We’ll get to MFMB in a minute – it’s my should-be patented secret to marital bliss. But let’s start with the BBQ part since that takes less explaining.
This year’s competition started a week or so back, when Elaine’s son Brandon, who lives up in Tacoma, lit off his wood-fire BBQ and sent us the most delicious looking plate of ribs we’d seen either in a picture, or real life for that matter, in years.
So this past weekend we got out the BBQ here and started firing off the summer’s best.
As you can see in the top picture, Elaine likes breasts (don’t go there, we’re talking the damn chicken!) which has been rubbed with a mix of lemon-pepper marinade and K.C. Masterpiece seasoning. On top of this goes some Jack Daniel’s BBQ Sauce from the store and yessir, damn fine ‘Q.
My approach, off to the right here, is a little different. Ure’s taste runs more to Asian so when I’m lazy I mix up a 50-50 of Very Teriyaki (which has enough garlic in it to be Italian/Asia) and mixed about 50-50 or whatever feels right with Kikkoman pre-made Teriyaki sauce.
This is poured over the chicken about six-hours before grilling. First step is to toast it up on all sides, basting as you go. A shot of tequila (warmed) will do a nice flaming glaze if you put some sugar and a teaspoon of Everclear in it…depends on if your home owners insurance is current).
After browning up, you set them to one side of the grill and then roast for about 30-40 minutes at 350’ish. Experience teaches that the thermometer on a BBQ is useful. So is a timer.
The next big BBQ plan this week is for my Chinese-flavored country style ribs. Then we will send the Tacoma division of family a couple of pictures so they can have to wash the slobber of their monitors; like we did when the kids rib pictures showed up.
The recipe isn’t terribly difficult. Try it – it’s to die for.
The sauce/marinade:
About 1 cup of brown sugar.
About 1/2 to 3/4 cup of soy sauce (adjust to your desired salt/sweet taste)
About 4 tablespoons of mushed up Maraschino cherries with some of the juice to boot. No, no pits or stems…
A heaping teaspoon, or better, maybe two teaspoons of ground ginger.
A half-dozen ground up garlic cloves
Several solid shakes of Cayenne pepper. No…make it a bit more…lot’s more, depending on your fortitude and whether you like spicy or mild pork.
The lazy way to do this? Take all these ingredients, and throw them in the Vitamix. Hit high a few times (things will warm up, and melt since my chainsaw doesn’t have the power of the Vitamix. Let it sit overnight so flavors blend.
Next morning toss the trimmed, fat-free ribs into a bowl, toss with about 3/4’s of the mix and wander off for 8-hours. Work on something else.
When you are famished: Heat the BBQ, quick brown on a hot flame, basting lightly with some sauce to get a nice glaze going. Then kill heat on one side, slide the ribs over there, and turn the other burners down to maintain 350-400 degrees and have an adult beverages.
When you run out of things to talk about, or begin to stumble, or the chips and salsa aren’t enough, the ribs should be done.
Remove, cover with foil (keeps insects off them) and haul out the dipping sauce. Made of…
1/4 cup catsup (or ketchup of however you spell it)
1/4 cup of freshly ground prepared horseradish.
Long-time readers will remember this as our shrimp cocktail sauce, too. Yes, dual purpose sauce and it does well with Chinese/Asian foods. Heavier on the horsey, or not. Depends how close the fire department is.
A purist would go to Tai Tung in Seattle and have real Chinese food, but it’s a 2,130 mile drive from here…so we make-do at home, instead.
Having grown up in Seattle’s Asian community, I am partial to “blow the roof of your mouth off, freshly made Chinese hot mustard. The right way to do it is to mix up dry powder, give it 10-minutes to hot-up and then serve in a three-tray with sesame seeds and ketchup with a dash of honey and/or cherry juice it in. That would be the RIGHT thing to do. Plum sauce, too, or Hoisin. Nice dipping assortment.
Seems absurd in Texas to have to order a whole case of Dynasty Mustard Powder, 2-Ounce Jars (Pack of 12) for $29-bucks, so I make do with the fresh prepared horseradish (just the horseradish, not bunch of wimpy sauce crap with it). Anyone who buys premixed Chinese mustard probably likes frozen piazza, too.
All of these BBQ treats taste really good cold, or just barely warmed. That’s one of the real tests of good BBQ – how is it cold?
