use real butter

Recipe: slow-oven ribs

Some of you may wonder if I cook as often as I post (well, lately I haven’t posted as frequently and there is a good reason for that). Um… yes and no. My cooking and baking tend to cluster in that I will make 3-5 recipes in one sitting and shoot them all to blog about eventually. It’s an OCD dream come true really – keeping all of that straight in your head. I suppose it’s very good practice for those times I entertain guests for dinner. In any case, I have days where I whip something up and the little voice (me) in the back of my head says, “Oh, you oughta shoot this” and the other voice (me) in the front of my head says, “Yeah – you can go shoot it…” and those are the days I don’t record what I make.

I have recipes in queue for times when I feel unmotivated or times like tomorrow, when I’ll be out of commission for a day or more and unable to cook or bake anything. I just find it funny that I decided to post about barbecue pork ribs on a day when we finally, we finally got a decent dump of snow here. I’ve been waiting for it all season and of course, leave it to the storm track to arrive right before I can’t take advantage. Ah well…

Recipe: chinese hot pot

While I was pondering a non-trad Thanksgiving menu, HolyBasil reminded me of a favorite dish from my childhood: Chinese hot pot. Call it what you want, huo guo, shabu shabu, fondue… it’s delicious and fun. My mom prepared this on cold nights and it was perfect for someone as picky as my sister. I distinctly recall the steam rising from the broth in the electric wok, fogging the insides of every window in the kitchen. The wok was the centerpiece of the table, surrounded by plates and bowls of colorful vegetables, meats, noodles, and tofu – ready to be picked and cooked. My mother hand sliced everything with such precision and laid out all of the ingredients in beautiful fans.

Recipe: chocolate stout chili

It can get pretty cool where we live… sometimes down to -20F. I don’t mind the cold. I actually enjoy stepping out into the winter air and feeling the inside of my nose crackle when I breath in. The only real hardship of winter that we encounter is the wind (because snow isn’t hardship, it is recreation). And we encounter it up to 100 mph at times. So while I might not feel cold in 10F, I will feel chilled to the bone at 32F with a wind whipping away every unit of heat my body produces (and I produce a lot of heat – some may call it hot air). It’s blowing today and I can hear the loose sections of roofing flapping in the gusts. I sincerely hope the roofers call before the pieces go flying off into… Kansas.

Soups and stews are so utterly perfect for cold weather days. When I was a graduate student in central New York, I would rally a chili cookoff among the graduate students during this time of year. We always had an impressive array of chilis that included: curry, chocolate, beer, vegetarian, chicken, or the hottest hot you could imagine. It was always a geochemist who went for entering the hottest chili. That’s when my friend Ben thought he made chili from the butt of a pig. He kept chuckling, “Mine is made from Pork Butt.” We finally told him he was an idiot and that the pork butt is part of the shoulder. I should also note that the majority of our cookoff participants were men!

My most recent incarnation of chili involves two of those inspired variations from the cookoffs: chocolate and stout. Chocolate stout, to be precise. I have one of those prize-winning recipes that requires throwing in chorizo, a cow, and a pig, and a million other ingredients, but I like this simple recipe because it’s something you can whip up fairly quickly and because the guys at the local liquor barn get a kick out of my food-related booze purchases.