Magazine Monday #9: Braised Beef Ribs

Strange things are tickling my fancy these days. I think this is because I'm in a period of recovery after 2.5 years of being quite ill (for those of you who don't know, I live with something called Major Depressive Disorder, along with BPD, and dysthymia). Now that my brain seems to be able to handle more and now that I seem to have more energy and enthusiasm about life, I feel inspired to do new things in the kitchen. When I got the October issue of Bon Appetit (the one with the controversial, yucky cover), I saw a recipe in there for these braised beef short ribs and thought they looked easy enough to make. I'd never prepared beef ribs before and this seemed like a cool challenge to take on.

My local overpriced grocery store sells beef back ribs that were actually reasonably priced - but they also looked like something Fred Flintstone might munch on while at the drive in, so I had the butcher halve the package for me. For $10 I got 4.5lbs of beef ribs, which I didn't think was that bad. I borrowed some wine from my SIL, who makes her own, and I was set.

Nothing can be simpler than sticking a bunch of ingredients into a slow cooker and forgetting about the whole thing for 8 hours - and that's exactly what I did.

My dad came over for dinner to help me try out this new dish. He's a bit of a fat freak, so to keep him calm I strained off a bunch of the fat before he arrived, and I'll save it for another use (I have something in mind to make from Fat).

The verdict: It looked great, as you can see from the pictures. The flavour was OK, but you had to look really hard to find much meat. There was some, and it was succulent, but frankly, not my cup of tea. The meat was tasty, but I don't want that much work to actually get at it. I served the ribs with nugget potatoes and roasted asparagus, and that was very good.

The recipe for the dish can be found here. I accidentally bought back ribs instead of short ribs, and I'm not sure what the difference would have been. Ah well. It was a nice change and a good challenge, but I'm not sure I'll be keeping this recipe around.