Ribs. Beer. Boom.

Yesterday morning I woke up to find that my man and his friend who had crashed on our couch (this is a different friend from the one who usually sleeps on our couch, but who’s counting) had, the previous evening, left two almost-full bottles of Corona undrunken when they—wait for it—crashed on the couch. (YES, "UNDRUNKEN" IS A WORD, I JUST MADE IT A WORD.)

Gentle reader, I largely do not live my life in accordance with societal conventions, or ethical standards, or...well, probably the less said on this topic the better—but I do have one inviolable rule governing my household and existence in general: YOU DO NOT WASTE BEER. So, I did what anyone else would do in this situation, and dumped the leftover beer into the slow cooker along with some bone-in spare ribs (sprinkled with salt) and a squirt of barbecue sauce.

Slow-Cooker Pork Ramen, Ignorant American Style

Gentle reader, I do NOT love a rainy night. Not when it’s raining, like, buckets. (Although it is exciting when the storm drains on my street are clogged by litter and the street floods and I can legitimately say I live on waterfront property.)

But when life gives you rain, you make comfort food. So I perused a few slow-cooker pork ramen recipes online and then, as is my wont, ignored like 90% of their instructions and mashed up the rest according to my own whim.

Adventures in Slow Cooking: Baby-Back Ribs

Gentle reader, you may have noticed that I am no longer numbering installments of the Adventures in Slow-Cooking series, as it has become readily apparent that they are accumulating too quickly to keep track of, and I was told there would be no math on the blog. I don't even like measuring ingredients.

Anyhoo, baby back ribs in a slow cooker, you can’t beat that. Especially if yours, as mine were, are labeled as “pork loin back ribs,” which just sounds so deliciously dirty.

I severed and peeled off the membrane (that plastic-wrap-like layer on the back of the ribs) and rubbed into the meat a dry rub consisting of the usual suspects: kosher salt, paprika, garlic powder. Kept it simple. Let it sit in fridge overnight.

Adventures in Semi-Homemade Ignorant American Fusion Slow Cooking: Korma Is Not a Bitch

Gentle reader, I’m not gonna lie: I have not been employed full-time for some time. (What, how did you think I made time to suddenly and vociferously resurrect this blog?) And while I was extremely, extraordinarily grateful to have scored a week’s in-house freelance assignment in Manhattan, I was unprepared to be thrown back into the cowpen of personal-space violation that is the C-train morning commute. (Pro tip: Ladies of the C train, if you have ever lamented aloud to your significant other that you’d like to spoon more often, BE MORE SPECIFIC about whom you'd like to spoon with, because if you don’t, all I have to say is, BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU WISH FOR.) Mind you, this was morning time I would ordinarily spend Instagramming my breakfast while watching "In the Papers" on NY1, then observing the progress of Jamie Shupak's baby bump, then wondering just how drunk everyone on the Today show is, then maybe throwing some stuff in the slow cooker, then maybe going back to bed until like 11. Okay, fine, noon.

Anyhoo. I determined to still make at least a couple of weeknight dinners in the course of the week, even though I would probably not be able to get home before 7PM, given the bashful C train's tendency to wait for FOUR FREAKING A TRAINS TO GO BY before it works up the courage to pull up into the station.

But oh right, the slow cooker—that part of my morning ritual could actually carry over! This, I realized, would be a good opportunity to continue evolving my slow-cooking skills, which I will definitely need to rely heavily on if I am ever again gainfully employed full-time. I resolved to purchase a jar of premade Indian sauce, slather it on a chicken, and call it a day before starting my day. I figured, hey, if the semi-homemade approach is good enough for the plucky unofficial First Lady of New York, Sandra Lee, it’s good enough for me.

I also thought that leftover chicken could be used for lunches, because another traumatic memory that came rushing back this week was HOW FREAKING MUCH A MEASLY SOGGY SANDWICH COSTS IN MANHATTAN! (Don’t get me started on what happens if you want a salad. Let’s just say it’s a good thing that I never want a salad.)

