Pesto al Attilio!

I’m playing ketchup (lol) with posts today as we get ready to put the house back on the market. Ergo, “Wildcard Wednesday” is “Meals Monday” for this post. 🙂

A while back, I promised my readers a post with my pesto recipe. I’m here to deliver! This is a traditional Genovese basil-based Pesto sauce. My step father brought it over from Italy (he was born there) so it’s authentic. Also named after him here. His original Italian first name was Attilio.

Just a quick note before I get started: This recipe is going to make a large amount of pesto. A cup is usually plenty to do pasta for four people. Pesto keeps fairly well in the fridge (not indefinitely however), and it can be frozen with minimal loss of flavor. It defrosts fairly quick also.

Note this is also all U.S. measurements. Converting them to Metric equivalent can be done at this site or similar sites:

https://www.metric-conversions.org/volume/us-cups-to-metric-cups.htm

The Recipe:

3 Cups of Fresh Basil

3/4 Cup of Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1/4 Cup of Pine Nuts

3 cloves of garlic

1 teaspoon of salt

1/2 Cup of Parmigiano-Reggiano (Parm) cheese

3 Tablespoons of Romano, Pecorino, or more Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

Preparation:

All you need is a Cuisinart or similar food processor. Add everything in and blend well. The basil should be broken down to small, crumb sized pieces.

Alternatively, if you’re a fan of pine nuts, you can blend everything except the pine nuts, then add them to the food processor and give it 3 quick presses of the button to chop them up without breaking them down to tiny pieces. This gives the pesto a little more texture and makes the pine nut flavor a little more noticeable.

On the flip side, if you hate pine nuts, you can leave them out or substitute another nut for them. Walnuts are a common option in other recipes I’ve seen.

Final Notes:

The most important thing I can add here is that pesto is a sauce that you add to food AFTER it’s cooked. If you cook it with the pasta, etc… you’ll lose much of the flavor. I can tell you first hand that it looses all visual appeal if you try to add it to vegetables while they’re grilling. WAIT UNTIL AFTER THE FOOD IS COOKED, then put it on top or mix it in.

Also, pasta with pesto added is how at least most Americans see this used. I can tell you that it goes well on top of grilled chicken and fresh steamed or grilled vegetables as well. I have no idea how traditional those uses are, BUT pesto is a fairly versatile sauce. Give yourself permission to experiment with it a little. I imagine it could go well over a milder flavored fish for example.

When my family makes the above recipe, we put the excess into seal-able containers that are about 1 cup in size, and store them in the freezer. When we’re ready to use more, we pull it out and set it on the counter. It will defrost in an hour and a half to two hours in my experience. DO NOT defrost using a microwave! It’ll do nasty things to the oil and cheese.

The recipe doubles nicely also if you want to store a large amount for future use.

LASTLY: As with ALL cooking, the quality of the ingredients makes a HUGE difference. Find the freshest basil you can find, make sure the olive oil IS Extra Virgin, not Walmart trash, there is a massive difference between authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese and Kraft Parm, etc…

Silk’s Ethnically Confused Redneck Nachos: Game Day!!!

I’m watching the Puppy Bowl and snacking on my most successful insane culinary experiment ever.

The Origin Story:

At our house, the Superbowl is more an excuse to relax,snack and watch the commercials than anything. We wanted something different this year. Nachos came up as a suggestion but I wanted somthing other than the standard Tex-Mex snack. A quick Google search turned up Italian Nachos as a common spin on nachos.

“Italian” nachos use wonton wrappers for chips (apparently Chinese is more Italian than Latin is, LOL), alfredo sauce in place of salsa, grilled chicken and italian sausage for the meats, and then you can top with italian cheeses, diced tomatoes, parsley and whatever else sounds exciting and vaguely Italian, LOL.

It all sounded good, but today was the first day in ages that looked good for BBQing, and we wanted to make use of what we already had around the house. Tri-Tip quickly got substituted for the shredded chicken. Likewise, the normal Italian sausage got replaced by a chicken basil & black pepper sausage we had on hand.

Getting Cooking:

The first thing I had to do was smoke the tri-tip. We had picked up a couple of prime grade pieces at Costco:

To move things along, they got my usual rub of salt, pepper and garlic powder, then slow cooked in the smoker. A few hours later:

If you’re not familiar with smoking, that probably looks raw. Smoking leaves red-pink smoke ring around the outside of the meat. Do it REALLY low and slow like I did, and the smoke coloring can permeate the entire piece of meat. I cooked the meat to a nearly perfect medium rare. The sausage above, I waited and cooked in a pan since I wasn’t sure how fast the beef would cook. Grilling times can vary with outside temperature and wind.

