Sunday BBQs

It’s Veteran’s Day.  Two of my favorite veterans are coming over tonight, the Hawleys, Jessie and Joe…both Marines.  They hail from the Carolinas.  Hubs and I met them shortly after they moved to Oregon, at the same time I moved down to Southern Oregon.  We all just hit it off right away.  Sometimes it happens like that.  Now they’re just part of the family.  They’re even raising a pig for us!  Jessie dragged me into being a chicken owner, for which I am forever grateful.  And so are my tomatoes.

Tonight Hubs and I are doing three different kinds of ribs…slow cooked Korean bbq beef short ribs (thank you gochujang!), smoked pork spareribs with Hubs’s dry rub, and lamb riblets roasted in garlic and rosemary…all from our whole animals expertly cut and wrapped by the most wonderful butcher in Southern Oregon, South Umpqua Meat.  Love you guys!

Accompanying the array of ribs, I made a macaroni salad, some collard greens with our smoked ham hocks, some grits with aged white cheddar, my grammas biscuits, and her chocolate snack cake.  I’ve been cooking all day.  I have peppers on the farm still and I had all the ingredients so why not make some macaroni salad?  Who cares if it’s November?!  Cheddar grits was a given along with the collard greens and biscuits.  Of course Korean bbq will go with all of that, silly.  Lamb goes with everything.  And if you don’t think so, then you just need a sense of adventure.

So it’s the next morning.  The lamb riblets were an epic fail.  So fatty.  And not in a good way.  I set them aside to see what I can do with them today to fix it.  Blah.  But everything else was delicious!  Even the soupy grits!  I have no idea what was going on there.  I’ve made grits a bajillion times and never had that problem.  I obviously measured out too many cups of water, but whatever.  The Korean short ribs were the favorite and Joe was talking about everything he would do with the leftover sauce so I sent them home with them.