Easy Sunday Afternoon in-the-oven Ribs

I was a bit wary when SO suggested ribs for Sunday. She has all the good ideas in the family, but our track record for ribs lately hasn't been stellar.  Well we had a few disastrous mishaps in any case.  Oh well, let's try again. At our local grocery I got 2 large racks of side ribs for around $20, not too bad. We actually had the slow cooker out when she suggested doing them in the oven before leaving for the day to traipse around to the musem and the movies with SSO and his "date". A girl. Not a date he insists, but a "birthday present" since he missed her birthday party the week before. How does a 7 year old even know what a date is anyway? Anyhoo. So oven it will be.  Let's just wing it, how bad could it be?

Easy Ribs in the oven

Well you know, it actually turned out awesome! I had trouble removing them from the roaster because they were falling apart like crazy. I decided to try and do them with as little work as possible, partly because I wanted to see if they'd turn out ok that way, and partly because it was supposed to be my do-nothing-because-it's-Father's-Day day. Nevermind that Father's Day was last Sunday. Things get delayed for camping, is all.  So instead of cutting up onions, mixing up fancy spices and bbq sauces, basting every 20 minutes like some recipes would have you do, it was a stick in big roasting pan with a bottle of bbq sauce and cook for 5 hours. Not much else. I ended up mixing the bbq sauce with a bit of water, some ketchup, some Sriracha hot sauce and the rest of another bottle of bbq sauce I had in the fridge. A little fresh vegetable medley of whatever I had in the fridge, plus some 10 minute rice, and that's it. Sometimes the whole KISS principle actually works, and I'm not refering to Rock and Rolling all night...

Next time: Not much different, actually. Maybe I'd try making a fully home-made bbq sauce.

Me: 8/10
SO: 9/10
SSO: 5/10

Easy Sunday Afternoon in-the-oven Ribs

Ingredients

This was enough for our family of 3, plus enough left overs for 4 lunches.

• Two large racks of side ribs (add more or less, depending on what your roaster can manage)
• Bottle of bbq sauce, possibly another half or full bottle depending on quantity of ribs
• You can experiment with adding things like ketchup, hot sauce, worcestershire, brown sugar, maybe a bit of water to dilute a bit. Anything that sounds right.

Method

1. Pre-heat the oven to 275 or so. Prepare for around 4-5 hours of cooking time.
2. Remove the silverskin if not already removed (slide a butter knife underneath). You will probably have to cut the racks in half if they are large racks.
3. Mix the bbq sauce and other ingredients  together in a 4 cup measure. I ended up with around 3 cups total, which ended up being about right.
4. Slightly oil your largest roaster (I use those dark blue metal things usually used at Christmas for the turkey). Put in the racks and pour 1/3 the sauce over evenly.
5. Stick in the oven . After the first 60 to 90 minutes, some of the fat will have come off and there should be an inch of gross looking soup in the bottom.  I temporarily put the racks on a plate and then dumped the whole lot of gross juice into a pot, to cool down and later be discarded. 
6. Put the racks back in, and dump the second third of sauce over.
7. After an hour, flip them around a little and pour the final third of the sauce over.
8. Cook until done. Mine went for 5 hours, mostly because I was just waiting for SO and SSO to return from the movies. Keep checking to make sure the pan doesn't dry out.