My mother’s best rib marinade

I need to come clean. I am rubbish at barbeques. Great with anything on a stove, but when it comes to barbequeing, everything turns out black and charred. When we moved into this house we needed a barbeque, and didn't want to spend a fortune. We looked at Viking, looked at Weber, and decided instead of spending vast amounts so unnecessarily, we thought we'd be really clever and investigate online.

We ended up finding a barbeque on amazon.com that looked like the deal of the century - $1,200.00 reduced to about $200, and best of all, I can 'one-click' it! No filling in pesky details! No running downstairs to grab my credit card out my purse! The grill looked amazing - big, silver and shiny, just like the very expensive Viking. We put it together (I do hate that everything these days arrives in kit form, as if all of us are experts at putting together furniture), congratulating ourselves on finding such a bargain.

And then we found its fatal flaw. You cannot control the heat. It has two temperatures. Burning, burning hot, or...off. And, Beloved wants me to point out, entirely uneven. In other words, it may have cost only $200, but we may just as well have taken the $200 and thrown it down the toilet, and the reason it was reduced to $200, is because that's all it's worth.

Yesterday we had a barbeque for some neighbours. I dashed to Stew Leonard's, (largest dairy store in the world, fantastic produce, and on my doorstep!) desperate for ready-made everything, finally throwing in the towel for these summer barbeques, and couldn't find the ribs. I'm sure they were there somewhere, but the place was a madhouse, so I grabbed a few sides of babybacks and dashed home to make my mother's best rib marinade. I'm giving it to you, because it's delicious, but it wasn't so delicious last night. It works best when you marinade the meat for a couple of hours, then slow cook the ribs, for a few hours, on a lowish heat (around 300), until the meat is falling off the bone.

It doesn't work so well, we discovered, when you are rushing around in a panic, don't marinade the meat at all, cook for an hour and then stick it on your super-hot-turn-everything-it-touches-into-charcoal barbeque at the end to give it that authentic barbeque flavor.

Basically, we sat down to coal.

Yum.

Luckily it was more of a potluck last night. Neighbors brought delicious orzo salad, green salad with walnuts, feta, cranberries and oranges, all of which was delicious. And we provided the coal. Ah well.

Speaking of madhouses... There were seven adults, and fourteen children. It was wild, and wonderful, but it was, as it so often is in our house, utter chaos. I think our guests were a little overwhelmed. I can't blame them. I feel like that much of the time myself.

Then today, after two super-late nights back-to-back, we piled the kids in the car and drove up to Fire Island to spend the day with friends. Let me just say this. You know those stories you hear when friends give their children Benadryl on plane rides thinking it will knock their kids out, but their kids turn out to be amongst the one percent for whom Benadryl has the opposite effect and the drugged-up children turn into manic, crazy, climbing-the-walls-of-the-airplane monsters?

That was our car journey today. Given how late the kids had gone to bed, I assumed they would be asleep in minutes. I had visions of a wonderful quiet car ride, Beloved and I talking softly in the front as the kids caught up on some much-needed sleep. I didn't imagine for a second they would spend three hours screaming at one another, punching one another, crying, and basically having major meltdowns. I spent most of the journey fantasising about having a sound-proof, tinted glass screen that would rise up, behind our seats, at the push of a button and block out all noise.

Seriously, I'm going to spend tomorrow investigating how much it would be to install.

In the meantime I'm still trying to sort out the kindergarten bus schedule fiasco, taking the kids in to school to meet their new teacher tomorrow, and wondering when I'll get back to writing my novel, and longing for school to start so I can have a routine again.

Back to my spare coal recipe. Don't cook it as I cooked it, cook it as my mother cooks it, and it will be delicious. Good luck!

Equal amounts (this is how my mother writes down her recipes. I'm lucky the amounts were even in there. Often it's just the ingredients which is all you need when you're that good a cook. Not there yet. Clearly.)
Tomato Ketchup
Worcestershire sauce
soy sauce
malt vinegar
brown sugar

(I used 3 tablespoons of everything, and had run out of brown sugar so used maple syrup instead).