I'll Get You, My Pretty

And your little mom, too.

Tonight, I cooked dinner. That meant that dinner was about an hour late because of a combination of equipment failure and deciding to try something new. See, it was baby back rib night. Now, normally I'd just make my ribs. But people have been getting tired of the ribs. I've been making them the same since about 1993, and slowly the audience has been drifting away. The final straw was when The Mrs. declared that she preferred Traitor Joe's plastic-bagged ribs to mine.

I know she said that just to be mean, but it still motivated me to try something new. And I decided to cook the ribs differently, too.

I got out my barbecue recipe book. I very rarely use a recipe book, mainly because I very rarely cook. But it had about 5 different recipes for pork ribs. The very first recipe had a picture that looked absolutely delicious. It was called "Roasted Salsa Spareribs". It involved making a fresh salsa by roasting Anaheim peppers and tomatoes on the grill, then chopping them up and mixing with cilantro, garlic, and red-wine vinegar. Then you baste the ribs in the salsa while cooking over indirect heat for about an hour.

Mine actually turned out just like the picture. And they tasted great, too. Even The Mrs. seemed to enjoy the ribs.

As for the equipment failure, I have a Weber Performer grill, which is a great grill if you like charcoal. It has a little propane bottle to ignite the coals. You let the propane run for 3-5 minutes, then shut it off. Gets the coals going really quickly. Well, last night when I was grilling the porterhouse steaks I had a hard time getting the coals going. The propane was burning in a lackluster fashion, and with an orange flame. This is one of two things. Either I'm out of propane (which I suspect, since I haven't filled that thing up in three years), or the propane tube needs cleaning again (which I suspect, since I haven't cleaned it in two years.) The propane tube gets filled up with ash and needs cleaning on roughly a yearly basis. I decided not to deal with this today, and to just use the old chimney starter that I used before getting this grill.

The chimney starter works fine, but it takes about 25 minutes longer to get the grill going. I had forgotten that.

So, the long and the short of it is that I had to whip up some guacamole to feed the fambly while I waited for the ribs to finish.

Now, to get back on the original topic, while we were eating dinner HannieC starting smart-mouthing about something or other. I reprimanded her, as a proper parent does, and she said this to me:

You be quiet. You untrained man. You're just an untrained man who doesn't know what he's supposed to be doing.

Now, this was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser. I began fishing. "Did they teach you this in Sunday school today?" No. "Did you hear this from your friends?" No. "Where did you hear such a thing?"

"From Mommy."

Now, The Mrs. is sitting right next to her during all of this, and she immediately denied everything. But HannieC stuck to her guns, claiming that Mommy had said that over a year ago, and she had remembered it since then.

Mommy still denies it.

But we know the truth.