Adventures in Slow Cooking, Part V: Curried Chicken Thighs With Mushrooms and Green Beans

Gentle reader, in my ongoing attempts to master cooking with my new slow cooker, I dare say this might have been the most successful yet. Now, I’m not going to lie: This recipe is basically a variation on the Ignorant American Fusion Tikka Masala recipe I recently posted. The biggest difference is, you would really want to use thighs over breasts on this one, because they’re moister (read: fattier), and they will end up shreddy as opposed to chunky. Also I skipped the heavy cream component in the sauce, because I had no idea what consistency that would yield. Maybe next time.

I took maybe 3 pounds of bone-in chicken thighs, deskinned them and trimmed the blobby fat seams with kitchen shears, and rubbed them with a mix of curry powder, paprika, kosher salt, garlic powder, and cumin. (I was pretty generous with this dry rub, because I figured it would kind of dissipate into and flavor the sauce.) I left them in the fridge overnight like this, but eh, you needn’t bother.

Adventures in Slow Cooking Part IV: Pot Roast

I feel like pot roast is the ultimate slow-cooker meal, even though the method of cooking means it is technically not a roast, and arguably not in a pot. On Wednesday, I decided to go super-old-school and combine in my slow cooker (as seen above) ...

Adventures in Slow Cooking, Part III: Red Cabbage with Onions

So upon returning from a lovely Chrismakkuah holiday in Massachusetts (during which I had the requisite bowl of clam chowdah at the Union Oyster House and the requisite healthy salad at the Ninety-Nine), I had very little viable food in my fridge, but felt the need to immediately get back on the slow-cooker horse. So on Tuesday I fished out of the fridge:

• Half a head of red cabbage
• A pat of compound butter (leftover from my holiday party—as was the cabbage—you could also use regular butter and some fresh herbs, I kind of wish I’d had some)
• One quarter wedge of a huge yellow onion
• A half-full (or, if you’re pessimistic, half-empty) bottle of Corona

Adventures in Slow Cooking, Part II: Cream-of-Mushroom Chicken With Broccoli

Gentle reader, for my second-ever foray into slow-cooker cooking, I had the urge to go old-school-Americana with that classic creamy combo of chicken and Campbell’s canned cream of mushroom soup. (I have a perverse taste for this, as evidenced by the Company Chicken recipe.) I checked out a few recipes online, and they were all pretty similar—as Andy Warhol could’ve told you, Campbell’s soup cans do not really lend themselves to variation. I settled on a pretty simple take on it. You just dump all of the following into the cooker:

Adventures in Slow Cooking, Part I: Pork Loin

Gentle reader, I have never had a slow cooker before—the amount of counter space it would take up seemed prohibitive in my matchbox-sized NYC kitchen, and I feared that with my innate propensity for injuring myself and damaging things, it would be a bad move to leave something cooking in absentia for hours. I had visions of languishing in prison for years after my slow cooker started a fire that took down my building and killed my neighbors. Seriously.

But. I decided to start a new and less melodramatic chapter in my life—expanding my horizons if not my countertop space—and asked for a slow cooker for Christmas.

Soon, my aunt Sue shipped me a large box—after having already texted me that she was getting me one—so it seemed obvious that that was what was in the box, and thus I felt justified in opening and starting to use it before Christmas.

Short Ribs With Kielbasa and Polenta: A Dish to Die For

I love short ribs over polenta. As previously noted, I like to slow-and-low-cook short ribs in the oven the night before and then reheat, for 3 reasons: (1) You can prep them while you make a quicker meal for that night; (2) You can skim off a congealed layer of grease when you take them out of the fridge so you don’t hate yourself as much; and (3) My kitchen does not have space for a slow cooker, are you kidding me. Barbie’s Dream House seriously has more kitchen square footage than mine, and I am not adjusting for scale here, people.

