Baby Back Ribs

Ingredients for the rub:
- 8 parts light brown sugar
- 1 parts kosher salt
- 1 part chili powder
- 1 part spice mix: black pepper, dried garlic, bay leaf, dried ancho chili, herb de provance, cayenne pepper, all ground in a mortar and pestle.

For two large racks of baby back ribs, 1/8 cup works out for the parts, e.g., 1 c brown sugar, 1/8c salt, 1/8c chili powder, 1/8c spice mix.




Ingredients for the bbq sauce:
- 1 cup white wine
- 1 tblsp white vinegar
- 2 tblsp worcestershire sauce
- 1tblsp honey
- 2 cloves crushed garlic
* Microwave this mixture for 1 minute to melt the honey

Make a kind of "boat" for the ribs with heavy duty foil. Shiny side out!

Lay them in and rub on both sides liberally with the rub. Meat side up (convex side up).

Close well, and let site AT LEAST 2 hours.

After the ribs marinate in the rub for at least 2 hours, open one end of the aluminum foil boat and pour in the bbq sauce. Bake in an over at 225 degrees for 2 1/2 hours. How do you know they're done? Grab a bone and try to turn it, if it breaks free easily, it is done!

Drain the bbq sauce into a clear dish and let the fat settle to the top for about 20 minutes. Skim off the fat and put the drippings in a sauce pan and reduce to a thick paste. Brush on the ribs, and then broil the ribs just a few minutes to caramelize the bbq sauce. 

Brush the bbq sauce on the ribs and broil a couple minutes - careful it will burn quickly.

Done!

If you want to see the origin for this recipe, it is from an Alton Brown video. Here he explains the entire technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ2nL7VGOFs

Paella

The finished Paella looks awesome!

Probably the biggest challenge to make a good Paella is picking the right ingredients. It's probably one of the harder dishes to shop for. But once you figure out where to get the ingredients, Paella is both easy to make and amazingly delicious.

There are some tricks to picking easy ingredients, but when you find them, they make preparation very quick; for example, pre-sliced mushrooms, canned diced tomatos, and olive & garlic mix are pre prepared ingredients you can buy that shorten the cooking time dramatically. And Saffron. The liquid base is flavored throughout with Saffron.

Basically here are all the ingredients

There are only a few tricks to getting this dish right, but once you have it down, it is actually very easy and can have amazingly savory flavors.

Paella goes really well with any wine - it's not at all finicky. It is good with cabernets, pinot noirs, sangria, and champagne. It is also great with beer and a Caipirinha.

Ingredients:
- linguica, pre-cooked is preferable, about 4 inch piece
- olive oil
- diced tomatos (canned diced tomatoes or fresh)
- about 4-5 chicken thighs with the bone in, skinned
- mushrooms (pre-sliced or whole)
- Paella rice, about 1 1/4 cup
- 1 onion
- a few cloves of garlic chopped coarsely
- olives, garlic, pimento, caper mixture (also called alcaparrado, see notes on this below)
- shellfish; shrimp and/or mussels are nice, about 1/2 lb each
- chicken broth about 2 cups (or beef broth)
- anchovy
- cilantro
- saffron

Notes:
I'll write these notes first, because there are a few tricks to Paella. The right ingredients matter for this dish, and substitutions are not a good idea.
- Paella rice, do not substitute, it is an important ingredient. It is not too hard to find.
- Linguica can tricky. There are a lot of styles. Pre-cooked is preferred, and try to find one that is not too firm, not too soft. The important thing to remember is to buy one that you like, one that tastes fine all alone, and you'll be fine.

- You can find an olive mix in the deli section in jars, or make a mix yourself from the olive bars in a Safeway or Whole Foods. We made this mix ourselves by just going around the Whole Foods olive bar. It turned out awesome because we picked just the ingredients we

We made our own alcaparado from the
Whole Foods olive bar, it was delicious

- You can save a ton of time with canned or bottled ingredients. Diced tomatoes can be found in a can. Mushrooms are easy to find pre-slice now. All these little things can save a lot of time and make this dish more fun and easy.
- Shellfish can be mixed any way you like. Get 2 or 3 that you like. We usually use shrimp and mussels. Clams are fine. So are squid or scallops.
- The main trick in the technique is getting everything done at the same time; the chicken, the rice, the shellfish.
- The only cooking trick is that it is very easy to burn the bottom of the rice, so you have to be careful with the right heat.


