A friend asked if I wouldn’t mind giving her my recipe for BBQ ribs.
“Sure, no problem,” as I opened Grandma’s old hand-me-down box stuffed with a smorgasbord of meals sure to keep ’em coming back week after week. The card labeled “Ribs” was smeared up with ketchup, finished sauce, and a few ingredients from the recipe cards in front of and behind it. Measurements had long ago flown out the window, and I was stumped as all get-out about what to write down on a shiny new card for my friend.
Though I cooked up a kettleful of ribs at least once a month, it was tough to explain exactly how I made them.
Jotting down “Spare Ribs” was a good start, but then I got to thinking… Was she using regular ribs, country, or baby backs? Fresh, frozen, or pre-packaged?
I started laughing at myself as my little predicament totally equaled a trip to the parts store. “Go pick up a gasket for the combine” was supposedly a simple task to help out with, but once at the store, your “deer in the headlights” stare at the counter person about shut your brain down for good. Questions of “left?, right?, upper?, lower?” were answered with clueless shoulder shrugs and “I dunno”s.
Deciding that drawing pictures would be a good way to transfer information and cooking instructions from one cook to another, I stapled a few cards together and sharpened my pencil.
Three sizes of kettles were listed at the top, along with side directions according to whether my friend was using a gas, electric, or convection oven. Whoa… different amounts of ingredients would be used for each, so the cards were split up and categorized accordingly.
Impressed with my artwork so far, I sure hoped she would figure out that the curly tail sticking out of the roaster was actually a joke.
Racking my brain on “step two” of adding salt, pepper, and onion to the simmering side of ribs, I penciled in “shake a little more salt than pepper over the top,” as I drew a dark circle of dots with an X over it.
The quantity of ketchup used to start the sauce was hard to relay in pictures, as I used about half a bottle, and they varied in size from teacup to enormous. I drew a picture of a feed scoop and placed a line about halfway up; that should do it.
How does a person draw a “dash” of lemon juice? Ahhh, think back to mud pies. After the dirt and berries are mixed together, the amount of water used to make it stick together would be comparable to your lemon-juice ration.
Vinegar was a tough one. Sketching a picture of Aunt Helen’s puckered face – that would be too much.
Sometimes I use a little water and sometimes I don’t, depending on the brand of ketchup. A picture of an oil well next to an outside water hydrant worked well, with instructions to “make it about halfways in-between.”
Worcestershire sauce will entirely make or break your ribs. It took a whole recipe card alone to draw and explain a flat tire on a livestock trailer beside a busy highway. If the trailer’s empty, use about “that” much. If it’s full of bellering cattle, splash in a little more. If your husband borrowed the jack and forgot to put it back in the pickup, pour in the whole dang bottle!
Very, very important but easy to relate to: There’s a time when you have to take out the ribs, drain the fat, and add the sauce to continue baking. Complicated and done by smell and instinct, my drawing of being bucked off a horse related to “too late, your ribs are toast.” The picture of a horse’s tail tucked, shortly before dumping a person in the dirt, depicted that the spare ribs should have been removed half a gallop before. Happy horse, happy rider, jogging down the trail represented the perfect moment to remove the ribs. The added picture of a moose crashing through the brush around a sharp turn depicted a flat-out disaster and “start again from scratch.” Remember to wear oven mitts, as spare ribs all over the kitchen floor are dang hard to clean up and harder to hide.
There, the “Little Picture Book of Spare Ribs” recipe was finished and ready to hand over to my friend. Betty Crocker just doesn’t have a clue how easy this is…