Rich Mintz  

I wondered how well this technique would work on other slow-braised meats, like beef brisket. Turns out it’s delicious — just as good as with baby back ribs, maybe better — and even easier because you’re dealing with a flatter piece of meat.

I like the pot-roast method of preparing brisket just fine (there’s a recipe I picked up years ago that involves slathering the browned brisket in tomato paste, then laying it on a deep bed of sliced onions in the pot), and an advantage is that you end up with rich broth that you can turn into soup. But this new sweet-and-sour method is so good, and so easy, it’s going into rotation.

I’ve written before about my attempts to use the iPad more aggressively as a laptop replacement, and I am starting to have some success. In particular, the combination of the Twelve South Compass iPad Stand (more here) and the Marware Sport Grip iPad Case have made the thing much more useful. The rubberized (actually silicone) Marware case improves “lap grip” for casual typing, and the Compass makes the iPad more suitable for tabletop use in 3 different positions.

I’ve also started using my Apple Bluetooth aluminum keyboards (at home and at work) with the iPad, and aside from temperamental pairing (basically, any paired Mac laptop within 1/4 mile takes precedence over the iPad, so you constantly have to un-pair your laptop and re-pair the iPad), this works great too. Now I’ve started to fiddle around the edges of the system to make it incrementally more usable.

One thing that drives me crazy is that (unless you buy the custom keyboard dock) there’s no keyboard shortcut for “press the Home button on the iPad,” and so no way to activate fast app switching without fumbling with the iPad touchscreen. Except, wait a minute — as I learned this morning, there is! It takes advantage of VoiceOver, the iOS accessibility scheme.

It’s actually quite easy (click through to the source post for more).

First, you activate VoiceOver on the iPad, and specify that a Home button triple-press will turn VoiceOver on or off. Then, you just learn a few simple commands and practice, and a lot of common quickie things (like app switching, scrolling through web pages, etc.) become possible without taking your hands off the keyboard. This is most useful when, e.g., you’re writing a blog post on the iPad, in the WordPress app, using the keyboard, and you want to hop over to a web page for a second to check something. Now you can do that without your hands leaving the keyboard, as follows:

1. press ctrl-opt-H twice to bring up the app switcher
2. press right-arrow to move to Safari, then ctrl-opt-spacebar to tap
3. press opt-down-arrow to scroll in Safari (or, if needed, right-arrow to move to the page selection button, etc.)
4. when done, switch back, via ctrl-opt-H twice, then right-arrow as needed, then ctrl-opt-spacebar to tap

It’s easier than it sounds. And this is without using Quick Nav (as described in the article, which for some kinds of operations is faster). Try it and see.

I was surprised to receive in the mail this sympathy card, signed personally by all the doctors, nurses, and staff who helped Clio through her final days of illness. It was a nice gesture, and indicative of the high-touch service I experienced throughout my time dealing with the West Village Veterinary Hospital. Thanks!

I’ve always thought of ribs (whether of the beef, pork, spare, or baby back variety) as something that Other People cooked — you know, people who weren’t cut until the fourth episode of Top Chef, or got a culinary degree like my brother, or had a grandfather with a little store out on US 78 near Bamberg. At the very least, I assumed you needed either a restaurant kitchen, or a pit in the sand, or an oil drum cut in half and a stack of artisanal Long Island willow branches, along with a bunch of knowledge I didn’t have the benefit of.

Obviously in a Mason-Dixon world, I’m a Yankee. But I lived in Atlanta off and on for years, and during that whole time I was dating a Southerner — not the sort of Southerner that lives out in Powder Springs and drives a pickup with a gun rack and listens to this, but the sort whose family is still living out in the rural Lowcountry of South Carolina, near where they’ve been for generations. And during that period I also spent months in Arkansas (which we’ll talk about another time), and driving back and forth via Birmingham and Memphis. And, besides, I came to Atlanta with an open mind (it’s a lot more fun that way), and so broadened my tastes in such close-to-the-heart matters as music, home decor, religion, politics, and food (come to think of it, that last link could have worked for “home decor,” too).

My childhood memories of “barbecue” were mostly of “ribs,” and with few exceptions, those were all of either the “Tony Roma’s” (i.e., charred and sinewy) or what New Yorkers would recognize as the “Dallas BBQ” (i.e., boiled and soused in what is essentially syrupy ketchup) variety. Meh.

I learned better barbecue habits when I came South: the sauce-ingredient loyalties that identify one as a partisan of a particular region, state, or in some cases county; what good ribs taste like, in about 40 incarnations in eight states; and what side dishes are worth bothering with. (Cole slaw, rarely, except at Newt Gingrich’s favorite Williamson Bros. in Marietta; cornbread, never within 10 miles of the Georgia State House except in restaurants established before 1950; collards, everywhere that bothers to offer them.)

However, until this week I never tried cooking ribs at home. By “never” I mean I tried it a few times when I was a young adult; the results were always absolutely awful; and I gave it up for 20 years. Let’s face it, ribs are tricky. You start with a rather intricate hunk of raw animal matter. You may need to do a bit of prep to trim off bits here and there, which is a turnoff for the squeamish (e.g., almost everyone under 70 living within a 10-mile radius of Times Square). You need a long cooking period, at a low heat, that keeps the meat moist enough but not too wet. And then there’s the near-religious question of rubs, seasonings, infusions, and/or sauces. It’s enough to make you throw up your hands and put a box of Trader Joe’s frozen macaroni and cheese in the oven.

