My husband’s meat market binge…

…turned out delicious.  🙂

Okay, I know I haven’t blogged in…well…months.  Did I mention I’m a retail manager?  November/December/January are a little nuts for me at work. 

We’ve been cooking – you know, that’s how I blow off steam! – but not taking many pics and definitely not blogging about it. 

But yesterday…my dear hubby, meaning well, stopped at a local meat market on his way home from work.   He meant well.  He didn’t know I had already planned my Sunday off as a day full of lounging in my bathrobe and slippers, ordering pizza from that great place around the corner where everyone from the order-taker to the delivery guy is Asian and the pizza is totally awesome.  

He had the best intentions.  And then he experienced his first meat market.  And went a little nuts.

Fortunately, the ground elk was already frozen in one-pound chunks, so it went directly in the freezer with the 35+ pounds of roasted Hatch chile peppers that live there.  I’m sure at some point they’ll merge into something delish.

The venison sausage, all $27 of it?  (That’s a basketball-sized chunk of sausage links, by the way.)  He hasn’t yet been able to articulate his intentions toward the sausage, but it seems to involve grilling at some point.  The paper-wrapped monstrosity is squatting on the bottom shelf of the fridge for now.

Then…there were the ribs.  Beef AND pork ribs.  And he bought (this is a direct quote), “four of each”.  So we have four huge pork ribs of unknown specific cut, and a chunk of beef with bones that he can’t exactly identify, but ‘ribs’ was definitely in the name.

Pork on the left, beef on the right

And there goes the day in the robe and slippers, just like that.  Because we have to find stuff to do with the ribs.

It started, of course, with foodnetwork.com.  And then making up our own stuff because nothing really fit what we wanted to do.  So he made a wet marinade for the beef ribs, and I made a dry rub for the pork ribs.  And we left them in the fridge.

We drove through Arby’s for a snack on the way to the SPCA (I know, that’s a HUGE non-sequitur).  My birthday is in 2 weeks and all I’ve asked for is a kitten (to accompany the 4 cats we already have).  They’re SO cute when they’re little and fuzzy…

After failing to fall irrevocably in love with 3 kittens in a row (and feeling guilty about rejecting each one), we headed for the grocery store.  You know by now, hopefully, how much I adore my dear hubby.  But he DOES leave the shopping cart in the middle of the aisle.  Repeatedly. 

I don’t understand it.  But I love him still.

We survived the grocery store, and were still speaking while we unloaded the groceries.

German potato salad...it has BACON!!!

We had chosen four new recipes for tonight’s meal, without any dishes we’d ever made before.  The menu: grilled dry-rubbed pork ribs with spicy jalapeno-honey relish; beef ribs with grilled pineapple-habanero sauce and chile oil; German potato salad; and apple/poppy seed slaw.

I’ll post recipes later.  For now, I’ll just say…the food rocked.  And it was good to get back in the kitchen with the hubby. 

The new mandoline is awesome!

And I LOVE my new kitchen toys!  Santa brought me a mandoline, a chef’s knife, and an immersion blender.

Santa outdid himself this year.  You should really taste these ribs…