Fine, so now I’ve got you thinking of BBQ – so what is MFMB?
Matching Food, Matching Breath.
Mr. Ure’s lone contribution to marital bliss. Eat the same foods as your partner/spouse/whatever they are nowadays, and since body chemistry should roughly synch up over time, you will have similar breath!
(My other contribution to marital bliss [“whatever you say dear…”] hasn’t be adopted by large enough numbers to be statistically measurable.)
Gee, I don’t know which would more rewarding…being a cook or a marriage counselor, but I’ll go with cooking and whatever is behind Door Number 3.
Hell of a Woo-Woo Story
We were speculatin’ Monday on the possibilities of timelines, time jumps, thinking CERNtain thoughts and such in in popped this amazing report about the Woo being out and about this weekend:
“…oh yes, temporal reality -there-is-a-portal-in-my-bedroom- is alive and well. Last Saturday was a day of high strangeness out here in the boonies…first, a copperhead coiled by the front door (?) bit our small dog as it ran outside (l saw this):hubbie went to get the snake charmer(gun)out of the gun safe as l held the snake down with tongs…but no snake charmer in the safe where we had seen it only 2 days earlier…instead, there was a pristine, dust-free( important to consider if you live out in the country) black box containing a night vision scope that had “disappeared” 3 years ago!
we have looked high and low for that (expensive) scope and recently bought a replacement as it seemed obvious that the lost” one could not be found….the gun was later found in an upstairs bedroom (btw, l killed the snake with a shovel while waiting for husband/gun to come back) . Later that afternoon, we took our dogs out to romp in the field behind the house. We stayed out there for an hour, then walked back to the house. l was especially careful , considering the prior snake-event, in making sure that all the dogs were accounted for on the walk back…we have another very small dog ( the bitten one was recuperating in the bathroom) that had been with us on this walk…
l obviously kept a close eye on her during this outing..suddenly, half way to the house, l realized that she had disappeared from sight..l thought that maybe she had doubled back to walk with my husband…but he yelled at me from behind that the dog had also disappeared from HIS sight, and since it was getting dark he said he would stay outside and look for her…
panicked,l unlocked the front door and took the other dogs inside ….. l went into the master bedroom and opened the bathroom door to check on the injured dog and, of course, the “missing” dog was in there with her !!!!
-smart little doggie (9 lbs): she unlocked one door, and opened and closed 2 behind her….this bathroom shares a wall with the closet containing the gun safe……hello, Rod Serling.”
My pet theory is that these kind of time displacements happen all the time. And, what’s more, they seem to scale. Missing guns and reappearing night vision gear is the small stuff. What about the whole country that disappeared? Bugravia. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, right?
No?
New Topic. Old Radio
Well, turns out, Bugravia (best I can remember) was a creation of the old San Francisco radio comedy team of Coyle & Sharpe.
Check out their (no it ain’t fee) CD set “…these 2 Men are Impostors”
They worked for KGO in San Francisco and they’d take any idea that came up out onto the streets and get people’s reactions to it.
I am particularly fond of their piece called Renting Children. The premise was “Should parents be allowed to rent out their kids?” No? “Well, how about if the child were to get 25% of the charges so they would have an interest in being rented out, too?”
I like people who thing far enough outside the box to live a vastly different life than most of the flock, yet close enough to scamper back to the coop when the foxes show up.
Yes, Coyle and Sharpe on KGO (SF) was one of my earlier drivers of pursing electronic perfection. How else would a lad of 13 be able to hear SF radio in junior high school in Seattle?
Is This Write?
Thinking about writing a high-profit blog or finally finishing that major novel you have been working on?
Pass. Or, if so, don’t plan on making a whole lot of money at it.
According to a survey done by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society of the UK, the money is writing is in steep decline. Like so many things, it is driven by competition, computation, and branding, it seems..
Among other things, their report, summarized over here and worth considering, finds that 5% of the top name authors make 40% of the money from their wordsmithing.
One would think that with a whole internet to fill up, the demand for written material would be soaring. But that is not the case.
Part of this, no doubt, is due to the copy-cats that have driven reputable authors to distraction and then there’s the ever-shortening attention span people have. There are times I wish we could pass out ADHD meds before people skim our sites.
