Once more it was a good sale that made me reach for a package of baby back pork ribs, and this past Monday proved to be the right time to roast them. That’s been my go-to method: an ample spice rub and sealing them for an overnight rest, followed by a light smear of dijon mustard and a fresh barbecue spice rub, before settling them onto a pan with a wire rack, covered with a tight seal of foil, to slow roast for several hours. I roasted the rest of the broccoli I had on hand, and got to do my first major sampling of the Midnight Snack cherry tomatoes, which were quite tasty!
But to me the way to make pork ribs even better, even more tender, and even more flavorful is to pull them out of the oven at the end of the cook time, allow the ribs to cool down, wrap ‘em in foil, bag ‘em for an overnight rest in the fridge, and then subject them to a gentle low-heat warm up on a following day. That’s what made the leftovers even more tasty, as a simple solitary meal-snack a few days later.
While the threat of storms Monday was dire enough to earn me a “how-to-prepare” email from Duke Energy, we relished what was instead a perfect breezy day under sunny skies. Sumner and I passed quite a bit of time, first with coffee on the driveway, and then in the yard or under the Bradford pear’s enormous canopy.
A lot of laptop time for me, a lot of nap time for Sumner, and we considered it a winning way to kick off the final week of June. It wasn't until dinnertime that the dark cloud cover moved in, with the barest sprinkle of the shortest interval, a single roll of distant thunder, and then a gradual lightening of the evening sky to indicate the first threat line was passing.
The radar from around 7 o'clock Monday night did show that compact pockets of stormy energy were in play elsewhere...suggesting there was a general threat overall but only isolated specific manifestations of whatever that system was packing.
And then by 8 pm, one of those intense cells passed over downtown Winston-Salem, a brief soaking shower, a bit of lightning and some good rolling thunder...all well-tuned in the key of summer.
And towards the end of it all, from the 3rd floor front dormer window looking out at the city's skyline, there was this endnote:
"How to Make Great Ribs in the Oven," by Emma Christensen. From The Kitchn. [Published 01 July 2017]
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