As this is ostensibly a blog about eating and drinking and gallivanting and the like, figure I best get back to brass tacks. So, with only a tiny little bit of further ado, some photos of the culinary badassery that my mom, stepdad Rich and I experienced at Bittersweet last Friday…
I ordered the duck. It was, I say with not a trace of hyperbole, the single best thing anyone anywhere has ever eaten, ever, with the exception of foods made by The Wife. Gorgeous, buttery, the kind of thing that Diamond Jim Brady probably had shipped in by the ounce from Turkey in the days before refrigeration and suffrage.
The scallops, my mom’s order. Her own mother–a tiny, daffy woman whose outsize appetites and gigantic personal history nevertheless loom over my family’s recent past like a colossus–made a point of ordering scallops in every single restaurant she ever visited, menus be damned. I like to think of ma’s choice as a sort of homage.
My stepdad Rich chose the wild boar. If my own hadn’t been so stellar, the clutchings of food envy might have been too much for me to bear. I’m a sucker for those perfect little potato croquettes. (I should mention, as well, that our server was beyond awesome.)
So. That was Friday. The Wife returned from her business trip Saturday evening, and Sunday I welcomed her back to the bosom of home by smoking a rack of baby backs treated with my buddy Jason’s signature rub and some other techniques I cobbled together with the help of my friends over at The Internet. (Hey guys!)
Here’s what I came up with:
After letting the rack sit in its spice rub for 24 hours, I proceeded to whip it gently with a camel’s hair shaving brush, douse it in Hellman’s Mayonnaise and recite, in my best Paul Lynde impression, every single section of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. When it began the inevitable back-sassin’–you all know what I mean, I’m sure–I ate 14 packets of red hot pepper flakes and made sure to carefully monitor its socio-economic worldview through the end of the cooking period. I also drank about 14 cans of Rolling Rock.*
Following that:
*Try it yourself at home!
Yum! You can bring some of those ribs over to your MIL’s house…soon!