So with the tri-tip,we have our redneck aspect of our confused nachos. We used a bag of Tostitos corn chips instead of buying wonton wrappers. So we’ve added a little Latin influence. My next obstacle was Alfredo Sauce. The only bottled one I’ve tried that I didn’t hate was by Emerril. The stores here stopped carrying it since the philistines here prefer Ragu. That left me with making my own. Something I’ve never done before believe it or not. Well, it turned out fabulous! Enough so that, to paraphrase Scarlet O’Hara; “As God is my witness, I’ll never eat bottled Alfredo sauce again”. LOL.

I looked up a few recipes and then improvised my own:

Silk’s Cheesy Alfredo Sauce

3 tablespoons of butter

2 tablespoons of olive oil

4 cloves of minced garlic

2 cups of heavy cream

1 1/2 cups of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

1 cup of grated mozzarella cheese

(Yes, this makes some cheesy sauce)

1 tablespoon of freshly ground black pepper

Put the butter, olive oil and garlic into a medium saucepan on medium heat. When the butter and garlic start to brown, add the heavy cream. Give it a minute or so to warm, then add the cheeses, Cook until the cheeses are melted and smooth, then add in black pepper and stir. Give it a minute or so longer and it’s ready to go.

The only trick or caution is to stir frequently so nothing burns on the bottom of the pan. If it starts bubbling, reduce the heat also.

Spread some chips out on a plate, then ladle on the alfredo sauce, then add the sausage and tri-tip:

From there, you can add a little more alfredo sauce. Then I added grated parm, mozzarella, and smoked gouda cheese. After that top with onions, diced pepperoncini peppers, diced tomatoes, olives or whatever else sounds exciting.

I’m thrilled with the way this turned out. The beef, the sausage and the gouda all had a smoked flavor and blended together perfectly. The alfredo sauce will put Olive Garden to shame too, LOL.

Silk’s Secret BBQ Sauce Repice – Keto Friendly

OK, this is something I thought I’d never do. This sauce has been in the family for four generations now. I’d thought about keeping it secret too in case I ever opened a BBQ resaurant. With my hearing loss and back / neck problems though, that seems unlikely. I also got a Keto focused blog as a follower and realized this could help people on a quest to cut sugar and similar empty carbs out of their diet.

You see, this is an OLD school Texas sauce. That means there’s no sugar or molasses in it. I *hate* commerical sauces because that’s all they are. This sauce is savory, smokey and with just a LITTLE heat to it. Anyway, if Aaron Franklin can publish his sauce recipes, I suppose I can too. Franklin’s sauces have a good bit more heat too BTW.

So here we go. Licensed for private use only, LOL.

RECIPE:

13 ounce bottle of catsup

5 ounce bottle of Lea and Perrins Worcestershire sauce

Juice of Two Lemons

1 Tablesppon of Yellow Mustard

6 Heavy Dashes of Tabasco Sauce

2 Medium Yellow or White Onions, Diced

3 Cloves of Garlic, Diced Fine

Salt and Pepper to Taste

2 Catsup Bottles full of Water

My great grandmother used to add a half pound of butter to the sauce to keep it from “breaking” and keep it smooth. My mom and I both agree that just makes the sauce too greasy though. Try it if yout want but I’d advise against it. Simmer the sauce for a half hour to an hour to allow the flavors to fully meld and blend together. Cooking it slow does matter.

The recipe above makes about a quart. Plenty to add to a dinner of ribs, chicken or brisket after it comes off the grill. It doubles fine if you really like your BBQ sauce. Keeps fairly well in the fridge or freezer also.

If you want to truly make absolutely sure there’s no sugar, replace the catsup with tomato sauce or better yet, cook and puree your own tomatoes into an equal amount of tomato sauce. Yes, catsup and even some canned tomato sauce have sugar added to them. Almost any commercially made food product does nowadays.

Even using the catsup however, there should be minimal sugar compared to commercially bottled sauces. The carb count on almost all of them is off the charts, esp if you consider they typically measure by the teaspoon as a serving size.

