Right! CSA starts Thursday, so I'd better get off my ass and post the two or three things I've been meaning to post before that happens.

My mother enjoys barbecued pork ribs a great deal. I now have a smoker. That was Mother's Day taken care of, then. I'd buy some St. Louis ribs from Costco, do 'em up, and get some important experience under my belt before we do the ribs from The Pig sometime in the next few weeks.

For the rub, I went with the same rub I came up with for pulled pork:

• Six tablespoons dark brown sugar
• Three tablespoons kosher salt
• One tablespoon smoked paprika
• One tablespoon granulated garlic
• One teaspoon Penzey's BBQ 3000
• One teaspoon ancho chile powder
• One teaspoon dried thyme

Got the rub on the night before. Did you know that three racks of ribs from Costco nicely fill up a sheet pan, and that a sheet pan fits in my fridge if I take everything off of the crisper drawer shelf? No? Well now you do. That's what Forkbastard is all about. Occasional tips that are only useful if you cook in my kitchen with my equipment.

After a couple of stabs at pulled pork and some additional poking around on the Internet, I have settled on a perfectly acceptable smoking technique for my Char-Griller Nerd-Grill 3000:

• Ash tray removed from grill.
• Grill bottom lined with foil. Learned THAT the hard way.
• Fire box drawer/rack lined with one layer of unlit natural briquettes.
• One chimney full of natural briquettes, approximately 80% lit, poured in an even layer over the cold briquettes and smoothed out so that the fire box grill grates sit above them.
• Wood chunks on top of grill grate
• A couple of tinfoil patches to seal up a couple of leaky spots in the fire box - one on the left side of the door, one around the ash drawer. This is, again, only helpful to me.
• Vents cracked a hair.
• Meat as far to the left of the grill body as it will go.

With this setup, I can get about a half hour, more or less, of smoke out of the wood chunks, which makes for a nice interval to rotate the meat. For the first batch, I did not mop, because circumstances kept me from having the necessary hardware and software on hand.

I went with two hours in the smoke, one hour in foil in heat, and one hour in heat without foil. It ended up being closer to 2:30/:45/:45, because I wasn't paying close enough attention and loaded up more wood for smoking near the two hour mark, but still.

The end result was meaty, not dry, nicely flavored, but a bit dark for my tastes. A very nice bottled sauce from Costco with a name that sounds like an old blues player in a tin shack, but that I'm blanking on right now, helped brighten things up, but I still wanted lighter notes.

So, when my mom's birthday rolled around shortly after, I decided that, since ribs vac-seal and freeze and reheat really nicely, that I'd make six frozen half-racks as a present. A present I have yet to deliver, so nobody tell her before this weekend. And I changed up the rub, replacing the ancho (pre-smoked) with dried crushed jalapeno that I buzzed into a powder with the spice grinder, and the smoked paprika with unsmoked paprika.

I also arranged for a spray bottle full of apple cider vinegar, and on the half hours, after I rotated the meat, I sprayed it down. (Obligatory "PHRASING!" here.) And since I was reheating the third rack of Batch 1 for my own dinner last night while making Batch 2, I was able to do a direct taste test.

Batch 2 was closer to where I want it, definitely. I don't think any strong, sharp, bright flavors are going to survive the smoking process. I think that's why people make vinegary, spicy barbecue sauces that get put on right at the end of cooking. But the ribs certainly didn't need more smoke flavor, and the extra heat from the jalapeno was helpful when it was detectable.

What's next? I want some more heat. Either using a sauce, or some different ratios in the dry rub in the hopes of the heat surviving to the end of the cooking. Also, switching up the profiles away from Basic American Barbecue to see how much different rub flavors survive past the sugar and salt and smoke to the final product. And finally, experimentation with my own sauces - there was some success with the pulled pork in that area, at least.

Oh, and by the way, in the middle of the second batch, I threw six Roma tomato halves on the grill and smoked/roasted them for an hour along with the meat. That's going into salsa tonight.