Happy Labor Day Folks

Today is the day we celebrate labor by not doing any. When you work from home, three day weekends don’t have the same feel. First off, it’s easy to forget. You don’t have coworkers reminding you, or asking you about what you’ll be doing over the long weekend. It would have been easy to come down here and start working, forgetting completely it’s a holiday. It also doesn’t quite feel like a day off. Now, a day off is when I leave the house. If I come down here to my office, invariably I start doing something, because all my somethings are right here. So to have time off, I generally have to be focused on activities away from the computer. If I get bored, I’ll come down here and work on something.

So today it’s going to be smoking up some baby back ribs. My smoke wood will be cherry, and I’ll have to formulate a rub. My rubs for chicken tend to be lighter, focusing more on onion, garlic, sometimes ginger or coriander, and other flavors that go well with chicken. My rubs for pork tend to be redder, sometimes with fennel, and other spices that go well with pork.  Beef I like peppery, both from pepper peppers and chili peppers. A lot of times I just mix spices, salt, and sugar together until it tastes good. On ribs I tend to cheat. I’ve found the 3-2-1 method, of smoking for 3 hours, foiling for two, and finishing for 1 hour ends with the best results. Sometimes I only foil for an hour. I’ve successfully done ribs without foil, but I tend to prefer moister, more tender ribs, and I have a hard time getting that without foiling.

For a side, we really like this cole slaw recipe. Bitter hates blue cheese, but loves this. I gave it to someone else who hates cole slaw and they loved it. It goes great with a beef dish, and also pork. Usually we’ll cheat and use bacon bits from a jar (the real ones, the fakes ones are an abomination). I’ll also probably concoct some legume-based side as well. So that’s my “Yay! It’s a holiday,” plan for not hanging around the office too much.