A couple posts ago, I posted about trimming up spare ribs into essentially a ‘St Louis Style’ rib. So what do you do with all the left over trimmings? You have a huge amount of cartilage, you’ve got that ultra-rubbery flap of meat that never cooks down that well, and bits of fat and bone. Well, here’s what I do –

Let’s start with pork bones – I know we’re steering away from the spare rib conversation, but I’m setting up the full process behind my dish here so you get what went into it. Say you smoked a shoulder or a rib roast or got stuck with a loin roast (or 3 like I did the other week) –  I’ll save up my bones, purposely leave a little meat on them, and hang onto any large fat-cap pieces – and squirrel them away in the freezer until I get some more, and make a stock out of them. I’ll add other ingredients – onion, celery, carrots, bay leaf – and make a ‘smoked pork stock’ out of these things. I mean boil the bones/cartilage/fat for about an hour and a half – letting the liquid reduce the whole time, stirring it up, agitating it, and all that goodness. Then I’ll strain it a bunch of times and continue to boil the strained liquid until it is a dense, rich, borderline gravy consistency – then throw it in the fridge. The end result is a salty, smoky, gelatinous stock that you can work into almost any dish – by the spoonful, that will keep for a good amount of time, in the fridge – or get frozen into cubes.

So back to the trimmings – you have a fire going – might as well smoke them with your ribs-  they don’t need to be pretty, but season them and cook them just like your ribs, and you can snack on them and use them as a guage to see how your ribs are cooking – kind of like cheating! Great way to keep the wolves at bay that want to see how things are going in the smoker – you give them a little taste off the cheater meat and they love it.

The only difference between the trimmings and the ribs is that I don’t want to braise the shit out of my ribs during my 3-2-1 technique, that 2 minutes in the wrap is mainly to cook it more, without getting more color on them. I will leave my trimmings in the aluminum foil for 3, 4 sometimes as much as 5-6 hours – I want to break that meat down as much as I can, I want it to flake apart in my finger tips when I pinch it, I want that cartilage to be like a tapioca pearl when I bite it – I am going to dice this meat and work it into a dish, I don’t want to go fishing out all the tough cartilage – I want to eat it. But not the day of the cook – It’s for a later meal, not this meal. I’m eating the good part of the ribs for the meal on the day of the cook, so it always goes right from the smoker, to the counter to cool, and then right into the fridge.

The meal is the bomb, and I move on, then it’s time to make one of these dishes.

2 cups of brown rice

1 cup of home made Pork Stock (that I reference above)

1 cup of water

1 can red kidney beans

1/2 can black beans

1 can aldi chipotle peppers

1.5 lbs or so of cubed smoked trimmings

1 onion

4 cloves garlic

season to taste.

Sweat the onions in some olive oil – add the garlic, add the rice – let it get all warmed up. – Add the water – stir – add the stock – stir.

Add the cubed goodness, the beans and the chipotles – stir

Let it come to a rip roar boil, and reduce to low – let it go for a while checking on it every so often to stir – eventually the rice will be cooked and bam:

All you need is a veggie (or not) and you’re golden. you will love it – serves 4.