Coffee Rubbed Hickory Smoked Spare Ribs with Brunswick Stew For Man Food Mondays

Hello y’all!

Michelle and I wish you a Happy Labor Day.  As you could tell we are not doing much more than the rest of you today.  Just taking it easy and getting ready to see the rest of the family for good food and conversation later today. I hope you all are doing the same.

For today’s meal I decided to roll back to some past recipes and put them together to take to the in-laws.  So, today we are having Coffee Rubbed Hickory Smoked Spare Ribs with Brunswick Stew.  I am using the dry rub I made for my Coffee Rubbed Flank Steak and redoing the Brunswick Stew from a while back.  See, we don’t always create new when the old is so freaking tasty.

Let’s talk a bit about what we did and how it is a little different. I had not used the coffee rub on spare ribs before, so I was looking forward to seeing how it turned out.  I smoked 3 racks that I cut St. Louis style and brined them for 8 hours in a 1:1 salt\sugar brine. LATE last night, I took them out of the brine and patted them dry and put the coffee rub on 2 of them and wrapped them in plastic wrap. I took 3 tablespoons of the left over coffee rub and added 1 tablespoon of Ms. Kathy’s Cajun dried peppers and rubbed the 3rd one with that and wrapped it. Then, I put them all in the refrigerator for about 7 hours.  EARLY this morning, I unwrapped them and put them in the cook rack and on to the smoker.  Cooking them 3 hours in smoke and 2 hours wrapped in foil and finishing them out of the foil and over a little more smoke for the last hour.  The meat fell off the bone!

If you followed the link over to how to trim the spareribs St. Louise style, you will see that there will be pork meat that you do not use…you can throw it on the smoker and eat it or you can do what I did and use it in the Brunswick Stew.  I took a couple of chicken leg quarters, the spare rib trimmings ( I had 3 racks so there was about 2 lbs  of trimmings) added 1 can of chicken broth and 4 cups of water to my slow cooker.  I set it on high for about 4 hours and when it was done I took 2 cups of the liquid out of the slow cooker to discard and pulled the meat off the bones and separated the cartilage out and returned the meat to the slow cooker. I added one package of frozen okra, one package of mixed vegetables, 1 onion quartered, a little white vinegar, about 1 cup of ketchup, added 1 tablespoon of Ms Kathy’s Cajun dried peppers and salt and pepper. Then, I turned it back on high for 8 hours and turned it down to warm until we left.  It was really hard not to snack on the Brunswick stew while it was finishing.