But when I saw this story in the Times (for what it’s worth, the print paper) — and, in particular, this recipe — I decided to give it a shot. I’ve always had a weakness for a caramelized exterior on a rib (one reason I’m such a fan of Whole Hog, which fortunately was about a 2-minute drive from my Little Rock apartment, aka “Bates Motel Rock Vegas,” right around the corner from a real-live murder house!… but again I digress), and I wanted to see if I could pull it off.

Guess what? I could! And the recipe was not hard to follow, and is hard to ruin and easy to adapt to your taste and/or the sauce ingredients that happen to be on hand, and is so uncomplicated that once you’ve done it a first time, you can do it again from memory. Photo of part of the fresh-out-of-the-oven results at top (click for larger). Here’s what I learned:

Follow your instincts. I wanted something much spicier than the recipe called for, and because I had them on hand, I added both ajvar and Vietnamese chili-garlic sauce (in place of ketchup, which I don’t bother keeping in the house because I don’t go through a whole bottle of it in 3 years). I worried about the ajvar, since it’s full of eggplant and peppers, but with so much sugar and balsamic vinegar as the base, you could probably mix in half a cup of mucilage and the sauce would come out okay. The caramelized coating was a little lumpy, but who cares? I wasn’t cooking for the Queen. Similarly, I like sauced ends, so I cut the racks in smaller pieces so there would be more of them.

Cook longer, and slower, than you think you have to. The ribs came out delicious, but they would have been even better with another 30 minutes in the oven. Similarly, I had to boost the oven for a while because I had other dishes in there too; that probably inhibited my collagen liquification just a bit.

Caramelizing the surface of a rack of ribs is not brain surgery. It is a matter of “put something sweet and greasy under a hot fire for just a little longer than you normally would, keeping your eye on it.” That’s it! The crappy broiler in my run-of-the-mill gas oven did the job just fine.

Like so many other things you cook, ribs are better 3 days later. Not much to say here, except that they were perfectly fine right out of the oven, but that by the third day the flavors had melded such that I could have eaten them cold out of the fridge.

Try a drip pan. The recipe as written kept the ribs tightly sealed in the packet; that essentially braised them in their own juices, which is fine, but it yielded a slightly wetter final product than I like. (The Whole Hog product is dry, which I note is not the same thing as “dried out.”) I think next time I’ll try cutting the underside of the foil for the final 30 minutes and letting the excess liquid fall out the bottom.

Thank God for my heavy saucepan, which I seasoned properly early this year after reading this post from the Clever Cleaver and now use four or five times a week, more than any other item of stoveware that I own. In fact, as you can see at right, it’s sitting on my stove right now. You can make a sauce like this without a heavy saucepan, but you’ll be happier if you use one, and you need one anyway. A good seasoned saucepan is like nature’s Teflon; it can get much hotter and holds heat much better than industrial-coated pans do, which lets you cook more gently and more effectively.

After a short rally, Clio, my cat of 12 years, died this week in the veterinary hospital. As much as her death was anticipated, it’s been difficult for me to find the words to talk about it.

This was the first time in my life that the life-or-death decision about a beloved pet was my responsibility and mine alone. Given her age — between 15 and 18 — and her condition, I knew this time would come, but I didn’t know when, and I wasn’t sure that when it did come, I’d be absolutely sure about it.

But after sitting up with her on the floor throughout her final night, a night she spent in discomfort and pain, with no clear path to improvement, I knew it was time. The doctor and nurse on duty when I arrived early in the morning — two of almost a dozen doctors and staff we dealt with during her illness — were gentle, respectful, and compassionate. They had seen her previously, understood and agreed with my decision, and made her end painless for her and about as emotionally tolerable for me as was possible under the circumstances.

Clio had a good, long life, a life she lived in security and with a fair amount of freedom. (For several years, she roamed outdoors at will, in the ravine behind my house near downtown Atlanta, until she had a scare several years ago and decided she’d be safer inside.) She knew that she was loved, and that to the best of my ability I would protect her, which is more assurance than many souls ever get. I’m happy about all that. But I’m sad that she’s gone. Now the house is quiet, and after almost a week I still find it jarring to be alone here.

Thanks to all who have expressed your concern about Clio. The good news last week was that her biopsy was negative; the bad news, that she has a severe intestinal irritation of a type that’s often pre-cancerous. And the immediate challenge was that she had been completely refusing to eat for two weeks, despite the kitty appetite stimulants, kitty Pepcid, kitty Pepto-Bismol, and kitty steroids I’ve been trying to push into her. By yesterday she’d lost at least 20% of her body weight and was looking quite poorly.

I’ve had a dickens of a time pilling this cat — she may be old, sick, weak, and without front claws, but she’s incredibly willful, and her paws, tongue, and fangs still work. She’s only bit me once, but I was still concerned yesterday that I was having so much trouble getting the steroids into her, which were supposed to help her restore her equilibrium and get her eating again.

So last night I took her to the veterinary clinic and they gave her a steroid injection, along with a rehydration. And the effect was virtually immediate. After about half an hour, we decided to see if she might eat a little something; she got a whiff of tuna on the air and she was READY. She nibbled at tuna all evening; by this morning, looking at her, she’s still sick and tired, obviously, but her aspect’s no longer alarming, and her personality is back, as you can see from this photo of her sitting beside me as I type this.