Today is my daughter’s 21st birthday – the baby of the family all grown up. How did that happen? How did the years fly by so very quickly? And how did she grow up to be such a talented, lovely young woman? One I’m proud to say will be attending culinary school next year after college! (Yes, I’m thrilled, which is what all my friends ask me when I tell them that.) As you read this we are in San Francisco celebrating with our family – doing it up the way any self respecting foodies would, with dinner at Perbacco and the Franciscan Crab House. But fortunately, I had a small “Rib-Fest” last weekend for Father’s Day, and I wanted to share this new recipe with you.Now when I say a rib-fest, I mean a rib-fest. I scoured my meat freezer for all the ribs still in there from the past year’s farm purchases, and that included grass-fed beef short ribs from Sun Prairie All Natural Beef (click on the icon on the sidebar to place an order with a 5% discount!), bison short ribs, pork country style ribs, pork spareribs, and lamb riblets. Yes, I know it sounds sad – riblets just sound like part of a baby animal. But surely if you eat lamb you already know this, yes? And if you buy from a farmer or rancher you trust, like I do, you know that little fellow had a really nice life.I like to brown off my ribs first in a very hot oven – like 400 degrees to seal in the juices. My riblets came with the fat side already scored. but if yours aren’t you’ll want to do that so the whole thing doesn’t just curl up while cooking.My garden is overflowing with both mint and oregano, so I decided to make an herb vinaigrette type of marinade that the ribs would basically braise in.Remember for hard stemmed herbs like these you want to strip the leaves off the stems and discard the stems. I add a good handful of each herb to a blender along with garlic cloves, cumin, coriander, lime juice, olive oil, agave, salt and pepper.Lay the ribs on several layers of foil and pour about 2/3 of the marinade over the ribs making sure they are coated. Seal them up tightly and bake at 300 degrees for about 2-3 hours, or until they are tender and falling off the bone like this.Serve the riblets with the remaining sauce as a dressing. The minty lime flavor is outrageously good with lamb. And if you’re lucky, your sister will make you some out of this fabulous potato salad to go with it. I’m working on getting that recipe for you next!

In case you want to know how I cooked everything else, here it is:

Pork Country Style Ribs – I browned them, then put them in a Dutch oven with my Simply Peach BBQ Sauce and cooked for about 3 hours.

Pork Spareribs – I browned the rack, then laid it on foil and doused in a basic BBQ sauce.

Beef Short Ribs – I browned on a rack then cooked in a Dutch Oven with wine, stock and vegetables, although I did not add tomato sauce as this recipe calls for.