A Trying Day: Emeril's Slow and Low Pork Candy Ribs

How about I spend the day not writing about my disappointment in the current White House occupant and his administration? I can already sense the sigh of relief emanating from certain parts of my cyber universe. Besides, the Lidocaine patches are actually working today, so I'm going to take full advantage of that tiny little miracle and go to work on a recipe from Emeril called Slow and Low Pork Candy Ribs.

I wish I could spend more time here, cooking and writing, but fibromyalgia blah blah blah. You know the story, I've certainly complained enough about it. I have, however, been spending a good deal of time here behind the blog, having committed myself to a major project which does not involve any heavy lifting.

I've been blogging about cooking, some times on a daily basis, since February of 2011, and there are in excess of 500 recipes just sitting out there in Google's cloud, or wherever such things are stored. For a while now - probably since I realized that I was getting an unusually high number of visits from Russia and the Ukraine - I have been worried that the whole bloody electronic system was going to go down and take a good part of my life's work with it.  Admittedly, this had something to do with memories of a show I used to watch, called Dark Angel, which was broadcast just after the Turn of the Century Y2K Scare that fortunately never materialized, intruding on the reality of 2016 and forward contemporaneous reports of major computer hacking.

From Wikipedia:

In 2009 a genetically enhanced nine-year-old female supersoldier designated as X5-452 (Geneva Locke) escapes along with eleven others from a secret U.S. government institution codenamed Manticore where they were born, raised, and trained to be soldiers and assassins. On June 1, 2009, months after X5-452's escape terrorists detonate an electromagnetic pulse weapon in the atmosphere over the U.S. which destroys the vast majority of computer and communication systems, throwing the country into chaos.

Ten years later in 2019 the now 19-year-old X5-452 (Jessica Alba), who calls herself Max Guevara, struggles to search for her Manticore brothers and sisters. In a recovering United States which is now barely more than a Third World nation she tries to live a relatively normal life and evade capture by Manticore, who wish to recover their lost asset. 

(Don't tell me life doesn't imitate art, folks. Especially if you've ever owned, in your pre-smartphone days, a cell phone which flipped open like a Star Trek communicator.)

So, having lots of time on my hands, I've been transferring copies of all my online original recipes to a safe place from which they can be printed and slipped into plastic sleeves alongside the rest of my personal recipe collection.  And hey, already 138 down, only 400+ to go.

I don't do much recipe development these days, relying more on old favorites and bursts of whimsy, neither of which I record for posterity anymore.  Cooking without a recipe is enormously liberating. You'd like the recipe for this pasta salad? There is no recipe, just basic guidelines. Pasta, fresh vegetables, canned beans, canned vegetables, salami-type meats, firm cheese, and a vinaigrette-type dressing, homemade or store bought. Salt, pepper, dried herbs. Voila!

Cooking from a recipe created by Emeril Lagasse is just plain fun.  This particular recipe is from his latest book, Essential Emeril.  Unfortunately the recipe isn't available online, but based on the wonderful way my kitchen is smelling as those ribs slow-roast in my oven, it is well worth the price of the book. Copyright laws notwithstanding, I can show you a picture of the finished product.

Arrrgh! These were so impossibly tender and delicious that they brought a tear to my eye ... or maybe it was the fibromyalgia. Lidocaine can only do so much, and those damn patches don't stick to skin all that good.

There's a cattle drive through downtown Kissimmee on Monday, April 3, 2017.  I'll be taking pictures from my front porch.