Meal: Crockpot barbecue ribs, smashed potatoes
Cost per person: $1.50
Time: about 25 minutes, 10 of which was hands off
Leftovers: a small lunch portion of ribs
Local ingredients: beef ribs, potatoes
Organic ingredients: sugar, tomato puree, lemon juice

Last night we did beef ribs in the crockpot with homemade barbecue sauce. That sounds intimidating. We’d tried homemade barbecue sauce once last summer, but I’d been guessing at a recipe instead of finding a good one, and it was a flop. This time, I started with a good recipe (I’ve also gotten much better at looking at a recipe and judging how it’s going to be and what I can substitute or leave out without negatively affecting it) and it was amazing.

The sauce recipe came from The New Low-Country Cooking: 125 Recipes for Coastal Southern Cooking with Innovative Style, that I have checked out of the library.

The original recipe calls for:

- 2 tbs vegetable oil
- 3 celery ribs, finely chopped
- 1 red bell pepper, seeded and finely chopped
- 1 green bell pepper, seeded and finely chopped
- 1 onion, finely chopped
- 4 cups coarsely chopped ripe tomatoes or tomato ketchup
- 1.5 cups firmly packed dark brown sugar
- 0.5 cups prepared yellow mustard
- 0.25 cup Worcestershire sauce
- 0.25 cup fresh lemon juice
- 2 tbs garlic powder
- 2 tbs ground ginger
- 0.5 teaspoon chili powder
- 0.5 teaspoon cayenne pepper
- 1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
- 1 teaspoon salt

Heat the oil over medium heat; add the celery, peppers, and onions, and cook until they’re softened, just a few minutes. Add tomatoes and brown sugar. Reduce heat and simmer until the sugar dissolves. Add everything else, cover, and cook on low for an hour, stirring as needed. Taste and adjust salt or other seasonings as needed. Let cool and store in an airtight container in the fridge. The author says that this “will last for months” and that the recipe needs 4.5 cups.

Then there’s my version. Yesterday, I didn’t need 4.5 cups of an unknown sauce recipe; also, if you’ll remember, someone isn’t fond of cooked vegetables. Finally, I needed something quick - I needed to put the sauce together, get everything into the crockpot, and make haste to my office hours. So, the expedited version:

- 1 cup tomato puree
- 1/4 + 1/8 cup brown sugar (there’s a trick that you can use if you don’t have brown sugar on hand but do have molasses. Mix a tablespoon or so of molasses with however much sugar you need - or a little more, until it’s the desired color - and you have instant brown sugar.)
- 2 tbs yellow mustard (next time, I think I’m just going to use mustard powder)
- 1 tbs Worcestershire sauce
- 1 tbs soy sauce (we ran out of Worcestershire sauce)
- 2 tbs lemon juice
- 0.5 tbs ground ginger
- 0.5 tbs garlic powder
- a touch of chili powder (I didn’t measure)
- a smaller touch of chipotle powder (again, didn’t measure)
- a generous grind of black pepper
- a generous dash of salt

I heated the tomato puree, added the brown sugar until it dissolved, then added everything else. I stirred until the mustard was well combined, and that was it. This went into the crockpot with 1.3 pounds of beef ribs (on sale a couple weeks ago for $1.25 a pound). Prep time was 15 minutes. They sat on low for 8.5 hours, until I got out of class. When I got home, we threw a couple of potatoes in the microwave for ten minutes, mashed them up with a little milk, salt, and pepper, and ate the ribs and sauce served over the potatoes. This sauce was so, so seriously good, it’s making me hungry writing about it, and I’m already plotting the next time we can have it. I’m thinking that next Monday night, there’s going to be a meeting between this sauce, a package of stew beef, our crockpot, and the hamburger rolls…