There is a bit of good news in all this: There is a fine lesson out there in being an “early adopter.” If you were one of the first writers and distributors of an ebook, for example my “How to Live on $10,000 a year or less…” you could have changed some lives and made a few dollars. I did…but that was a decade ago…
However, thanks to rip-offs by torrent freaks, not to mention plagiarizers and idea “borrowers” a very solid, original idea from 2004 is now ranked at #4 by Google results.
The BIG LIFE LESSON? Well, two, actually.
If you have designs on making serious money, you need to be both the first – and best – at something. Oh, sure, you may have a “better idea” for a search engine, but do you think you’ll be able to take out the likes of Google and Bing? No way in hell, bubba.
If you’re not pioneering and leading in early adopter categories, there’s not much future for you, except insofar as trench warfare goes. Those kind of marketing battles are long, unprofitable and boring…
The second point is trademark the living hell out of anything you do. That’s why Peoplenomics™ is trademarked and why we will be moving our efforts over time to that site.
Why? Highwaymen of the Internet haven’t taken over the term “urbansurvival” when I created it in 1997, but a search right now shows 576,000 sites that are “trading on the name.”
So is it any wonder that writer incomes are down and likely to fall further?
No.
What will continue to rise in value, though, will be your brand in whatever field you operate in, and not enough can be said about the value of being first with the best.
So when you read about other Urban Survival sites, remember this morning’s lesson: They’re not the innovators… Just phonies and rips which the world is quickly filling up with both on the net and off.
So if you’re planning to write, the only thing that will distinguish your work from others is what?
The price of information is collapsing. The value of infotainment is still there.
OK, back to lawn mowing…yes. three days to mow and edge all that needs doing. This may seem absurd, but I am trying to get part of the property ready to put in a beef, or two. That means developing grass…and that means mowing and that means time on tractor-back. Hesitating even a week or two and Ma Nature comes back to reclaim the property.
Over time, that’s one of the few things more relentless than banksters and tax collectors, but in the short run, most people don’t do hand-to-hand combat with Ma Nature. So time to pour the horses some diesel and mount ‘em up for another day in the saddle.
Write when you break-even
George george@ure.net
Ref: “Highwaymen”
The power of infuence. Create a meme and then complain about the collective embracing the term “urbansurvival”. Somethings are more important than the padding.
Do you suppose George, that Edison family is in litigation about every human on the planet who flicks a switch to see?
What is the advantage? There is always a vantage point dude. Even when the trolls post comments, they are bumping your thread and hey, they are reading it. So you thank them kindly for paying attention.
The Edisons patented and made millions.
George, my mother passed down the best seafood cocktail recipe ever, excellent on raw oysters, shrimp…Adjustments may be made to the cayenne and sriracha sauce for heat.
1 cup Heinz Chili Sauce (may substitute catsup)
2 -3 Tablespoons of horseradish
1 – 2 tablespoons of Worcestershire sauce (Lea & Perrins preferred)
juice of 1/2 fresh lemon
1/2 teaspoon of cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon of Sriracha Chili sauce
1/2 teaspoon of fresh ground black pepper
Refrigerate overnight for best results. Will keep in fridge for a couple of weeks. Enjoy….R/Mark
P.S. Life is too short to eat pre-made store bought food….
P.P.S. I believe this recipe is a bastardized version of the one found in the GOLD COOK BOOK by Louis P. De Gouy, pub 1948, available on Amazon for $7. Highly recommended book with all the classic recipes.
that looks terric bbq but iam under the weather so to speak and i am consuming soup mixtures of 1 can chicken noodle soup thrown into the small crockpot and 1 can of vegetable soup a couple of garlic gloves and onions ground up with a little water in a magic bullet and a can of mixed vegetables and a hicken leg and a few squirts of tabasco and some pepper and a little green peppers and real butter and a few brewskees while waiting for it to reheat yea that that bbq looks good
I will trade you as I am getting ready to clear 5 acres of blackberries that are tree top tall.
Put in a beef or two? As in longhorn or Holstein?
Your idea is getting plagiarized, but those search result numbers are pages, not sites.
Thanks George, I now have the weekend menu decided. And after seeing your BBQ pics I have to decide where to go for supper. Knucklehead #1 is 21 today and he thought we were going to the local Apple place so I could buy him his first (yea right) beer. But now we’re going to have to drive clear across town and into KS for some real KC style BBQ and the coldest beer in the area. No gas burners there, just good ole hickory wood.
Mom is a little reluctant since she is the designated driver.