Asian Cinnamon Spare Ribs & Potato Salad

I went to 99 Ranch a couple Fridays ago and the meat section was ridiculous. Like, I thought they were giving away filet mignon for free, there were so many people. Turns out, spare ribs were on sale for $1.69/lb and people were buying them up like the apocalypse was coming. I saw people buying 10 lbs of spare ribs at a time! Who needs that much meat? Needless to say, since I had to wait for 30 minutes to buy my pork belly, I grabbed half a slab as well. And since Boyfriend has STILL not set up the grill that I bought almost a year ago, I had to piece together some recipes I found online to oven bake them.

Good thing these ribs were really damn good, otherwise I would have been super angry that I had to wait 30 minutes at the butcher to get them and driving in the San Gabriel Valley fills me with rage. Maybe it's bad for my blood pressure that I can go from calm and singing along to KOST 103.5 (soft rock with less talk, baby) (don't judge me cause sometimes it's comforting to listen to after work) to ENGRAGED in a millisecond. So I'm glad the ribs turned out meltingly soft and tender. Served them with potato salad and an easy salad with kalamata olives, feta cheese and avocado, dressed with balsamic and olive oil.

Asian Cinnamon Spare Ribs
Serves 4

3 lbs spare ribs, cut into strips
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup Shaoxing wine
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp black pepper

Preheat oven to 300degrees. Line a 9x13 pan with layers of aluminum foil to avoid a messy cleanup. Boil a large pot of water. Rinse the ribs and simmer for 10 minutes. Mix together soy sauce, wine, sugar, cinnamon and black pepper in a bowl.

Remove ribs from simmering water and rinse off quickly to get the scum off. Place into pan in a single layer and pour the marinade over it. Cover with aluminum foil and bake for two hours. Uncover ribs, flip over carefully with tongs (they may be falling apart a bit), cover again and bake for another two hours.

To finish, remove foil and allow ribs to cook for 10 minutes. Flip carefully (they will be totally falling off the bone at this point) and bake for a final 10 minutes. This will thicken the sauce.

Potato Salad
Serves 4

2 large russet potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 medium carrot, cut in bite size pieces
1/2 small red onion, thinly sliced
1/3 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon red wine vinegar

Boil the potatoes until half tender and add in carrots. Once potatoes are completely tender, drain. Pick out carrots and crush potatoes slightly with a fork, leaving them pretty lumpy.

Combine crushed potatoes with carrots and mix in red onion, mayonnaise and red wine vinegar while potatoes and carrots are still warm. Salt and pepper to taste, adding more red wine vinegar if additional acidity is needed. Refrigerate until cool.