June 2, 2014 New Recipe - Baked Boneless Spareribs with Five Spice seasoning, Fresh Corn on the Cob and Tomato, Mozzarella and Basil Salad and menu design explanation

June 2, 2014 New Recipe:  Baked Boneless Spareribs with Five Spice seasoning, Fresh Corn on the Cob and Tomato, Mozzarella and Basil Salad and menu design explanation

Yesterday we bought a large package of boneless spareribs at Costco ($3.19/lb.).  Today I called Suzette around 3:30 p.m. to see how she recommended we cook them.  Neither of us wanted them cooked in that usual sweet BBQ sauce style, so I readily agreed when Suzette said, “Rub them with Five Spice Seasoning.”

 

On my way home from an appointment I stopped and bought four ears of yellow corn at Lowe’s (5 ears for $1.00).

New Recipe: Five Spice Flavored Spareribs

When I arrived at home, rather than rubbing the ribs with Five Spice Seasoning powder I decided to make an emulsion of the seasoning with Chinese cooking Wine and Hoisen sauce and brush the sauce onto the ribs.  I put about 2 Tbsp. of Five Spice Powder into a bowl and added about 3 Tbsps. of Chinese Cooking Wine and about 1 Tbsp. of Hoisen and stirred until it all went into solution as a light sauce.  I then brushed the ribs with the seasoning paste, wrapped them in aluminum foil and put them on the top rack of a broiling pan sprayed with cooking oil over about 1/3 inch of water in the bottom portion of the roasting pan and baked them at 350˚ for about 2 ½ hours.

I had a late appointment that ended after 7:00 p.m., so Suzette had to take over in the kitchen.  She boiled two of the ears of corn and made a salad with slices of Roma tomato, fresh mozzarella (Costco) and basil leaves and lettuce gathered from our garden and garnished the salad with the first four small snow peas, also from our garden, blanched in the corn water for a minute.

When I finally arrived in the kitchen we made the dressing for the salad, by mixing red balsamic vinegar and freshly infused fennel white balsamic vinegar and adding new Portuguese olive oil we bought in Oporto, Portugal and whisking the olive oil into the vinegar until the mixture turned into a fairly stiff creamy sauce and the dressing had lost most of its vinegary flavor.  

Then we removed the ribs from the oven and opened the aluminum foil and placed a couple of ribs on each plate with an ear of corn.  We took the salad to the table under the gazebo in the garden and grabbed a beer and had an interesting summer dinner of Chinese flavored BBQ ribs, a classic Italian salad and an American style fresh ear of corn on the cob.

Some meal menus are an aggregation of ingredients that were planned to be part of a dish, such as the tomato, mozzarella and basil salad.  Other menus create new ingredients entering the PPI category, such as the Chinese BBQ ribs, while other ingredients serve as the addition of a fresh ingredient that complements one or more of the other dishes for form the triad of dishes that usually form our menus, like the fresh corn on the cob.  The total menu looks odd but it loosely fits our standard formula of combining a protein, a starch and a vegetable.  That is why I stopped and bought the ears of corn; to add a starch that went with the BBQ’s ribs and salad, for a summer garden party style meal.

Now we will have Chinese BBQ ribs for other dishes, such as Ma Po Dofu.  We also have PPI roasted chicken from Saturday evening and PPI Teriyaki Salmon from Sunday evening’s meal. 

So now the trick is to see what we can do with those ingredients.  We love salad topped with salmon and we can shave the kernels from the corn to add starchiness to the salad or we can use the eggplant in the fridge to make MaPo Dofu with the pork, if I get some tofu.  The chicken can be used in almost anything, such as chicken sandwiches or chicken salad or any of these PPIs could be used to develop a one dish meal combining a meat with pasta and the artichoke hearts from the artichokes I bought and boiled on Staturday with peas and chard from the garden.

That is how our meal planning goes.  We develop menus from the direction of the ingredients we have made, loosely following our starch, protein and green vegetable formula for our menus.

Bon Appétit