I can imagine what you’re saying: “surely even the CrummyCook has cooked ribs before!  What’s the news here?”

The news is that I’ve never cooked ribs on the gas grill before using indirect heat.

I’ve done plenty of “ribs in the oven”.  And I’ve done a fair share of “ribs in the oven/finish on the grill”.  But I’ve never — until this past 4th of July weekend — done ribs slow-cooked on the grill, away from the heat.

My friend and partner @harrydandrea has been inflaming my desire to try this for some years now.  Not to mention egging me on.  He’s of course an all-charcoal-grill man, with few utils for gas.

But here — with indirect heat — is one of the places gas can shine.  You don’t have to worry about the (lack of) charcoal flavor because your food is not directly above the charcoal.

So it turns out it’s really really easy.  Per Mark Bittman, you just rub the ribs with rub, keep the grill at an internal temperature of no more than 300-350 degrees, and cook for a long time.

Which I did.  Debbie did the rub — cumin, paprika, salt, pepper, a couple of other things, no surprises — and we cooked them for ~6 hours.

Here’s the ribs pre-cooking with the rub on.  Not a great photo (sorry!), so it’s hard to tell how huge they are.  These are three racks of back ribs, very meaty, maybe 3-4 lbs each.

They turned out really really good.  Debbie and I liked them.  We took it over to some friends’ on the 4th and they liked them.  We’ll do it again.

I’m sure you know how it is with food: it speaks to us in a welter of voices and feelings: whispers, sighs, hot voice in the ear.

So last night, on my way back home, thinking about dinner, I got an authoritative “Poached Eggs” from my limbic system.

I like them.  I’m not very good at making them (they spread out too much or else the yolks get too hard).  Good chance to practice.

But what to make with them?  I had noshed at the last event of the day — a reception for some teams finishing up an Entrepreneurship course — and didn’t want some blowout dish like Eggs Benedict or hash and eggs.

Epicurious to the rescue.  They had a dish called “Poached Eggs with Ramps” that looked like the ticket.

That’s theirs.

Well, needless to say, I didn’t have any ramps, but I did have some baby chard from the farmer’s market.

And I didn’t have goat cheese, but I had some La Tur, which is a blend of goat, sheep, and cow.

Safe improvisations, both.

And I had some nice gnarly-looking multigrain bread to give some bottom to the piece.

So, I sauteed the chard with olive oil and salt

As I feared, I ran into trouble with the eggs.  First egg spread way out, even with the vinegar in the water.

Second egg went a bit better, and I knew enough by now to get them out of the water before the yolks turned to adamantine,

Here’s the final result.  Not too shabby, and very tasty.

A decisive answer to that limbic voice.

So, Debbie went out of town last night for a few days.  Perversely (since the whole genesis of Crummycook was spelling her in the kitchen) her trips generally bring the Crumster out of retirement.   And so it was last night.

I looked up “brown rice” (I had a couple of cups cooked left over) and “ricotta” (because we have a pint of it and this happens all the time: we use a bit of it for one recipe and then the rest eventually goes to mold).

Guess what?  My beloved Epicurious let me down.  Nothing for these two except some recipe that didn’t look very interesting.

So I just googled the ingredients, and one that came up — from Writes4Food.com — was a casserole-type dish with brown rice and broccoli… and ricotta.

Not the best picture, but you can see what it looks like.  Cheesy on top, with chunks of broccoli throughout a rice-and-cheese matrix.

Pretty good.  No one to do criticism and self-criticism with, so not much to say in that regard.  But I’d cook it again, although with fewer pots and pans.  I somehow filled the sink with apparatus making this, and it’s not that hard.

Maybe I should go back to past Crummycook recipes and reduce the pot-and-pan count…

I’ve been trying to find time to do CrummyCook some more, and was able to make something last night.

Stuffed cabbage, to be exact.

My mom made an unbelievable stuffed cabbage, at least in memory, so the benchmark was high.

I took a recipe from The Joy of Cooking, which also loomed large in my childhood.  My brother David and I had a scheme to cook everything in Joy and got as far as a couple of recipes.  Story for another time perhaps, especially since David died 47 years ago yesterday.

Here’s how it looked.  The look was good, true to my memories of long ago.

Debbie liked it, or said she did.  I thought the sauce was a little bland.  To my mind, I didn’t put in enough salt and brown sugar, so the sweet and sour flavor was off a bit.  I guess the upside is it didn’t give me heartburn.

All in all, a good job on a personal classic.  And looking to do more CrummyCooking in coming months.