barbecue with out a barbecue

I'm trying to get back into cooking on a regular basis. It's been tough adjusting. My preferred grocery store is a 20 minute drive away and we only have one car which m drives for the most part.

I've been suffering from the fatigue that all expectant mothers suffer in their first trimester. So that made cooking a bit of a hurdle.

And even without the hurdle of logistics or baby-carrying fatigue, I sort of feel like I've lost some of my cooking mojo.

My food doesn't seem to taste quite right to me. Not sure what's up with that, but I guess I don't really have the option to stop so I'll just keep trucking with the cooking.

So Sunday night I made barbecue baby back ribs. I was at the market and saw a rack of baby back ribs and I couldn't say no. Never mind that I don't own a barbecue.

I ended up baking the slab in the oven for about 45 minutes to an hour. This was just under 2 lbs so probably I should have stuck closer to the 45 minutes. They were just a touch over done. The slab gets wrapped in foil with the ends tightly crimped and you just leave them in the oven without ever checking on them. When the baking time's up, you unwrap the slab, slather with your best barbecue sauce (I used one called "bone sucking good sauce." Amen.) and then leave under the broiler for a few minutes to give the top a bit of a char. Then flip and slather and char once more.

The yam fries are just a yam cut up into strips and then tossed in olive oil and baked for half an hour. I can never get mine to be crisp. They are sort of soggy in terms of texture, but m never seems to mind. Something about the yams being cut up into strips sends the message to his brain that they will taste differently and he gobbles them up in a wink.