Braised Pork Ribs with Rosemary and Garlic Spinach

So after a long, long time, I’ve finally decided to put something up on this long-forsaken blog of mine. Guided by the motivation that I a) love food b) love sharing it with people c) eat alone in this grad school site of boredom, I figured I might want to share some of my creativeness. People who know how to cook might find some of my recipe stuff stupid, but considering that I had no idea how to cook, and I learned painfully after years of trial and error, I am firmly entrenched in my beliefs that procedures should be explained.

Skip that intro? Good, let’s begin… (you can just scan the bolded stuff for teh quickness)

Today’s recipe are braised pork ribs with rosemary, and garlic spinach as a side. This dish has no salad (but you could add one yourself).

We start off with a packet of pork ribs, the meaty kind. They can be with or without the bone (although I like to keep the bone on for flavor), but they should be a little meaty with a small bit of fat left on them. Don’t worry, fat is very good for you in small quantities, and if you happen to find ribs from the Serbian Mangulica pig, you’re in luck, since it has less cholesterol than chicken!…

But yes. So chop up some spring onions (scallions), about 4-5 medium-sized ones should cut it. Add to that one large carrot, sliced into little circular bundles of joy.

Take your braising pan, put a bit of olive oil on the bottom, and turn the heat on to medium-high. Drop those scallion bad boys and the carrotino, and sautee then for a few minutes. It’s good to wait for a small change in smell that happens when the scallions lose their slight bitterness, but if you don’t want to smell like a silly person (me) around your kitchen, you can just time it around 1.5-2 minutes. Then, add the pork ribs, reducing the heat to medium. Your olive oil should be quite hot by now, and quickly browning the meat. At that point, put a pinch of salt over the meat, some black pepper, paprika, and rosemary. It would be best and cheapest if you’d have a rosemary plant in your garden or outside, but some dried ones work fine as well. Rub the spices into the meat using your wooden spoon while it’s browning, and then turn it around and repeat the process. Finally, add half a cup of water (or just enough to cover a little less than half the meat in height, and reduce the heat to a simmer. After that, put a few hefty drops of olive oil on top of each rib, and rub it with the spice using that same spoon. Put the lid on, and forget about the whole thing for one hour.

For example, listen to some Stelios Kazantsidis – that always puts me a in a cooking mood. While you’re at it, wash and clean your spinach, and leave it aside.

Boil some water in a quart pot, and just blanch the spinach – drop it into boiling water for about 30 seconds, and then just take it out! It will get much smaller – a big bag will turn out to be a bit more than a handfull. If you’re using canned spinach just skip this part…

Chop up two large cloves of garlic, and heat up some olive oil in that same quart pot (just make sure its dry first! – hot oil and water don’t like each other very much). Then, drop the garlic into the hot olive oil, and right when you can smell the delicious garlickyness of it, drop the spinach in and stir, reducing the heat to a low setting. You might realize the water+oil thing in the beginning of this exercise, especially if your spinach is still damp. Finally, add some milk into the mix (quarter to half of a cup), salt and pepper, and stir again. The whole spinach process shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes.

By this time, your delicious pork ribs should be done, so just take both out, put them side by side, add a nice helping of plain yogurt and a parsley leaf on top of the spinach, and enjoy!