Day 275: Ribs, Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Green Beans
OK, here’s the thing. I was at the grocery store looking at pork tenderloin and noticed a full rack of pork ribs at eye level labeled with the low low price of $5. It must have been mislabeled, I thought. Jackpot! I pictured myself exiting the store in the style of that IKEA ad that I just realized is probably on YouTube. It is.
(This makes me laugh every time I see it.)
But then the one underneath it was $4.65, and so was the next. I don’t know what kind of crazy side rib sale they were having (the back ribs were three times as much), but they were all in the vicinity of $5. So I couldn’t really not buy two. The thing is, I really really love ribs. But I don’t think I’ve ever eaten them so many times in the space of a year. I had intentions of saving them for our birthdays (coming up this month!), but I’m trying to clear out my freezer, not fill it. One of the racks got ejected to make room for a cheesecake (for an event tomorrow night) and so I took two minutes and threw it on a baking sheet, covered it with foil, slid it in the oven, turned it on to 300 degrees and went out. (Don’t worry, Mike was home.) The key to ribs that don’t pull your teeth out is precooking; I find roasting easier and less messy than boiling, but you could do that too. After that all you do is paint on some sauce and throw them on the grill just to finish them off (and heat them through, if the precooking was done in advance), and in this case I slid a few small, long sweet potatoes, poked with a fork, onto a rack beside them. The green beans went into a pot with about an inch of simmering water for about 5 minutes. Really, this dinner took about 5 minutes of actual work. For real.
(I should also mention in my defense that the plate in the above photo isn’t the traditional dinner-size, but halfway between dinner plates and dessert plates. Lunch plates? To put things into perspective, portion-wise. Which isn’t to say a few ribs didn’t disappear before they made it to the dinner table.)
October 01 2008 | pork | 10 Comments »
