“Let’s have short ribs,” suggested Mary when I mentioned it was about time for our writing group to meet, “at your house.”
I lifted my eyebrows and shrugged non-committally. “We should have it at my house. It’s been a minute.”
“I’ll send the text,” she offered.
Although I didn’t promise, I did plan to make short ribs. I’d made them once before for the group many years ago. Then, I’d seen beautiful boneless short ribs on sale at the grocery store, and they seemed like the thing to cook. I had adapted a braised lamb shank recipe, and in my memory, they were effortlessly delicious: perfectly tender in a savory sauce enriched with mascarpone cheese.
That’s what I was planning this time, too, but I decided to order the meat from a local farm that delivers dairy, meat, and produce. Their beef is sustainably and humanely raised and very flavorful. Two frozen blocks of bone-in short ribs were delivered last week, and the first part of the recipe was make-ahead, so I thawed the ribs a few days ago and planned the first cook for yesterday.
I knew I would have to cut the ribs to separate them myself, but I wasn’t prepared for the thickness of the fat cap on them. Rather than marbled, they were layered, and each rib had a slightly different proportion of meat to fat and bone. When I thought about it, I knew that such irregularity is to be expected when you source your meat from a farm. Unlike in the grocery store, all of these ribs came from a single cow. Because of the sheer volume they supply, grocery meat distributors can package meat by like size and shape by trimming and sorting through cuts from many animals.
There is an adage recommending giving a task you really need to be done to a busy person. The notion is that the busy are more efficient and productive. Accurate or not, the folks in charge of education seem to have taken that one to heart: as much talk as there is about taking things off teachers' proverbial plates, in the years that I taught, our responsibilities were regularly compounded. The time it took to do my job as well as I wanted to was one of the main reasons I retired.
As unsure as I am about the busy person maxim, I have found that the inverse is true, at least for me. The less I have to do? The less I get done, especially since retiring. No deadlines, means, well, no deadlines. But with the actual date of writing group fast approaching, I found myself with a hard to-do list, and spent yesterday catching up on the housekeeping I’d been putting off since we cut our cleaning lady’s visits to once a month. Even so, I did not feel stressed, because? I’m retired!
Depending who you talk to, or what recipe you read, short ribs are either one of the easiest dishes to make or else they are a somewhat tricky entree to pull off. The conflict lies in the cut itself. Short ribs are cut from the first five ribs of the cow, which is also in the chuck section, or the side of the chest. That area has a lot of muscle and fat, so the meat is tough, but marbled with fat and collagen that break down and tenderize it with long, slow cooking. That’s why most recipes call for braising short ribs-- just pop them in a low oven or slow cooker, set the timer for several hours, and voila!
The tricky part is this: if you don’t cook the ribs long enough, they are super-tough and chewy, but if you are overdone, they can be cottony and dry. The exact timing can vary, too, depending on the ribs you get. All told, however, the braising liquid can be forgiving, so overcooking is less of a problem.
It was around six last night when I butchered the ribs and began searing them in my new cast iron braiser, all the while cooking our dinner for that night, too. “Are you going to have enough time tonight?” Heidi asked. “Weren’t you going to try to do those earlier?”
“Yes and yes!” I answered confidently, straining the bone broth I had simmered all afternoon for the braise. “The recipe says they only need to cook an hour and a half tonight.” And that’s all I gave them. Even though they seemed tough when I pierced them with a fork, the recipe also called for cooling them overnight in the braising liquid, and I was hopeful that would do the trick.
This morning, when I geared up for phase two of the dish, the short ribs were still very tough and chewy, even after a night in the broth and an hour in the marinade. There was much more fat than I remembered, too, but that was easily discarded. I hoped they would tenderize in the short cooking time remaining, but I was disappointed 20 minutes later when I checked. Uh oh. It was time to improvise.
And I did. Another hour in the oven seemed to do the trick, although I would have to tweak the sauce a bit. Fortunately, I had made another bit of beef stock with the bones I’d lifted from the ribs. And there was the mascarpone, standing by to pull it all together. Dinner was saved, but was it because I was busy or because I had all that time?
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