I made sure to read the recipe early on to allow for ample cooking time. For big meals like this we often end up eating around 10 p.m., but I wanted to serve dinner a little sooner than that. Preparations involved making a rub and marinating the three slabs of pork ribs a day in advance.
The day-of preparation began around 2 p.m. The hickory wood chips needed to soak for an hour, while I prepared the barbecue. Around 3 p.m. I tossed the ribs on the barbie.
They then sat on the barbecue for the next three hours, until they were fall-off-the-bone tender. After that, they looked like this:
I think it's strange that people consider barbecuing such manly work. It's mostly prep work, i.e. marinating meat then tossing it in the barbecue for a few hours to let it cook. You don't really have to tend to it. The real work is in the calculations, figuring out the heat, the amount of time it needs to cook for, etc. By comparison grilling is much more manly since you're dealing with an open fire. But I digress.
Anyway, the plated ribs looked like this:
In the meantime while the ribs were barbecuing, I made a barbecue sauce from scratch, which took a couple hours as well. Rounding out the meal we had cornbread, corn on the cob, and asparagus.
Overall the meal was quite good. Allowing for the extra time for the ribs to cook meant we neither rushed the meal nor ate dinner too late. Actually, we got dinner on the table a little after 7 p.m., which wasn't bad for us. I ended up eating a rack all by myself.
For dessert, Sister C made blueberry tarts, as requested by mom. It was something she came up with and last made over ten years ago.
Overall it was a successful Mothers' Day. Mom was happy she didn't have to wake up early to let out the dogs, dinner was good and served in a timely fashion, and nobody died. You can't ask for much more.
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