Once you’ve made the sauce once, it’s easy to tweak to personal tastes. I use one larger onion that would equate out to about 1 1/2 medium onions for example.

Note this will be a thinner sauce too; authentic old school Texas before everybody started using mollasses to turn their sauces into overly sweet gunk. It’ll stick to food fine however. 🙂

Breakfast Pizza!

I got bored with the idea of a normal sausage and eggs breakfast for dinner, While digging for ideas I remembered an OLD recipe for Breakfast Pizza. My mom originally found this in the newspaper or a magazine back in the 1980s.

History aside, let’s answer the obvious question for some of you: What the heck is a breakfast pizza?

You use croissant roll dough for the crust, then pile on sausage, eggs, cheese and shredded potatoes, and bake. 🙂 The original recipe is pretty simple and designed to be thrown together quickly.

INGREDIENTS:

1 Pound of bulk pork sausage (I like Jimmy Dean sage sausage)

1 package of refrigerated crescent rolls (Pillsbury or similar)

1 cup frozen loose pack hash brown potatoes, thawed

1 cup of shredded cheddar cheese (8 ounces) – can use Monterey Jack, Swiss or a Blend)

5 Eggs

1/4 Cup of Milk

1/2 teaspoon of Salt

1/4 teaspoon of Pepper

2 Tablespoons of grated Parmesan cheese (Parmigiano-Reggiano if you want to do it right. Trust me, there IS a difference)

PREPARATION:

In a skillet, cook sausage until browned, then drain off excess fat. I put the sausage on a plate with a couple of paper towels underneath it. 😉 Place the dough in an ungreased 12 inch pizza pan with points towards the center (see pic below). Press over bottom and up sides to make a crust. Make sure to seal perforations.

Note; I used a skillet since I didn’t have a pizza pan. A round casserole dish or similar should also work as long as it’s 12 inches in diameter. I also used cooking spray on the pan.

Spoon sausage over crust. Sprinkle with potatoes. Top with cheddar cheese (or cheese of choice). In a bowl, beat together eggs, salt, pepper and milk. Sprinkle Parmesan over all.

Finally, bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 to 30 minutes.

Aside from some small commentary, that’s the recipe verbatim from the original article. Here’s a couple of observations from my first time remaking this in decades:

1: Make sure that the hash browns are indeed thawed. If you add them frozen, they’ll be very mushy. In fact you may want to try partially cooking them first if you want a more crispy texture.

2: If you use pre-packaged crescent rolls or croissant dough, the “Grands” (large) size rolls will make a thicker crust. I prefer the regular size. My personal advice would be to stick with plain ones also. If you go with buttery flavor, etc… you’re going to have really greasy crust that tastes like pure butter. We did regular and it was still a bit too close to that for me. My next experiment will be using Phyllo dough instead. There are several options a creative cook can play around with here,including making croissant dough from scratch.

3: As with any recipe, you can always adjust the seasoning. The original is not much salt and pepper, but it’s easier to add later than to take away after too much has been added. I personally like about double the parm cheese in the recipe also. It would be easy to throw some bacon or turkey bacon in the mix also. As a final note, I used 6 eggs, not 5 with no adjustments to cooking time (done in 30 minutes).

Regardless of whether you do it the easy way above or get closer to cooking from scratch, this is a hearty, flavorful meal that should easily feed a family of four. It only took 2 slices to make me full.

You can see how thick the “crust” is with the “grands” size Pilsbury crescent rolls used.

A quick apology to those on the metric system also. The measurement conversions should be fairly easy for you to look up online though.

Buon Appetito! 🙂

New Year’s Eve Dinner

We stayed home for New Year’s Eve this year. Avoided the crowds, the drunk drivers and the police sobriety checkpoints. Besides, the big screen provides a better view of the NYC fireworks than camping in Times Square would, LOL.

I made grilled chicken for dinner tonight. I have the usual pictures also, but I wanted to give a couple of tips for any charcoal grilling newcomers.

First is a piece of equipment that I consider essential. I was and still am one of those people who couldn’t get a traditional charcoal fire going to save my life. Then I discovered this:

It’s called a charcoal chimney. Stuff the bottom section with newspaper, junk mail sales ads or similar paper (crumpled up) then flip it over and fill the top portion with charcoal. Put the chimney on the lower rack for charcoal in your grill and light the paper. 15 minutes later you’ve got perfect coals for cooking over. Empty the chimney’s coals onto the rack, put the grilling rack on the grill and you’re ready to go. This thing really is flawless. You also avoid the need for any lighter fluid and the nasty aftertaste that it can add to food.

