I’m back in the kitchen so let’s make something tasty, shall we? This recipe of is one of my husband’s favorites. My mom used to make it frequently, and it’s practically a meal unto itself. Laced with spicy sausage, corn, cheese  and black-eyed peas, it’s a snapshot of southern traditions. You can serve it plain, or add some salsa or sour cream on the side if you’re really feeling rebellious.

Hot Sausage Cornbread with Jalapenos and Black-Eyed Peas

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Servings: 44 mini muffins

Notes

Notes

Ingredients

• 1          lb         hot bulk pork sausage
• 1                      medium onion, chopped
• 1          box      corn muffin mix (Jiffy Mix)
• 2                      eggs
• 1/3      cup      vegetable oil
• 1          cup      buttermilk
• 1          cup      grated cheddar cheese
• 1/4      cup      chopped jalapeno (jarred jalapenos are fine)
• 1                      (15-oz.) can black-eyed peas, drained and rinsed
• 1                      (7-oz.) can cream-style corn

Preparation

1) In a medium skillet, brown sausage and onion until the sausage is thoroughly cooked. Drain off any excess fat, and set aside.

2) In a medium bowl, combine corn muffin mix, eggs, oil and buttermilk, stirring until blended and smooth. Add cheese, jalapeno, peas, corn and sausage mixture, stirring well to combine. Pour mixture into a lightly greased 9x13 casserole.

3) Bake at 375 degrees for 55 minutes. Remove pan from oven, and let sit for at least 20 minutes for bread to set before slicing and serving.

I love barbecue ribs, but as with most barbecue (not to be confused with grilling), it seems like a long, drawn-out, finicky process. After all, they have competition shows about such matters in which contestants treat barbecue like a series of impossible secret equations that we philistines can never comprehend. I have spent endless hours trying to perfect ribs, even going so far as to drag out the seasoning-marinating-smoking-finishing hoopla for days. And you know what I got for all of that work? My husband shrugged his shoulders and said, “Meh…”

After a little more trial and error, I finally figured out that good, tender, everyday ribs really aren’t that difficult after all. You just have to back away from the culture of barbecue snobbery and quit overthinking it. With only a few minutes of effort, I figured out a stupid-easy way to cook a rack of ribs that my husband loved, and earned me a happy Sunday afternoon. Here’s how I did it:

Bayou-Mama's Stupid-Easy Baby Back Ribs

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Notes

Notes

• 1 rack (or more if you want) baby back ribs
• Several teaspoons of your favorite BBQ rub (can be homemade or store-bought. I just grabbed some from the store...it was Sunday, people)
• Your favorite BBQ sauce
• 1 bottle of beer (I snagged a bottle of Shiner Bock from my husband)
• Tools: a roasting pan with a rack, and heavy duty foil. You can add a brush if you really want to feel like the Julia Child of Barbecue.

Wow, that's a whole bunch of stuff, isn't it? How will we manage?

First, I seasoned both sides of the ribs liberally with the BBQ rub. You can let this sit overnight in the fridge if you have the time, but it's not necessary. Next, I sprayed the bottom of a roasting pan with non-stick spray (for easier clean up) and placed a baking rack in the pan. This kept the ribs elevated so they would have heat circulating all around them. It also prevented them from basically boiling in their own liquid.

Next, I poured the beer in the bottom of the pan and covered the whole she-bang tightly with foil. I placed the pan in a pre-heated 275 degree oven and let it bake for about 2 to 2/2 hours. When I took it out of the oven, it looked like this:

Don't worry, it gets better, I promise. I then liberally brushed the ribs with BBQ sauce, recovered them with foil, and baked them for about 45 minutes to an hour:

So, I had perfectly cooked, tender ribs but I wanted to firm up that sauce for a more caramelized finish. I placed the ribs uncovered under the broiler for 5 to 10 minutes, watching carefully to prevent those annoying unattended broiler mishaps:

The result was fall-off-the-bone perfection that was far superior to any of my previous attempts at the perfect rib rain dance. The only catch is that it truly takes several hours in the oven, but you just can't get around that. I said it was stupid-easy, not magic.

Now, if my husband could only streamline his lasagna (but that would probably involve handcuffing our toddler):

Halloween is tomorrow, and if you are a big, fat procrastinator like me, you may still have time to figure out your pre-Trick-or-Treat dinner. In the hectic after-school wait until dark, I usually strive for a very easy meal that doesn’t make me feel like too much of a slacker-mom. I don’t care what those supermoms on Pinterest say…I certainly do not have time to craft a cute, themed, labor-intensive dinner that I know in reality, my kids won’t remotely care about. They are simply watching the clock until they can be unleashed on our poor neighborhood like candy-starved fiends. During this hyperactive waiting period, my kids are already pinging off the walls from excitement, so making them sit down to a big dinner would be an epic fail. Here’s some of my favorite ideas for Halloween dinners that your brood may actually eat:

Caramel Apple Bacon Panini’s

I know these sound bizarre, but they are awesome! To help balance the flavors, I added a little bit of the rendered bacon fat to the butter that I spread on the outside of the sandwich, just prior to grilling. If you just HAVE to cut them out into shapes, more power to ya sister. I skip that step.

Pioneer Woman’s Tomato Soup

This is, hands down, my favorite tomato soup recipe. I serve it with bacon grilled cheese sandwiches. In fact, this is what I’m making tonight for our pumpkin carving session. Don’t skimp on the basil.