Anyway, the other week, I preheated the oven to 250° or so; dredged my short ribs in garlic powder, kosher salt, and paprika; and browned them in olive oil in my Creuset saucepot before adding an 8-oz. can of tomato sauce, some chicken stock prepared from the carcasses of recently documented roast chickens, and the remains of a bottle of red wine I had in the fridge. Then I put the covered pan in the oven for a few hours.

It was only later that it occurred to me that the fact that the wine bottle’s cork had a festive Santa hat topper meant that it had been sitting in the fridge for almost exactly one year, since my holiday party was scheduled for that coming Sunday. This concerned me. Actually, my immediate thought was OH MY GOD I’M NOT READY TO DIE OF FOOD POISONING, I HAVE SO MANY THINGS LEFT TO EAT, BUT IF MY DEMISE IS AT THE HANDS OF SHORT RIBS AT LEAST MY LOVED ONES CAN CONSOLE THEMSELVES BY REMINDING THEMSELVES THAT I DIED DOING WHAT I LOVED.

So anyway, the polenta recipe...

Lamb Shank Stew With Tomato and Butter Beans

It is an all too rare occurrence that my co-blogger and I cook and eat a meal together. But a few days before New Year’s, we found ourselves free of plans. Serendipitously, I had a pot full of lamb shank stew that I had planned to serve over rice, and Alyce was…making rice. It was totally like I was a crocodile and she was that bird that picks food out of its teeth, or something. So, Alyce jumped in her car to come pick me up, I threw my pot into a canvas shopping bag (have lamb, will travel!), and we proceeded to have the best impromptu dinner party ever.

How, gentle reader, did I come to have said pot of stew in my possession? Well, the previous night, I had made tomato soup (recipe to come, sooner or later) and grilled cheese sandwiches (with fancy artisanal bread from Brooklyn Victory Garden and Kraft singles from Met Foods) for myself and The Rob, and prepped this lamb stew for later in the week. See, on weeknights, I like to throw together something quick for that night’s dinner (say, pasta) while simultaneously pre-cooking something that can be reheated another night. Cheap cuts of meat like lamb shank and beef short ribs take a long time to slow-cook but require zero maintenance while doing so, and serving them on the next night or two is actually preferable because (a) the flavors develop that much longer and (b) during overnight refrigeration, a layer of fat congeals at the top of the liquid and can be easily skimmed off before reheating.

So, here’s how to put this dish together. It takes time management (you want it to cook 4 hours on night 1) but very little hands-on time.

Cassoulet, Brooklyn-Style

Yesterday I was perusing the meat aisle of my local Met Foods trying to come up with a dinner idea that wasn’t just a straight-up meat-vegetable-starch plate, when I suddenly came upon packages of confit duck legs. While a nuanced discussion of gentrification in Brooklyn neighborhoods is outside the scope of this post, I will just say that the presence of duck confit there was about as surprising as discovering that the G train was running normally on a weekend.

At $6 a leg, I realized, I could not afford the confit. However, the idea of using it in a cassoulet had already taken shape in my mind, and I decided to try my own spin on that one-pot meal using turkey drumsticks, which were packaged at the Met for about $2 for two.

As usual with my cooking, this makes no pretense to be faithful to the classic dish, in this case a French-countryside-y bean stew with a mélange of rich meats. I looked up cassoulet in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking when I got home, and her rendition is a five-page, three-day affair for 10-12 people involving “pork loin, shoulder of mutton or lamb, and sausage,” with suggested variants such as duck, goose, confit goose, veal shank, and partridge—all compiled under the unassuming recipe title “Cassoulet: French baked beans.” (Sorry to get all “Kitty and Julia” on you, but she is the authority on French cuisine.)

Along with the turkey drumsticks, my cheapo version uses the packaged horseshoe-shaped supermarket kielbasa, plus two Goya cans of butter beans—large white beans whose starch gives the sauce an almost creamy texture. It does take upwards of two hours, so you may want to prepare it on a Sunday; this is one of those dishes that might be even better reheated. The below proportions would easily serve four for dinner, but I made it for two with plans for leftovers.