Here’s the end result there by the way:

Yes, it was dark out when I started. It gets dark crazy early here this time of year. The glowing charcoal at night made for a neat picture though. 🙂

Now the next thing I want to mention is how to avoid flare ups on a charcoal grill. Flare ups happen when fat melts from the heat and drips down onto the charcoal. The way around that is indirect heat. You arrange the coals along two sides:

And then put your food along the middle so that it’s not directly above the hot charcoal:

yeah, my iPhone’s flash finally decided to work, LOL.

Yes, the food is a bit too close together. Ideally you want it spaced out a little more so that it gets more uniform heat all around the individual pieces of food. By the way, indirect heat has two other advantages; you lose a bit less moisture, and it’s slower than direct heat. That gives you time to finish that side dish that’s taking longer than you thought, LOL.

So back to the chicken. It all got my usual Salt Pepper and Garlic treatment, then half got some lemon pepper seasoning and the other half got some chipotle pepper seasoning.

After grilling, add in some Au Gratten potatoes and steamed veggies and you have a nice relaxing meal at home to enjoy:

Peppermint Bark Chocolate Brownies

I’m overdue for a food post here, largely becuase my iPhone has decided it doesn’t want to download pictures anymore. >_<

I have a special holiday treat today; peppermint bark brownies. The original, make it from scratch recipe is courtesy of San Francisco’s famous Ghirardelli chocolate company. Occasionally some good comes out of S.F. lol.

Unfortunately for those outside the U.S, everything is in our measurements, so you’ll have to do conversions. If you’re interested in using authentic Ghirardelli peppermint bark, you’ll have to order fast. It disappears at Christmas and won’t be back until after Thanksgiving. Whatever you do, make sure you use high quality peppermint bark here. I tried substituting Costco’s store brand one year and took the tub back for a refund it tasted so bad. Quality ingredients are probably the biggest unspoken “secret” to good cooking or baking.

So, here’s the “from scratch” version:

Ingredients:
1 ¹/₂ cups Ghirardelli 60% Cacao Bittersweet Chocolate Chips
1 ¹/₂ sticks unsalted butter (12 tablespoons)
3 large eggs, at room temperature
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
¹/₄ teaspoon salt
¹/₂ cup + 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
¹/₂ teaspoon baking powder
8 Ghirardelli Peppermint Bark SQUARES™ chocolates, chopped into large chunks (for the brownies)
18 Ghirardelli Peppermint Bark SQUARES™ chocolates, broken in to large chunks (about 8 pieces per square) (for the finishing)

Directions:
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. n

Line a 9 x 13 inch baking pan with foil and grease with pan spray.
In a medium saucepan, bring 2 inches of water to a gentle simmer. Put the 60% chips and butter in a heatproof bowl and set it over (but not touching) the simmering water.

Stir the mixture with a rubber spatula until the better is melted and both ingredients are completely combined. Turn off the heat and leave the bowl over the warm water.

Sift together the flour and baking powder and set aside. In a large bowl whisk together eggs, salt, sugar and vanilla. Add the egg mixture to the chocolate mixture and whisk together gently. With a spatula, fold in the flour.

Immediately pour ½ the mixture into the prepared baking pan and spread it evenly. Next, sprinkle the chopped peppermint bark over the batter and then pour the remaining batter over this. Spread evenly.

Bake for 15-20 minutes. The center should be fudgy but not dry. Remove from the oven and cool for 10 minutes.

Place Peppermint Bark chunks on top of warm brownies and allow them to soften for 1 minute. Using a spatula, gently swirl the melting Peppermint Bark to create swirls of melted chocolate. Refrigerate for 1 hour. Trim the 4 edges of the brownies by 1/4 inch. And cut into 18 squares.

SILK’S EASY SHORT CUT VERSION:

There’s one big shortcut to making these brownies and a few tweaks to make them turn out even better.

The Shortcut: Instead of manually making the brownies from scratch, use Ghirardelli (and only Ghirardelli) brownie mix. The version I think works best is the Triple Chocolate Brownie mix and that’s the one I used this year. Follow cooking directions / time on box.

