It doesn’t matter how sunny and warm it is outside, if its a day in autumn, I automatically crave hearty, meaty dishes for dinner. My current obsession is spare ribs. The need to slow cook them coupled with their rich, off the bone flavour represents everything good about cooler weather meat eating.

I’m even happier if there’s a quick and easy recipe involved. A little bit of a search on allrecipes.com lead me to this recipe and it’s a winner if you ask me. The end result is less oily and sticky than the ribs you might get at steak houses.  There’s also the added convenience of being able to cook this recipe using a stove top and oven rather than having to fire up the barbecue.

You can either prepare the ribs as a rack or else cut them up individually before cooking.  Guess which option we went for?  The easier one, of course.  You need a bit of primal, bone gnawing, get your fingers dirty kind of meat eating in your week every so often.

The first step is to let your ribs simmer in a stock made with garlic, salt and pepper. It took 45 minutes for our ribs to fully cook.  We were working with two large sides of ribs the other night, far too many for one night’s dinner.  To save time for future rib dinners, we simmered all the ribs but only baked the ones we needed for dinner.  The remainder were frozen in a zip lock bag together with a marinade of barbecue sauce.

Let the ribs drain before placing them in a roasting tray and covering with your barbecue sauce of choice.

There’s probably enough sauce here for a lifetime of rib dinners….

For full effect, home made sauce would be great but I used this American made barbecue sauce I found at Costco.  It’s a bit smokier than the Australian made versions.

Bake the foil covered tray of ribs in a preheated 165C oven for about 1 3/4 hours. Baste the ribs every 20 minutes during the cooking process.

When they’re done, plate up and be prepared to get your fingers dirty.

Are you a rib fan as well?  Where was the best place you ever ate them?