A Column by John Estridge
Back in the day when my ex was not my ex, and she was going to college to be a nurse, I found myself as the family’s cook.
Up to that time, the last time I had cooked anything was when I was a pizza twirler in Colorado. About 20 years had gone down that ever-moving river of time between the two events.
It was so bad, and this is the God’s honest truth, I had to call a fellow Pub employee, Patti Teufel, to ask how to make hot dogs. I really did not know, and as readers know my common sense/aptitude is less than morons and idiots. So, Patti was not surprised by my question although it took time for her to quit laughing and to loudly tell the rest of the ladies at the Pub my question. To a lady, they were not surprised either.
But with the help of cookbooks, remember those, I was able to learn quickly the ups and downs of cooking for three hungry children, two of which were unappreciative teen-agers or soon to be teen-agers.
And soon, much to everyone’s surprise, especially me, I thought I had become pretty good. Even though we could not afford it, I satisfied my seafood hunger as often as possible. I made seafood souffle and other seafood dishes. I also was heavy on pasta, and correspondingly, got heavy on pasta.
Let’s just not talk about the time I almost burned the house down while baking Snickerdoodles with the kids right before Christmas. All of us involved in that little exercise have done the best we can to disremember that. We have all had counseling.
Anyway.
Then came the divorce and after that, my Long Suffering Wife Ruth. Ruth is a no-nonsense country cook of unparalleled expertise. I have never had a bad meal from that lady. And the belly that enters a room minutes before the rest of my body can attest, that is a very true statement. Many times I tell and thank the Lord for the blessings that have come into my life from Ruth entering my life, but her cooking is front and center in those prayers and with the recounting of my blessings.
And she does not like my cooking.
She will deny that, but Ruth does not like seafood. She could live the rest of her life quite happily if she never has another red meat. And pasta is far from the norm, which is really good for me now as I have acquired Diabetes II.
An aside, before my second marriage, my extended family would request I bring my sweet potato souffle to family gatherings. I was really proud of that dish. Ruth and no one else from her extended family likes sweet potatoes. And after bringing that dish back with the only scoops removed from it, my own, I stopped bringing that dish to the family gatherings.
I just stopped cooking, and it was not a bad thing. It gave me more time to goof off, which I am a professional at. Ruth does not seem to mind my not cooking if not my proclivity for goofing off.
However, I am planning to spend more time at home starting soon so I have told Ruth I want to do much more around the house. It will be the first time in my adult life where I have lived with the fairer sex that I have not made the most money of the relationship. Thus, I feel I should bear the responsibilities in another way. And that means doing as much around the house as I can, or more importantly, what Ruth will allow me to do.
Remember, I am less than idiots and morons so I can be very dangerous doing normal things.
Thus, I was surprised Sunday when Ruth told me she had ribs thawing in the refrigerator and could I get them started on Monday afternoon. I got off my job that day at 3 and Ruth at 4. Sunday, she gave me the recipe. It was not from a cookbook, as I really do not know if we have one of those anymore. It was also nothing Ruth could print out as it was one of those documents that has 2,453 advertisements among the small amount of useful verbiage and photo illustrations. That meant I had to keep scrolling down the mammoth document while reading and rereading the instructions, which I am sure would be rudimentary to everyone else alive but seemed complex to me. Actually, I could not find the actual recipe, but Ruth showed me I had not scrawled down far enough. War and Peace could have been written in its entirety in the space I had scrolled down to that point, which was not far enough.
The first step was removing the cartilage.
There was a photo of it – a hand and a knife with the knife under the cartilage and peeling it off like it was a cartilage or something, coming off in one big piece — and it looked really simple. And there was one line of text split into five lines by the incessant ads. It basically said to put the knife under the cartilage, lift and peel off, well, like a cartilage.
Now, there is an old adage: the right tool for the right job. As I have talked before in my columns, my children, when they were home, hid my tools, and hid them well. Ruth has not told me the secret of where they are kept.
With knives, it is a little different because they are needed so often, not for Ruth stabbing me, even though I think she has thought about that on more than one occasion, but for actual cooking. However, because of my less than moron and idiot status, sharp knives are more dangerous than they are worth. That means all our knives are very dull. I mean very dull. And still, I almost slice my arm off every time I touch them. I have actually stabbed myself in the torso on multiple occasions trying to do something simple like cut up an onion or tomato. I kid you not.
