Southeast Texas Family in the Outdoors – Cooking Wild Boar Ribs

Southeast Texas Family Magazine Guide to Cooking with Kids

Oven Roasted Boar Ribs

We love spending time in the outdoors with our kids.

More often than not that means time on boats and fishing.

Like many of our readers, we also enjoy getting into the woods.

Once or twice a year that means harvesting a wild boar – and deciding how to enjoy the ribs.

Today we are sharing an easy recipe you can tweak for the grill, smoker, or oven.

If you don’t have wild ribs, pick up a rack or two from Market Basket, HEB, or Brookshire Brothers.

Please, please, feel free to throw these ribs on a smoker instead of the oven. My youngest is going through a phase of saying he likes ribs cooked in the oven, so I cook them that way for him. When you are a father, you make sacrifices.

Rack of ribs
1 tablespoon of olive oil
Garlic salt
Tony Chacheres
Your preferred barbecue sauce
Aluminum Foil

Preheat the oven to 250 degrees.

Lightly coat your aluminum foil with spray oil. Place your rack of ribs on the foil. Rub with olive oil. Shake on a generous portion of garlic salt and a small amount of Tony Chacheres on the ribs. Coat liberally with barbecue sauce. Wrap loosely. Place on the rack in a roasting pan. Poke the bottom of the foil with a fork so the juice can drip out into the roasting pan.

Cook for four hours.

Cooking times are the same for the smoker, but I don’t bother with the foil on the ribs. Others like to wrap the ribs in foil for the last hour or so.

We served the wild boar ribs with baked beans and cornbread.

In our family, cornbread is enjoyed with butter and Steen’s molasses.

Cooking is a gift you can give someone even when you have nothing else to offer. Thinking of it as a gift you are giving, rather than as a chore, can make it easier to enjoy.

When I was a child, my mom and dad both were college graduates with full time jobs. My mom told me, “Don’t expect to get married to a girl who knows how to cook. You better learn now how to make anything you think you’ll want to eat as an adult”.

She taught my brother and I how to make her homemade pasta sauce, King Ranch casserole, and all of the family cookie and cake recipes.

We have the same philosophy with our two teenage boys. They can fry fish and grill meat, but they can also bake cookies or cupcakes.

I believe household chores should be divided reasonably between spouses.

I also believe that no one knows how you want food to taste more than you do.

I encourage all children to learn to cook a variety of dishes and in a number of styles so they can feed themselves, and their families, for a lifetime.

Enjoy the outdoors with your family – in the wild and on the plate.