ribs from another world

Swedish pork ribs are different. They come with a four-inch layer of meat-streaked blubber un-firmly attached, and are pretty difficult to treat in the kitchen. Here are the choices:

- You cut off the offending layer and treat the ribs as ribs. Use the fat and the meat for sausages.

- You do a Chinese slow pot roast with star anise, garlic, soy sauce and spring onions. This will have to be a heck of a slow pot roast, or you’ll end up with layers of salty, tough meat embedded in sweet wobbly matter that carries a faint taste of anise. If you manage to summon the patience to cook the ribs all the way through (three hours…four hours??), discard as much of the accumulated fat as possible, rescue the heavenly sauce, but take care to have the Vodka chilled nevertheless - you will need it.

- You make several deep cuts in the meat parallel to the ribs and oven-roast - or grill - the whole combo, with the objective of letting the fat cure or tenderize the meat, or at least getting it to dissolve and vanish. This is, however, not going to happen:

sausage production part II, things to avoid

Our first two batches of sausage in the freezer are diminishing at an alarming rate.

This is mainly due to the fact that the sage-flavored breakfast sausage goes so well together with the maple syrup that we brought back from Virginia in October, that the chestnut-white-wine sausage was a smaller batch and that the chorizo-flavored variety was a welcome addition to a larger quantity of Sauerkraut the other day. So I made sausages again.

At the shop, the cheaper pork chunks were gone, no shoulder, no sides. The butcher happened to be available after a few minutes, or rather after concluding a boxing and tickling episode with his young children