My Chicken Tortellini Soup

You can have this one ready in 20 minutes flat, and that’s if you are a slow poke.

Smokey Mac and Cheese

This one requires a little more effort, but you can make it ahead of time and then just toss the casserole in the oven when you are ready. Carbs and protein…what more could they want?

So, these are a few ideas in case you are getting down to the wire. I understand last minute Halloween stress, because I actually had to go to three stores today to find pumpkins. Apparently in retail land, Halloween ended a week ago, Thanksgiving has been booted off the table, and Christmas is next week….sigh.

As for me, I have to confess that, this year, I got lucky. No last minute dinner scramble! Our new neighborhood rocks, and we’re are having a cul-de-sac block party. All I have do to is bring an appetizer, and other neighbors are grilling for all the families around us. I’ll whip up some Bourbon Meatballs, grab a folding chair, and let the Heathens run wild. And monitor my husband and his dry ice, special effects antics…but that’s a story for another day.

With all of the chaos of the move, I have been in a big-time cooking rut. I can’t entirely blame the move, however. Though they continue to improve, my kids are still extremely picky eaters. Together, they only have about 3-4 meals each that they actually “love,” and like any kid, they are prone to decide they don’t like something before they even try it. Every day, when I pick them up from school, they ask what’s for dinner before their butts hit the car seat. If my answer isn’t one of these 3-4 meals, I get the long-suffering groans and the sad, disappointed faces. Let me tell you, that wouldn’t inspire anyone to hop in the kitchen and cook. It’s hard to make the effort sometimes when you know dinner will be a fight of me watching them push the food around their plates with frowns on their faces. Despite this daily battle, I’m still holding fast to my philosophy that this is not a dang restaurant. Every meal is not going to be custom-tailored to special snowflake taste-buds, and they’ve been told repeatedly to build a bridge and get the heck over it.

My husband is also fairly picky, though he swears he is not. However, he hates onions, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, green onions, squash, zucchini, spinach, shrimp, gnocchi, artichokes, mushrooms, and quite a few other things. So, yeah…But, he at least always is up for trying something new…except for the aforementioned items, of course.

So, to get out of my cooking rut, I decided that I would try at least one new recipe every day this week. Last night, I experimented and made Korean Beef Tacos with a Cucumber-Carrot Slaw to go on top. Though the kids balked at the cucumbers, they did eat the beef, and my husband and I loved the tacos as a whole. I wish I was able to take pictures, but after just getting off of a 15-hour bus ride for a school trip, my husband and Heathens were hungry, and I wasn’t about to test their patience with a photo shoot. I also made bread pudding for the hubby (as seen above), and topped it with Whiskey Sauce:

This was my first foray into bread pudding, and I used this recipe as a baseline. Overall, it was okay, but we decided it definitely needs some tweaking. My husband said it needed more raisins and cinnamon, and maybe a bit more time to set up before serving. However, the recipe itself was a good starting point. The whiskey sauce is awesome, but if you’re sensitive to hooch, I’d cut it down a bit…we are not so afflicted, however.

So, all week I will be plowing through new recipes, and getting my kitchen mojo back. The Heathens may riot before the week is out, or they may actually try something new and like it.

*Oh the horror!*

For New Years Day, my husband and I decided to stack the deck and ate dang nearly every superstitious food we could get our hands on:

We need better luck than we had last year, so we were all about feasting on anything that might bring us some good fortune, like pork chops, hoppin’ john and such. One of the foods that my husband specifically requested was cabbage…stinky, weird, I-have-never-cooked-that cabbage. Call me persnickety, but cabbage hasn’t ever crossed into my cooking repertoire, and I’ve never had the burning urge to change that fact. After a quick consultation with Granny, I made my first attempt at cooking cabbage in a way that anyone in this house would have any chance in hell of eating. Here’s how I did it (and to tackle this beast, you will need a head of cabbage, about five slices of good bacon, salt and pepper):

I started with a head of cabbage, and made ugly faces at it just to make myself feel better:

Next, I cut off the bottom section so that the head of cabbage would sit flat on my cutting board while I made more faces at it and made inappropriate Cabbage Patch Kid jokes.

Then I cut it in half (Holy Crapadoodle, cabbage is ugly):

Then cut it some more:

Then I spent a good while looking at the cabbage and formulating a plan that may actually get me to choke this stuff down, and my solution was to pick it apart, and discard any parts that looked like something I wouldn’t eat:

Next, I chopped about 5 slices of thick-cut bacon (dude, I never said this was healthy cabbage):

I tossed the bacon in a skillet and cooked it on medium heat until it was kind of done but not crispy yet:

And I tossed it the cabbage with plenty of salt and pepper to taste:

I covered the skillet and cooked the cabbage on medium heat, stirring occasionally. I waited until the cabbage really cooked down and looked edible, which took about 20-25 minutes for me. And….Ta-da!

Now only did I eat the cabbage, I actually loved it. My husband said our New Year’s lunch may have been the best food he’s eaten in his entire life, which is saying something coming from Sir Picky-Pants.

So, if you are a cabbage newbie, it’s worth giving this method a try. After all, both my sister-in-law and I noted that you can probably eat anything if it’s cooked in enough bacon.