Category: General

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Grilled-braised beef short ribs

Braised short ribs

Ingredients: beef short ribs, onion, carrot, celery, red wine, rub spices, salt.

Short ribs are great grilled, but they’ve got some connective tissue that really wants to be braised. So, why not do both? First, your ribs should be big and chunky. If you’ve got thin-sliced ribs you should probably just grill them.

Start by getting your grill set up for indirect cooking. On my Weber, that means getting a smallish batch of coals going in the charcoal chimney and dumping those off to one side of the grill when they’re red-hot. If there’s greasy residue in your grill wait until that burns off – otherwise you’ll end up with a gross layer of black stuff on your meat.

Put some rub on your ribs. I like a mixture of salt, pepper, paprika, cumin, coriander, and allspice plus some fresh thyme or rosemary. Once the grill is hot and clean place the ribs on the side opposite the coals. Put the lid on. Turn them over after 10 or 15 minutes. Close the vent on the grill a bit if it’s too hot – you don’t want the ribs to cook too quickly. Check on the ribs every 15 minutes or so.

Meanwhile, heat up your oven to about 275F. Get out a braising dish the ribs will fit in. Pretty much any non-reactive (glass, enamel, stainless steel) dish or pot with a lid will work for braising. I like to throw some chopped onion, carrot, and celery in the bottom of the pot and soften that up a bit in some bacon drippings. This also gets the braising pot nice and hot for the ribs.

The ribs could be ready to braise after 30 minutes, but I like to let them go about an hour for more smoky flavor. When you’re ready, move them to the braising pot and pour some red wine in with them. Use enough wine to come about halfway up the ribs – not enough to cover them up completely. Bring the pot to a boil then cover and place in the oven. Check for tenderness after an hour, but it usually takes about 2 to achieve that desirable “falling off the bone” texture.

They’re good immediately, and even better reheated the next day. If you chill them you can easily separate out the layer of fat and harvest the gelatinous stuff for an excellent sauce.

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Nashville notes

I got to go to Nashville for the first time a couple of weeks ago for a friend’s wedding. What a cool place! It combines the crusty industrial feel of Pittsburgh with the artistic party-town feel of New Orleans. Like Pittsburgh, it’s wrapped around a river, the Cumberland.

Goofy fish Murky path

While waiting for Mandi to get a manicure I went for a walk to Centennial Park. The centerpiece of the park is a replica of the Parthenon that was built for Tennessee’s 1897 Centennial Exposition – like the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. On Memorial Day we went back to the park to check out a music festival but only caught a couple of notes before heading off to find cold drinks and barbecue.

Shelby Street Bridge Bricks and sky

We happened to be in town for Memorial Day, which curtailed our ability to shop. Instead, we walked around downtown and across the Shelby Street Bridge, an old bridge converted to pedestrian use in 2003.

While we weren’t shopping or walking, we were eating. Some highlights:

Mandi knew about Fido, a great espresso shop, from previous trips to Nashville. They serve breakfast too – I don’t know what everyone’s waiting in line for down the street at Pancake Pantry – the eggs and sausage at Fido were excellent and we didn’t have to wait.

Our first night in town we had dinner at Marché, a sort of French bistro-market in the East End. My asparagus and salmon with poached egg was about as good as it gets.

I was whining about how we’d eaten everything except barbecue so Mandi found Tom’s Elite Carryout, a funky little place in the East End. The barbecue pork and a double-side of mustard greens made a perfect lunch.

We had sausage, pig knuckles, sauerkraut, and beer at Gerst Haus. I had pretty low expectations, but this place served me a plate of pig knuckles that looked more-or-less like something I last saw in Prague. I only wish I’d had the sense to order the knuckle appetizer instead – I only managed to finish 2 or 3 knuckles. To top things off, they had a live band and real stuffed deer on the walls!

Only known treatment for my condition. Our dinner companions.

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Updated image renaming script

To help keep track of my photos, I like to rename them so their filenames are based on the date and time they were taken. I’ve used a couple of different scripts to do this, settling on a single-line bash script that runs exiftool. This works really well, but sometimes the extensions on my photos are jpg and sometimes they’re JPG. So, I added a couple of lines to the renaming script to first lowercase the extensions. Here’s the new script:


#!/bin/bash
ls -l *.JPG > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ "$?" = "0" ]; then
for f in *.JPG
do
mv "$f" "${f%.JPG}.jpg"
done
fi
ls -l *.jpg > /dev/null 2>&1
if [ "$?" = "0" ]; then
exiftool -d %Y%m%d_%H%M%S%%-c.%%e "-filename<CreateDate" *.jpg
fi

Download camcon:camcon.zip

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Crawfish party recap

We had the second annual crawfish party at our friend Aliza’s house earlier this month, once again stuffing ourselves with crawfish late into the night. This year we somehow managed to save a few crawfish to shell the next day for a tasty frittata.

Just like last year, I put together the boil spices based on the recipe from the Good Eats crawfish episode. This year I made two batches of spices – one less spicy and one with the standard amount of cayenne. I think the amount in the recipe is just right, but taste buds vary. The quantity of spices in the recipe is for one 40 quart boil, so I multiplied everything by 4 so we’d have enough for a couple of boils each in our 30 quart pots.

Instead of the corn in the recipe, we cooked a bunch of vegetables – brussels sprouts, asparagus, and broccoli. Having learned our lesson last year, we threw the potatoes in first then added the vegetables with the crawfish. The vegetables still end up well done, but not quite as boiled to death.

Ready for crawfish.

Big claws

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Another wide-ish M42 lens: Yashinon 35/2.8

Yashinon 35/2.8

Mandi decided to drive an hour to get her hair done at Sprout in Baltimore a couple of weeks ago. She talked me into getting my hair cut too, but since man hair is tamed 3 times faster than lady hair I was left to wander around Hampden for an hour or so.

I’m not much of a shopper, but Hampden has a lot of antique shops and a couple are more like junk shops, which I think are awesome. Antique shops are boring, but a junk shop? You could find anything in one of those! Hampden Junque is easily the junkiest of the lot, a pretty small shop with shelves crammed with curiosities. In a dark corner I found a jumble of photographic equipment, including this Yashinon 35/2.8, bargain-priced at $10.

It looks pretty good overall: the aperture blades move well, the focus is smooth (a little tight though), there’s no sign of fungus inside, and both a rear cap and funky cross screen filter were included. There’s a little dent in the focus ring, but that doesn’t seem to be the cause of the stiffness – I think the grease inside is just a bit old. The big difference between it and my 35/3.5 Super-Takumar is the 2.8 minimum aperture, which provides more light for easier focusing. The Yashinon seems just as sharp, and I think I like the colors a little better. It’s not a must-have, but if you’re looking for a decent 35mm screw-mount lens this is a fine choice…especially if you can find one for $10!

Fells Point