Real Caveman Eat Buffalo!

When you're only eating one meal a day (see last blog for details), you really have to budget your food preparation.  I made tuna salad on Thursday night from a large can.  Well, I've been eating tuna for three nights now, and I never want to see a tuna again.  Usually I would just eat the leftovers for breakfast or lunch the next day, but on Stage 2, there ain't no breakfast or lunch.  In case anyone was wondering, one large can of tuna is enough for three enormous tuna sandwiches.  Feel free to learn from my mistake.

I was hoping to make ribs for dinner last night, but there was still a ton of tuna left over, so it was free range chicken of the sea once again.  By the way, if you do make tuna caveman style, make sure it's wild caught, which means organic, and full of Omega-3 fatty acids.  Most of the stuff from a can is farm raised, which means the tuna is fed corn and soy, and filled with bad saturated fat.

Luckily, the rib recipe I'm making calls for cooking it twice, so I was at least able to smell a preview for tonight's meal all day yesterday as it slow cooked.  Believe me, it made the tuna that much harder to choke down.  Boy did it smell GOOD!  For those of you who remember, this blog was started right after I attempted to make caveman pork baby back ribs for the first time.  Just using ingredients I had in the house, I whipped up this sensational Asian BBQ Plum Sauce, which I've since made during the course of the blog, but just not with ribs.  Back then, I used baby back ribs from organic pork.  But this time around, a little health food store I frequent had a sale on grass fed buffalo (or bison, same difference) ribs.  So I bought me a rack and tonight's the night I try it for the first time!

Buffalo tastes a LOT like beef, only much leaner.  I like to refer to it as beef concentrate.  But since grass fed bison is even leaner than factory bison meat, I'm going to assume it tastes like beef concentrate concentrate!  Since the ribs are so thick, I felt I couldn't cook them the same way as the thin pork baby backs, so I looked up cooking times on-line, and found one that was easiest, and closest to the pork baby backs, mostly because they came out amazing and I wanted to stick with a similar cooking method, hoping to recreate the magic!  Taking advantage of the internet is a huge part of this diet for me, since basically I'm a dolt in the kitchen.  But I'm a very well fed dolt.

So first I browned the ribs in my cast iron skillet and a little sunflower oil.  The jury is still out for me on cast iron, only because it's so weird cleaning it with oil.  I'm a little befuddled each time that if I'm even cleaning it right, because we were all taught to clean things with soap and water, and the one thing cast iron warns you to stay away from is soap!  No soap, radio?  Wrong.  No soap, cast iron skillet.  If any one out there uses one regularly, any advice would be appreciated.

Once the ribs were browned, and the drool of hunger was wiped away from my chin, I transferred them to a big casserole dish that I use for everything but casseroles.  I don't own a lot of thing, like the proper knives, dishes, cookware, etc, and I don't have the money right now to invest in a complete kitchen, but you can improvise just like I do, and whatever gets the job done, will work just fine, trust me!

Then I poured the rock star over the ribs.  I say it every time I make it, but it's true, whenever I make this Asian BBQ Plum Sauce, I wind up eating it raw with a spoon, because it's so damn good!  And it's slightly different every time I make it too, because I use whatever I have in the house at the time.  Plums are winding down as fall arrives, so this is probably the last time I'll make it until next summer.  I thought about making a huge batch and freezing it, but part of the caveman thing is eating seasonally, so it won't kill me not to eat it again for 6 months.

This time I made it with some sweet and sour plums, deep purple in color, as opposed to very sweet ones I usually make it with.  But the very sweet ones weren't available at the farmer's market anymore, so these will have to do.  Don't ask me what kind of plums they are, I don't know their names, I just know I was looking for purple and sweet, and the farmer pointed these out to me.  Don't be afraid to ask questions, that's how we learn to be less dolt-like.

I skinned the plums and threw them in the blender.  Next went in three small garlic cloves, and equal amounts of fresh ginger (all ingredients, all organic, all the time).  Then onion powder, dry mustard, black pepper, and nutmeg powder.  Lemon juice, and a spoonful of honey.  Two healthy spoonfuls of caveman ketchup (you can find the recipe in my recipes section, but I'm disappointed, you should have it memorized by now).  By the way, I was out of ketchup, so I had to make a batch for this recipe, which means I'll have to make burgers soon to use up the ketchup.  Jeez, sometimes this diet is friggin' exhausting!

I also had some fresh basil that isn't going to be fresh much longer, so I figured basil, garlic and ginger go well together in Thai food, so in it went.  In the past I've used cilantro, which also worked great.  Finally, to finish the sauce off, I threw in a spicy red pepper.  I have no idea what kind it is, possible a ripe jalapeno, but all I know is, it came in a gift bag of organic peppers my friend Amy gave me.  But I tasted it before using it and believe me, it was HOT!  I had a green jalapeno too, but I thought the red color went better in the plum sauce.  If you like it less spicy, you can de-seed or de-stem the pepper, or lose it altogether.  In the past I used crushed red pepper flakes, which also does the trick.  There's no one way to make this, use whatever you have, and whatever you like!

Into the casserole dish goes the browned ribs drenched in the BBQ sauce.  I covered it up tight with foil, and cooked it for three hours at 250 degrees.  Low and Slow, baby!  Then I turned off the oven and let the ribs sit in the hot oven until it all cooled down to room temperature, probably another two hours!  Into the fridge it went, without even a peek at the ribs.  It sat in the fridge overnight until I was ready to eat it tonight.

I put it in the oven for one hour at 300 degrees, and now it's finally ready!  It smells AMAZING!!!  Let's throw them under the broiler to give them a nice crispy outside.  Take a look:

Is that gorgeous or what?  Now let's sauce one and taste:

Dude.  Please.  It's fall-off-the-bone UN-FRIGGIN-BELIEVABLE!!!!!!!  I'll tell you, nothing makes you feel more like a Caveman than gnawing on a buffalo rib on the bone!  Ugga-Bugga!

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