Substitutions: The brownie mix will tell you to use water and vegetable oil. Instead of vegetable oil, use an equal amount of butter (1/3 a cup). Instead of water, use milk. I use just a little more than the 1/3 a cup that the box calls for; right in the middle of the 1/3 and ½ a cup marks on the measuring cup. That way they stay moist but don’t turn to goo.

Tricks: There are three tricks I’ve discovered with making these. First is to add a half teaspoon of Peppermint Extract to the brownie mix. This adds a bit more peppermint flavor to the brownies without overpowering the chocolate. Make sure to mix everything thoroughly if you go this route so that the peppermint flavor gets evenly distributed into the mix.

Second is a prep trick that makes clean up easier. When breaking up the Ghirardelli Peppermint Bark squares, I use a blender or food processor. To make clean up of the blender / food processor easier, I freeze the squares in the freezer overnight. The pieces will break more cleanly and not start to melt in the food processor. This will let you almost just rinse the processor clean.

Third: I place the Peppermint Bark on top of the Brownies 2 or 3 minutes before they’re ready to come out of the over (when a toothpick will come out of them almost completely clean). They’ll melt into an even topping better that way.

Grilled Chicken Garden Salad

I need a lighter post, and I’ve neglected my fellow foodies lately. That being the case, I thought it was also time I showed I can do more than BBQ and do eat healthy (occasionally, lol)

What I did the other day was grill some boneless skinless chicken breast fillets on the charcoal grill

Two were seasoned with lemon pepper seasoning and two were seasoned with chipotle pepper seasoning, which allowed me to customize both our salads a bit. 🙂

From there, it was a simple matter of combining all the veggies, shredded cheese, sunflower seeds, etc… into a salad.

I double layer everything so that the salad is pre-mixed without actually tossing it in large bowl. The final result is a pretty big salad, but that was the main course for dinner

Serve with fresh french bread on the side and viola, a meal. 😀

BBQ Time Again! Beef Tri-Tip!!!

In between all the chores, I did find time Monday to apply my tasty slow cooking techniques to some beef Tri-Tip from Costco. It’s just taken a couple days to get to blogging about it.

Half the time, I’ll use my dual grill method and slow smoke until the meat hits an internal temperature of 100 degrees, then put it on a hot charcoal grill to put a nice sear on the meat and get the IT to 135 degrees. This time, I didn’t feel like fussing with two grills. I slow smoked at 180 degrees for a little over an hour to get the meat to 100 degrees, then I just cranked up the heat on the pellet smoker. So, no grill marks, but it did turn out very tasty:

Perfect medium rare with great smoke flavor

And for those who are curious… Yes, just basic salt, pepper and garlic for a rub. That’s almost all I ever use. Good meat doesn’t need sugar and other fluff. 🙂

Leftovers…

Tonight, It was time to finish off the spare ribs from last week. Luckily smoked meat keeps longer than with regular cooking. 🙂

Even a week later, I’d pit my ribs against any local restaurant’s.

Th curlie fries are left over from a burger joint last night. 🙂

Slow Smoked St Louis Style BBQ Pork Ribs

It’s FINALLY time! Yep, the pictures are downloaded and I finally have time to tell the tale. Easily offended vegetarians, vegans, kosher and halal eaters may want to leave now. 😀

That said, here’s the run down on the BBQ a couple of days ago. St Louis style BBQ ribs were the main course.

For anyone who doesn’t know the difference, St Louis style spare ribs (keeping it simple) are from the thicker belly ribs on the pig. Baby Baby back ribs (a.k.a. loin ribs, back ribs, or Canadian back ribs) are taken from the top of the rib cage between the spine and the spare ribs, below the loin muscle. St Louis ribs are flatter, have a slightly higher fat content (which can make for good flavor), and brown more evenly. Baby Backs do come from adult pigs, and some people think they’re more tender. It’s more about how either is cooked though.

The same can be said with the meat content for either rib. St. Louis style come from the belly, so the thicker the meat on the ribs, the less bacon and pork belly you get from the pig. It all depends upon how both pieces of meat are cut and trimmed. I look for packages with nice thick ribs. 🙂

THAT is the bone side of the ribs. You want to cook the ribs with that side facing the heat to avoid drying out the meat. That layer of white across 2/3 of it is called silver skin (at least it is in cooking circles here). It’s a connective membrane that helps keep meat together and connect fatty tissue to meat. Now if the silver skin is thin, you can ignore it and let the cooking weaken it. THIS is really borderline, and I probably should have skinned it off. If it’s thicker or especially if you’re doing a competition, you want all silver skin gone. It can not only be tough, but it also blocks flavor from smoke or seasoning from getting through.

