Recreating Memories

I'd better slip this one in before I forget how I made it. I find my memory is not what it used to be - and it was never all that hot to begin with. Ah, well, senior moments can be fun, too.

Like many seniors, I find I can sometimes remember things from my childhood with greater clarity than where in the damn house I put the book I am currently reading. One of my childhood memories is coming home from school to find the house suffused with the scent of my mother's oven barbecued spareribs.

Oddly, I also associate this scent with migraine headaches. As a child and young adult, I suffered greatly from "sick headaches" that would begin in the afternoon, rise rapidly to a pounding crescendo and ebb quickly once I had tossed my cookies. For some reason, the spareribs often showed up on a headache day - one of those little injustices of life. But, when I was healthy, they were my very favorite dinner.

I set out to re-create them recently and failed almost entirely. However, what I did make was tasty, even though it was not what I remembered. For one thing, I realized when I took the first bite of these country spareribs that my mother used pork, not beef ribs. Although the ingredients I used were roughly the same as her ribs, they were in a very different proportion. Hers used more catsup and less of the rest of the ingredients. I'll have to keep tweaking the recipe but here's what I made this week. My Beloved, never having had my mother's version, said they were pretty darn good.

Oven Barbecued Beef Spareribs

3 large country beef ribs with bones sliced (by the butcher) roughly every 3"
1 cup tomato catsup
1/2 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup orange juice + juice of one fresh orange
juice of one fresh lemon
2-3 Tbs. soy sauce
1/4 cup cider vinegar
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 red onion, chopped
1-2 tsp. allspice
1 tsp. Penzey's Northwoods Fire seasoning (it's mainly chipotle peppers, black pepper and paprika with a little rosemary, thyme and cayenne).

I mixed all these together, poured a bit in the bottom of a roasting pan, added the ribs, then poured the rest over the top, making sure it got into all the crevices in the meat. Roasted it under foil for about an hour, then turned the ribs in the sauce and removed the foil for the second hour.