook the squash or asparagus.

Main course...
Drunken Pork Spare Ribs: marinate ribs in 1/4 cup soy sauce, 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1/4 cup bourbon, 1 tbsp of ketchup, 1 tbsp of Dijon mustard. Cook in marinade for 1hr at 250 degrees and turn. Cook for another 60 min and turn. Increase temp to 350 degrees and cook 30 min until done. For light recipe cook ribs for the first 2 hours on roasting pan to allow some of the grease to drain before putting them back in marinade and increasing the oven temp.

The second picture is actually hickory BBQ ribs. I seasoned the meat with a pork rub and used the "light recipe" cooking directions. I transferred the ribs to a baking pan and added the BBQ sauce for the last 30 min. They were equally as delicious.

You can play around with the cooking time/temp to produce a more tender meat but I wouldn't recommend trying to cook ribs in less than 2hrs. From everything I've read, you're looking at closer to 5hrs for a fall-off-the-bone consistency.

And yes, I ate everything shown above. :)