Now this is the other side. Almost all the meat on St Louis ribs are on this side or between the ribs. This side rarely has any silver skin, BUT…

That’s a perfect example of way too thick silver skin. I had to get my trusty Cutco fileting knife and cut that out. It would have been like having a piece of rubber in the ribs otherwise.

There was a little left further under that fold of fat and meat to the right but it was thinner and I didn’t want to cut away half the meat to chase, so I left it.

After that, it was time for the rub:

There’s BBQ folks that put 20 different seasonings in secret combinations to create a fancy rub. Almost all of them have brown or white sugar also. I believe in keeping it simple. Just like with my last few food posts, it was salt, pepper and garlic, then some of Costco’s mesquite flavoring.

With my family’s roots in Texas, I’m not big on sugar in cooking (baking is another story, hehe). Never mind it’s unhealthy, and hidden in everything we eat too. Even my BBQ sauce recipe (four generations old at this point) is only tomato, water, Worcestershire sauce, garlic, onion, salt, pepper, lemon juice and a little Tabasco. Tangy and savory without being sickeningly sweet like the bottled stuff at the grocery stores.

Once all three racks of ribs were done, into the smoker they went:

Yep, it’s a big smoker, but we wanted one that would let us entertain.

Now in competition, the big thing with smoking ribs anymore is the “3-2-1” method. You start out low and slow for 3 hours, misting the ribs as you go, then at the 3 hour mark, you pull them, put them in a ‘boat’ of aluminum foil, add some apple cider, seal it up and throw the ribs back on for 2 hours. This lets them steam in the apple cider. Pork and apple are a good pairing, so if you want to do sweet, that’s a good option. This also supposedly keeps the ribs from drying out due to the prolonged cook. Then the last hour, you pull them back out of the foil and cook them “naked” again to finish cooking and hopefully put a little bark on the ribs.

Me… I have to be different, LOL

Here’s what I don’t like about the 3-2-1 method. First, the few times I tried it, I tasted more apple than pork. No bueno. Secondly, the time spent steaming in the apple cider tended to make the ribs a little mushy. Yes, I went fairly light on the cider too. 🙂 The mushiness wasn’t horrible, but you just couldn’t get a good looking bark or crust to the ribs. Lastly, the method is really intended for an old fashioned ‘stick burner’ smoker. Those are designed to operate around 250 degrees F (121degrees C) or so. Using a pellet grill, I am able to keep a very constant heat as low as 180 degrees. I just do a straight cook through, spraying the ribs every half hour or so to keep them moist. When they’re within 30 or 40 degrees of done, I turn up the temperature on the pellet grill and finish them off, putting a nice bark on them:

Do those look dry at all? LOL Because I go low and slow, I’m able to get smoke flavor and coloring all through the ribs also. I had one guest as me if they were done because of that even pink color. 😀

One thing I didn’t cover was the “spritz” AKA what I spray them with while cooking. Apple cider is again a common choice. Too sweet though, especially if you’re doing the 3-2-1 method also. What I use on either beef or pork is a mixture of broth, water and pepsi or coke. 1 part Pepsi to two parts water to 4 parts broth. Using broth as a primary ingredient keeps the flavor pure. Just use beef broth for beef and pork broth for pork. The water keeps the broth weak enough that the meat doesn’t taste like soup, and helps with moisture. The soda pop helps the spritz stick, adds a little browning and just a touch of sweet without overpowering the meat’s flavor.

One last note: Ribs are properly done when they have an internal meat (not bone or fat) temperature of 185 to 200 degrees. At that point, the meat should stay on bone, but still come away easily with a light tug of the fingers or teeth. If it’s tough, it’s undercooked. If it falls apart, it’s been cooked to death. My own personal experience vs conventional wisdom is that 185 to 190 is about the ideal temperature.

And that’s it for Silk’s scrumptious Southern style BBQ ribs. 🙂

We also had leftover Brisket and chicken, along with that homemade BBQ sauce I mentioned, green beans and bacon, smoked portabella mushrooms sauteed in marsala and garlic, biscuits, a green salad and raspberry and yogurt fruit salad sort of thing I found on Pinterest.

All of that would take an entire second post however, lol.