gonewest

I am not in the mood for BBQ very often, but I do get an occasional craving for it and BBQ is just about the only thing that I miss about the Memphis area. Unfortunately, there are only two options that I know of so far here in Seattle: Outback and Steel Pig BBQ. Both are good but Outback is expensive and neither are anything like the Memphis style that I remember.

So Saturday morning I was trying to decide what I was going to do about my BBQ craving and decided to make my own. After all, how hard could it be?

Well, it turns out that a decent batch of oven baked spare ribs is just about the easiest thing to cook. I took a quick look at a few recipes on the web (no taking notes though since I hate following someone else’s directions :-)) then made a quick store run to pick up a slab of ribs and some random BBQ sauce. I cut the slab in half (better portion size for me) and placed it on aluminum foil, scored the back of the ribs with a knife (I am guessing that this lets the sauce get through the tough fat on the bone side better), slathered some sauce and paprika on both sides and sealed the foil with the slab bone side up.

I made a batch on Saturday and another today according to different oven regimes and discovered that they produced distinctly different but tasty results.

Method 1: Bake ribs at 325 degrees for 1-1/2 hours. Take foil pack out, flip ribs and add a little more sauce, then bake at 350 for another 20-30 minutes. Ribs will be easy to slice into portions and easy to eat (no fighting to get meat off the bone).

Method 2: Bake ribs at 250 degrees for 3 hours. Take foil pack out, carefully flip ribs (they will be delicate), then bake at 350 for another 20-30 minutes. The meat will literally fall off the bones when you pick them up, so this is the better recipe if you prefer to take a knife and fork to your BBQ or if you want to make a sandwich out of it.

Both batches were at least as good as what I have found at local restaurants, but they are still nothing like the Memphis style that I miss. I expect that I need to throw out the store bought sauce and work up something of my own to get a more satisfying result. I would love to work with some rubs and try to get a decent dry rib recipe together, but I don’t know if you can make dry ribs in the oven (I am guessing that that requires a smoker).

Oh well, at least I have a new project to work on. Is it too early to think up recipe names?

Finding a good mexican restaurant in the Seattle area has taken longer than I would have expected. Here on the west coast, there is a strong asian influence that ensures a great selection of restaurants for chinese, thai, vietnamese, japanese, indian, and just about any other eastern food style you can imagine. I had assumed that the same would be true for mexican food, but we are apparently a little too far north for that.

Not that you can’t get good mexican food here, of course. In fact there is apparently a strong tradition of taco trucks with great authentic food that I need to investigate; but when I am in the mood for mexican, I usually want to go somewhere with good food and great margaritas. I found out about Luisa’s Mexican Grill while browsing Seattle restaurant reviews on the web and decided to try it for lunch on Saturday.

The restaurant has that typical worn-but-comfortable feel and the service was fast and friendly. The food was not the best mexican cuisine that I’ve ever had, but I would definitely put it near the top of any list. One curious note is that Luisa’s does not serve fajitas — at least not for lunch.

I was surprised that the salsa brought out with the chips actually had some spice to it. They also brought out complimentary guacamole dip which was good, but not as good as the dip at La Guadalapana in Memphis (of course, their guacamole isn’t free). The house margaritas were very good as well, and they seemed to have a little spice to them too which I found quite surprising. They also have something they call a natural margarita which is quite good if you like lime as I do, but it seemed to sacrifice some of the traditional margarita flavor for the fresh lime juice.

Anyway, I had already found a few mexican restaurants around that were OK, but none of them really satisfied my cravings when I was in the mood for a good mexican meal with a great margarita. I am glad that I know about Luisa’s now and I will definitely be back.