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I have long made country ribs in the oven covered with a thick, rich, spicy sauce from a recipe in an old The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook. YUM! But when I read a new recipe for Sweet 'n' Spicy Country Ribs in Taste of Home's Simple & Delicious Sept./Oct. 2008, I decided to try it. I had everything for the recipe except apple juice. I could've bought it but I already had apple cider so I decided to use that instead. It caused no problem as far as I could tell. The big change I made was in the preparation method. The recipe is for the grill. I have no desire to fire up the charcoal grill, especially on a day when my house could use the warming from the oven. I have a cast-iron grill pan but no desire to cook two ribs at a time for 45 minutes per batch. So instead I used the grill pan at an extremely high heat to sear each rib and get sexy grill marks, then I finished the meat off in the oven. Oven roasting is the method used in my preferred recipe, which follows. I...

The first cake I remember decorating (other than just placing those hard formed sugar disks pressed into letters and shapes) was to celebrate my cousin's Special Olypics gold medal. Roberta competed in the International Games the first year they were held in South Bend, Ind., 1987 I believe. When she was due to visit to show her medal to our grandfather, I baked a cake mix and frosted it with canned icing. Then, using tubes of decorator gel, I drew a gymnast with long dark hair, arms raised in victory and a gold medal around her neck. I figure I wrote something on the cake, too, crooked no doubt, but I can't remember what. Fifteen years or so later, I would get the urge to create again. For one of my mother-in-law's birthdays I decorated a cake to look like a grill. Simple enough -- just draw evenly spaced lines of dark chocolate frosting crosswise on the cake; slide dried fruits such as apricots, pineapple chunks and prunes, a-HEM DRIED PLUMS, on bamboo skewers; and unwrap...