Almost crawling....

Miller is doing so well lately - he's finally over a cold he picked up when he last visited a local playgroup. This weekend, we're enjoying a visit from Auntie Jodes. When she heard that my parents weren't coming up this weekend for a visit, she jumped at the chance to hang out with Miller one-on-one (and Carri was happy for the "break" that provided - as a matter of fact, she's out and about in town right now... something that is much easier to do without a 20 pound "assistant" tagging along.)

After we had Shane and Brielle over for dinner two weeks back, Carri has been bugging me to get something smoked on the bbq for her. Last time, we had a AAA Top Sirloin roast that I dry-rubbed and smoked for about 4 hours using a mesquite smoking pellet kit my parents got me for Christmas. This thing was amazing - SOOO tender, wonderful smokey flavour - the meat just melted in our mouth.

Today's challenge is a bit different - Carri couldn't find spare ribs I was wanting to do the other day, so she picked up pork short ribs instead. Beef short ribs are traditionally done on the smoker, but pork short ribs are a different animal. We're going to give it a go and whip up a homemade bbq sauce to accompany them. They've been sitting in the rub for about 2 hours now, I should be getting them into the smoker around 2:00 and we'll see how they turn out. I figure a little beer basting probably will help keep them nice and moist.

I'm going to adapt a technique from the BBQ Pit Boys - if you haven't heard of these guys, just google them, or even better - search youtube for them. They have a recipe for every kind of meat (even soups) you could possibly try to smoke. (For the uninitiated, "smoking" refers to a bbq technique that cooks food "Low 'n Slow" for long periods of time.) We did some pork back ribs the other day that were on the grill for 10 hours, even chicken takes this long. A lot of people assume cooking for that long would dry out the meat, but simply the opposite is true.

Now that I've got the pellet smoker, I can infuse apple wood, hickory, mesquite or even a Jack Daniels flavour into the meats. I can't wait until summer comes and this can be done a little more leisurely outside. For now, I have to just be satisfied running in and out of the house to our snow-surrounded BBQ.