Homemade Rib Sauce

Big happy family!

Last Thursday I really wanted to cook for a few special friends, and I racked my brains to try to think of something that was "American" but not too strange. So I finally decided on ribs, baked beans, potato casserole, green beans and cornbread. Surprisingly, they liked all of it! Especially the ribs and cornbread!

But, I have no tomato paste, no ketchup and certainly no barbecue sauce. So I took on the challenge to make my own barbecue sauce. I was quite please with the ribs sauce but the ketchup I made for the baked beans was NOT very good, so I'll keep trying before I post a ketchup recipe. (people still ate the baked beans, though. What do they know- they have nothing to compare it to haha!)

So to make my own barbecue sauce, I first needed tomato paste. Step 1: put several tomatoes into a pot of boiling water for about 30 seconds to a minute.

Step 2: dunk the hot tomatoes in a bath of ice water right away and the skin practically falls off. Peel all the tomatoes

Step 3: Quarter the tomatoes and remove all the seeds. At this time you can either go ahead and begin cooking the whole tomatoes down (it will take several hours) or you can do what I did: Put the peeled, seeded tomatoes through a juicer (save the juice- add a few ice cubes and you have a healthy, refreshing drink!) and put the pulp into your big pot. Doing it this way saved me several hours of cooking.

Step 4: Simmer the past on med/low heat (now add about 1 teaspoon of salt) and stir often until...

.... it keeps it's shape on the whisk and looks like what plops out of a can of tomato paste. Ta-Da!

Now here is the Rib's Sauce Recipe

• 1 can tomato paste
• 1/3 cup brown sugar
• 2 tablespoons red-wine vinegar (I used plain old white vinegar and it was fine)
• 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
• 1 tablespoon soy sauce
• 1 tablespoon chili powder
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

I put all these ingredients together in the pot with the tomato paste so all the spices could mingle together. You can put your ribs in the crock pot for about 4 hours, but I didn't love the texture of crock-pot ribs. I made another batch in the oven in my roasting pan and made sure to baste them about every 20 minutes. They were ready after about 3 hours at 400 F, but you can cook them to your choice of fall-off-the-bone tenderness. ENJOY!

Another tid-bit: There was so much ribs sauce left over and it was such hard work to make that I'm using it again right now to make some barbequed chicken in the crock pot. We'll see if the chicken is just as yummy as the ribs!