So, at 3:15 p.m., with a cup of coffee beside me and my Top 100 Songs to Be Played at My Funeral playlist – it now has 452 songs so when it happens, bring a cooler and a lawn chair – to accompany me, with dull knife in hand, I began to peel off the cartilage.
Except, I could not get it to peel. The knife point barely got underneath it. I picked and picked at what I thought might be the cartilage in between attempting to use the knife. I stabbed my arm twice and somehow a leg once. After a half hour and looking at the same photo and reading the same verbiage 12 times, I had merely rearranged about 1/16 of the cartilage on the rack of ribs.
A sidebar here:
Daughter Samantha is the proverbial fruit and tree scenario. She cooks like Ruth, and her ribs are to die for.
Sunday evening, we went out to Samantha’s and had her ribs. It was a mistake, not that they were bad ribs, the opposite, they were good, or more truthfully, great so there was no coming anywhere close to that no matter what happened. And not being able to remove the cartilage seemed like a very inauspicious beginning.
I called Samantha after the half hour of doing practically nothing beside working on my cursing, which is already pretty refined through much practice.
In response to my question, Samantha seemed to be repeating that one line in the 2,018-page recipe. I did not want to ask questions or tell her I had been trying to do that for a half hour to no avail, because I do not want to seem stupider to everyone than they already know I am.
So, I said OK to Samantha and went back to my futility and periodically stabbing myself.
At about 4:15, I had rearranged almost all the cartilage, not removed it, rearranged it.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, Ruth gets off work at 4 but she was talking to a co-worker in the parking lot of where they work and did not get home for a while. She did not text or call, but I knew from being married for more than 16 years that was where she was. And I was happy about that because I am sure I would disappoint Ruth once again by not having anything done to the ribs except rearranging the cartilage after more than one hour of effort.
For those who have done this before, you already know the cooking time on ribs are about three hours or longer. We are older people, so we are accustomed to eating supper earlier than in our younger years. I am not sure why that is, but many of our friends and relatives among our age group are the same way.
There was a dry rub to mix together.
That led to trying to pick out the correct size mixing-things-up container. Once again, I have zero common sense. Where this would be easy for 99.99999 percent of earth’s population and probably the same amount for Martians, it was like a complex theoretical physics problem for me.
Twice I chose wrong as I was mixing the ingredients. Ruth hates garlic and the rub called for two tablespoons of garlic powder so I thought the whole thing was doomed from the start, but I persevered.
It had become a quest.
The next step after “massaging” — actual recipe term — kosher salt into the ribs and covering it with the dry rub which was in its third container and still a container hard to get it thoroughly mixed up in was to wrap the whole thing in saran wrap and put it in the refrigerator for somewhere between 30 minutes and two months, according to the recipe.
Oh my.
I know aluminum foil. Beyond that everything else is unknown to me. Thus, I pulled everything out of that large, deep middle drawer that is filled with aluminum foil, Baggies and several unknown things.
Let me back up for a moment.
When I started the dry rub experience, I thought I ought to preheat the oven. We bought a new stove about two or three years ago. In all that time, I had heated up water for hot dogs so I could turn on a burner usually the wrong one on my first attempt, but I had not ever put anything in the oven. It is one of those where there are no knobs. Instead, one pushes on things on the surface and hopes something happens. I had no idea what to push. I was concerned because I felt I had a better chance at launching a missile into outer space than preheating the oven.
I just decided to put off preheating until I had time to turn to YouTube.
While trying to decide among three of those long cardboard containers with sharp teeth that held unknown things as which one would hold saran wrap, if in fact any of them did, Ruth came home.
Much to her credit and maybe after living with me for more than 16 years nothing I do surprises her anymore, she did not show shock, disappointment or say anything in the negative when she took over and found saran wrap. It was not among the three things I was holding but was actually deeper in that seemingly bottomless drawer.
She wrapped it while I moved 3,987 things around in our refrigerator to get enough space for that long rack of ribs.
As she preheated the oven, I went into the living room to find the recipe for the barbeque sauce. When I started asking her questions about the ingredients, many I had never heard of before or had forgotten existed, Ruth found two containers of store-bought barbeque sauce and told me they would do.
Around 11:30 or so we had our ribs.
They were not terrible. They were not anywhere close to Samantha’s. Charitably, Ruth did not complain. However, she has pointedly not asked for my help in anymore cooking. I gave up gambling when I was 19, but if I were a wagering male, I would bet that I never get to unleash my culinary talents in the future, near or otherwise.