Procedure:

Cooking the chicken and linguica

- This recipe goes fast, so it is very important to prep everything first; slice onion and garlic, skin off the chicken, slice linguica, peel shrimp, etc, etc
- Heat the broth to boiling in a separate pan
- In olive oil, brown the chicken thighs and slices of linguica
- After chicken is browned on both sides, toss in onions, garlic and mushrooms, cook a couple minutes
- Toss in paella rice, coat with oil and fat
- Toss in diced tomatoes, olive mixture
- Toss in a few crushed anchovies, you won't actually taste the anchovy, but they will impart a savory flavor to the dish.
- Add in hot broth
- Sprinkle saffron on top, it needs to infuse the broth

Adding the mushrooms and onion

- Turn the heat pretty far down - Cover and simmer 15-20 minutes. This is a tricky heat level, the broth needs to boil, but since you cannot stir the dish at this point, it is easy to burn the rice in the bottom of the pan, so get the heat as low as you can while still boiling gently.

Just added the broth and starting the simmer

- The rice should be near done in 15-20 minutes, put the shellfish in a layer on top, and toss on some cilantro (as much as you like)
- Cover and cook the whole thing another 5 minutes until the mussels open and/or the shrimp are done

Pao de Queijo

Finished Pao de Queijo & Caipirinha's

Ingredients:
-2 cups tapioca flour

-1 cup whole milk
-1/2 cup butter (or margarine)
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 cups grated Parmesan cheese
- 2 eggs

Put the dough in muffin tins

Pao de Queijo dough

 Procedure:
 1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees F.
2. In the mean time bring the milk, salt, and butter to a boil in a sauce pan while constantly stirring mixture.
 3. Once boiling remove the mixture of milk, salt and butter from heat.
4. Slowly add tapioca flour, stirring constantly until thoroughly mixed
5. Add the cheese and eggs to mixture
6. Mix until smooth
7. Fill each mini muffin cup all the way up
8. Bake until golden brown, usually about 15 minutes.
You can eat them while hot, they are delicious when fresh! Cooked puffs can be stored, in the fridge as long as it's kept covered and then warmed up on a low setting in a toaster oven.

Baked Rigatoni Pasta

This is a very fast, easy, and especially delicious pasta recipe. We got all the ingredients from Trader Joe's.

The ingredients are meant to all cook in one pan to save clean-up, then there is one baking dish, and that is it. I suppose this could all be done in one large pan like a paella pan, I will try that sometime!

Ingredients:
- Olive oil
- Butter, about 2 tablespoons
- Sliced mushrooms, one bag
- Rigatoni
- Cherry tomatoes, one small basket
- Sausage, about 1lb., (sausage links are fine, cut them open and remove the sausage)
- hard cheese, like reggiano parmasagna, about 1 cup grated fine.
- Marinara sauce (Trader Joe's sauce from a jar is really good and easy for this recipe, or you could make your own of course)
- Garlic
- Herbs (whatever you like, fresh basil is nice), dried herbs are fine (e.g., herb de provance)
- Bread crumbs for topping, 1/4 cup (optional)
- White cooking wine, about 1/4 cup

Chese, tomatoes, and sauce

Procedure:
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Boil rigatoni until al dente, make sure it is not overdone, it will cook more when baked later.

This is the part that gets done in one pan:
- Saute garlic in olive oil until light brown and fragrant.

Sautee the mushrooms and sausage

- Add mushrooms and saute with garlic until the mushrooms have a nice light brown color, then add sausage and break up sausage. Cook sausage until done, but not overdone, it should be soft - it will cook more later during baking.
- In the last 5 minutes, add in cherry tomatoes, sliced in half, and cooking wine, and to cook just a few minutes until the tomatoes soften and the wine evaporates.

Combine everything in the baking dish:
- Hopefully the rigatoni is done boiling while you are cooking the sausage - drain the rigatoni and put in a baking dish with the butter, and mix until the butter is melted and the pasta coated.
- Add about 1 cup of Marinara sauce and mix.
- Add in the sausage, mushroom, and tomato mixture and mix well.
- Add in the cheese and mix again.
- This is an optional topping: Mix breadcrumbs with a couple tablespoons of olive oil and herbs - it will be like a paste. Spread it on top and mix a little with the top layer.

Adding cherry tomatoes

- Place the whole thing in the over for about 30 minutes. It will look brown and bubbly when done.

Mix the sausage with the cooked pasta

Ready to go in the oven