So I got roped into doing the cooking of a plethora of oven ribs for a friend’s Election Night fundraiser. The friend in question is one of a group of political activists/performance artists who go by the nom de guerre “The Missile Dick Chicks,” a cadre of women who dress up in star-spangled outfits, neon-colored wigs of utterly unnatural hues, and phallic three-foot missiles turgidly strapped over their girl-parts. They journeyed across the country during campaign season, crashing rallies for George Dubya in character as drawling alleged supporters while ruining every possible Republican photo-op by inserting themselves into frame, intercontinental ballistic cocks standing at attention. Not surprisingly during this economy, such a junket is not cheap, so the chicks are throwing a fundraiser to recoup their travel expenses.
As you all know, I live to cook and my friend Beth — a Missile-Dicker — has eaten enough of my cooking to know what she likes. She emailed me with a request that I cook ribs for her fundraiser and I said yes, not realizing that the initial projected turnout for the event would be somewhere around three-hundred people. We eventually hashed out all of the details and she has figured that we’re looking at around eighty to one-hundred folks, max, so I picked up the budget of $180 from her and set to work. That figure includes the necessary amount of ribs (which ain’t cheap), the components of marinades and spice rubs, baking pans and other practical items needed for this culinary process. When all is finally said and done, any leftover cash goes back to the Missile-Dick Chicks.
Yesterday I went to the local Hispanic meat market — the excellent and accomodating Jany’s — and pre-ordered as many ribs as I could get for $80, cash up front, to be picked up by me today. I went in late this afternoon and discovered that $80 got me thirty-one pounds worth of full rib racks, which worked out to being seven fucking huge slabs of Fred Flintstone-looking pork. I schlepped the box of meat back to my apartment and did the individual rib butchery myself as a cost-cutting measure while listening to the CD of the Devo concert that I attended during the summer, a minor chore that took about a half hour. I then packed each separated rack into its own Ziploc freezer bag along with a healthy dose of rancho sazon and yellow-but-mellow Dominican pepper sauce, and filled each bag with approximately twenty ounces of Budweiser beer. Those bags were then each sealed and placed within another bag to avoid any possible beer leakage, shaken to distribute the seasonings, and finally relegated to the bottom two levels of my fridge for the next twenty-four hours. Tomorrow I’ll go to step two and add spices and a dash of liquid smoke.
TO BE CONTINUED
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